Any Truth In This?

[skippybangkok]

Just curious....... i firmly believe that speed limit enforcement in Oz is just a money spinner for the Govt.

The Idea:

Speeding is a major cause behind many fatal accidents, so it must also be true that mandating lower speed limits will make us all safer, right? Like how after marijuana was made illegal, you could hardly find anybody smoking the stuff.

It was back in 1974 that the federal government passed the National Maximum Speed Limit Law in the USA, slowing America down to a creeping 55 miles per hour. The main reason behind the law was to lower gas consumption, but President Nixon promised us it would make our streets safer as well.

A joke about Richard Nixon being untrustworthy? Cracked breaks new ground in comedy once more!

Partially thanks to anti-speed limit activists like Sammy Hagar, in 1995 it was repealed. But not everyone was happy about that. Some states and many cities still have their highway speed limits set at or near the '74 lows, and a lot of people support bringing the '74 law back into effect before every man, woman and child in the country finds themselves living in the horrifying universe of 2 Fast 2 Furious.

The future.

But There's a Problem...

After the National speed limit was repealed, the state of Montana removed all non-urban speed limits in their state. A few years later, engineers working with the state decided to venture out to see just what kind of post-apocalyptic Death Race wasteland their lawless state had produced. What they found was that, you guessed it, on the roads where they removed the speed limits, fatalities didn't go up at all.

Proponents of the national law still argue that traffic fatalities nationwide did drop during the national speed limit's lifetime. Buzz-killing critics of the law point out that no, no they didn't.

Why Doesn't it Work?

Because, and this surprised the hel_l out of us, people aren't completely retarded. As it turns out, people tend to drive at speeds they feel comfortable driving. Yes, there are reckless madmen out there, but they're not going to obey a couple of digits on a sign anyway. It just becomes a make-work project for traffic cops.

[dave_boo]

The reason fatalities dropped is because the vehicles are better designed to protect the inhabitants during an accident.

This is another attempt at disproving "corelation =/= causation" by disregarding the fact that the number of fatalities did not drop significantly after the lower limit but rather gradually over time....

[TVmonitor]

I tend to believe that in general, "speed kills".

Over the past decades, not only has car safety improved but the standard of roads has too - much has been learned and implemented with regards to traffic engineering. It may be that general driving kills are also better in later generations of drivers.

US and Australia actually have appalling road death levels compared to many countries in Europe where traffic is denser.

I think there IS a problem with unnecessarily low speed limits - it bores drivers - they lose concentration, and it makes a greater number of drivers law-breakers.

te other problem that comes with long distances and low speed limits is CRUISE CONTROL - how many deaths this is a contributing factor in, I believe has not been investigated

In UK there country with the highest number os speed cameras, the figures are not improving relative to other countries in the top 5 - it has been suggested that more money should be directed onto drink drivers rather than speeders. This doesn't mean the spedd limits aen't working, it means that drink drive is now in need of targeting.

[noahvail]

I had a '70 Volvo in the States when the 55 mph law went into effect. Before that, I was getting 30 mpg cruising along at 80 mph all day (and all night - frequent trips to Florida from Maine, in one shot). Sticking to the 55 mph limits, I got a whopping 22 mpg. What the federal officials seemed to quietly forget was that pre-74 cars were set up to run at speed.

I agree about the cruise control - but not only the reliance on that, but boredom. 55 mph is boring, and leads to highway hypnosis, micro-sleeps, and accidents.

But to bring this back to Thailand... many of the roads in Isaan are terrible; there's a stretch of road about 1 km long leading in/out of my town, and it's absolutely horrendous! They've managed to fill in the holes that were big enough to swallow a small car, easily many scooters, but the rest is just a series of potholes held together by a wee bit of mud. I'm told that every year the road is torn up and redone, only to be smashed to bits again by the overloaded trucks. My guess is that there's no decent base to the road, and the underlying water table needs to be taken into account, but hey... I'm not an engineer. But it's the scooter riders who suffer here, from driving drunk, from not wearing protective gear, from not even coming close to obeying the rules of the road. And suffer they do - over 20,000 deaths per year in Thailand from scooters. Speed certainly is a factor: you have to really go slow in the villages because they come out of side streets without looking or slowing down! Ok, rant over, back to you...

[harrry]

over 20,000 deaths per year in Thailand from scooters.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Well there are statistics lies and exagerations.

Motorcycle accidents kill 27 people a day

According to the Public Health Ministry (PHM), motorcycle accidents claim the lives of 27 Thais and injure 438 every day. Of those drivers involved in accidents 80% were not wearing crash helmets.

The statistics released by the PHM stated that motorcycle accidents was one of the leading causes of deaths among Thais in 2005 with 159,867 severely injured and 9,877 killed. In 2006 - 164,836 were seriously injured and 8,908 were killed.

More than 50% died instantly at the scene of the accidents and were aged between 25-45 years of age.

Road and transport accidents were the second major cause of deaths among children after drowning, with 65% of the road accident deaths involved children as motorcycle passengers.

Asst. Prof. Dr Adisak has six safety recommendations for children passengers on motorcycles, 1. Find a better mode of transportation, especially with children under 2 years old; no amount of safety equipment will lessen injury; 2. Children over 2 years old should wear crash helmets; 3. Children aged less than 5 years should not sit on the back unsupported because they could fall asleep and fall off; 4. There are no statistics to prove that the use of cloth or belts and other equipment to tie the passenger to the driver increases safety; 5. Use of special seats might prevent the child from falling off or getting its legs trapped in the wheels, but it doesn’t help in accidents, presently no designs are perfect; 6. If a child is a passenger the driver should not go over 40 kilometers per hour. CMM Reporters

Chiang Mai

http://www.thailandqa.com/forum/showthread.php?t=16320ail

[PeaceBlondie]

Safe speed seldom kills. Stupidly slow sometimes kills. My best student died from a wreck at zero kph, falling to the pavement without a helmet.

Drunk driving kills. Bad driving kills.

[Carib]

Even oranges kill, it is just the way you handle things and IF you really are able to handle them. Some drivers will be confident at a 100 miles, others are not even worth the word ` driver`.

My uncle got killed by healthy oranges, he got a crate full of them on his head while working on the docks, he was not paying attention for a split second, and with the speed these crates drop.......

[BigSnake]

Speed KILL, likewise drunk driving, no helmets and many many more BAD bad HABITs behind the Wheels.

[TVmonitor]

"Well there are statistics lies and exagerations. "

or...............lies, dam_n lies and statistics........

unfortunately speed DOES kill - it's fairly easy to find examples where speed isn't a factor - and YES you don't need to be going any faster than walking pace to get killed from a head injury, but the unexpected approaches that much faster with speed and braking distances get longer and longer - it may not be the "speeder's" initial mistake but the resulting damage is usually greater when it happens at speed.

this has to be balanced with some compromise - if we bring back the man with a red flag then the death-rate will fall, but business etc will grind to a halt - so the anser is somewhere in between..

Too slow also results in everybody driving at the same speed - and this is always a recipe for disaster.

As for the condition of roads - that is usually the direct result of corruption; so many people take a cut out of the govt money allotted for the contract to build the road that there is insufficient left to do the job properly - so the less visible elements - such as hard-core etc are cut back or left out - the result a raod that needs doing every year and MORE BACKHANDERS!!!

PS - I've lost count of the number of Volvos I've owned, and NEVER got 30 mpg out of one and that was a UK gallon which is more than a US one.

[TVmonitor]

"Safe speed seldom kills." - could you define that???