Re: Motorway Speed Limits Revisited : Sat Jun 22, 2013 9:18 pm  

LyndsayGill wrote:

They do on the M60 near Middleton. I got nicked for doing 80mph at 11:30 in the morning on a fairly quiet stretch. 3pts and £60 or a naught boys course. Nobody's fault but mine but gives lie to the " you won't get nicked for doing 80"

Out of interest, were you stopped by the police or caught by a camera?

Re: Motorway Speed Limits Revisited : Sat Jun 22, 2013 9:32 pm  

cod'ead wrote:

Certificate of Professional Competence is an admin theory qualification.

So you've never done any speed training, defensive driving courses, Advanced Driving course etc?

No wonder you believe you can drive as fast as you want to, unfortunately you'll discover just how bad a driver you are when the emergency services are peeling back the tin to drag your sorry remains from your car

Eh? I told you by standards i'm a slow driver, losing my license isn't a option to me so i've never risked it, i even stopped drinking for 8 years full stop up until 5 years ago.

Defensive courses, they are part of the PCV, you carry people not cargo, you are taught to read the roads in front of and second guess what people are going to do.

Speed training, licence wise no, i've done track days, formula ford stuff but to race i need the 'b' license and i'm not too bothered as i'd rarely use it for the cost i'd have to outlay.

I'm not a speeder, i think you're getting the wrong end of the stick, i'm saying treat us like Germany, apparently they have a safer record, so it can't be all bad.

Re: Motorway Speed Limits Revisited : Sat Jun 22, 2013 9:38 pm  

Him wrote:

It's not about protecting the minority. If the idiots driving at 100mph only killed themselves then that'd be one thing, but they don't. They crash into people driving sensibly.

You doing 160mph for instance (in your example). At that speed the slightest thing goes wrong and the car is out of control even for experienced and trained drivers. There's a pothole in the road, a piece of truck tyre debris, an unexpected bend in the road that you misjudge, the potential causes for disaster at that speed are many. And not only could you hit other drivers on your side of the road (though you did say if there's no-one around, but as Jerry says that's highly unlikely on British roads. I was travelling from Nottingham to York at 2am on a Wednesday morning there was only 1 stretch of road for less than 5 minutes where there were no other cars on the road, and that wasn't a motorway it was a stretch of York ring road) but you can easily cross the central reservation and/or break through the central barrier at that speed and hit cars on the opposite side of the road.

As I said, you want to drive at racetrack speeds, do it on a racetrack not on a public road.
70mph is a perfectly reasonable speed limit in my opinion and 70 is a perfectly reasonable speed at which to complete either a short or long journey.

When I ran the Merc dealership, one of my customers had an operation on his left knee which would restrict his driving ability for a couple of weeks. He phoned me to ask if my car was automatic (it was, only a fool buys a manual Merc) and whether there was any chance we could swap cars for a fortnight. After putting him on our insurance and me on his, he got his wife to drop him and the car off at the depot. I gave him the keys to my E350 and accepted the keys to his chipped Honda NSX.

I put about 3000 miles on the clock of that thing in the two weeks I had it but only once did I try to open it up. I was visiting another customer in Glasgow and left home early one mid-June morning. Round about Shap, at 5.00 am, I opened it up. I bottled it at 160mph (with more than a couple of hundred revs left) and dropped back to 80mph. What was apparent to me was no matter how good a driver I thought I was, there was no way I had complete control of that car. Anything untoward happening would have led to me losing control and I dread to think of any consequences. That was on a bright, dry mid-June morning, on a completely empty road, When I opened that car up, I never saw another vehicle on either carriageway.

Re: Motorway Speed Limits Revisited : Sat Jun 22, 2013 9:42 pm  

Horatio Yed wrote:

I'm not a speeder, i think you're getting the wrong end of the stick, i'm saying treat us like Germany, apparently they have a safer record, so it can't be all bad.

Spend some time driving on a two-lane autobahn and then come back and let us know what you think

Re: Motorway Speed Limits Revisited : Sat Jun 22, 2013 10:04 pm  

cod'ead wrote:

Spend some time driving on a two-lane autobahn and then come back and let us know what you think

The experience that I had (previous page) was on a two lane autobahn, nothing more grand than a dual carriageway, so as on the A1 (for instance) you change lanes frequently if only to overtake HGV's - its dangerous when the differential speed between the two lanes can be 50mph or even more, far too dangerous for me to expect British drivers to be able to handle it even on our three or four lane motorways.

Re: Motorway Speed Limits Revisited : Sat Jun 22, 2013 10:15 pm  

As for accident stats, well the internet will back up whatever data you want to prove, this report for instance seems to suggest (from the graph in the report) that German autobahns have much higher death toll than British motorways http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2013/may/13/speed-limits-reduce-number-road-deaths but being naturally skeptical about news reporting I'd suggest that anyone continues their browsing because you can find reports that suggest the opposite too. What isn't in dispute is the fact that higher speeds are bad for pollution and for fuel consumption. should we really be discussing increasing pollution just because we want to arrive at our destination ten minutes earlier ? You'll also notice in that report a theme that is consistent in others - the autobahn is not de-restricted as such, it has "suggested" speed limits and many sections have compulsory speed limits and being involved in accidents at high speeds will most likely affect your insurance and possibly bring prosecutions - its never quite as clear cut as it seems.

As for accident stats, well the internet will back up whatever data you want to prove, this report for instance seems to suggest (from the graph in the report) that German autobahns have much higher death toll than British motorways http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2013/may/13/speed-limits-reduce-number-road-deaths but being naturally skeptical about news reporting I'd suggest that anyone continues their browsing because you can find reports that suggest the opposite too. What isn't in dispute is the fact that higher speeds are bad for pollution and for fuel consumption. should we really be discussing increasing pollution just because we want to arrive at our destination ten minutes earlier ? You'll also notice in that report a theme that is consistent in others - the autobahn is not de-restricted as such, it has "suggested" speed limits and many sections have compulsory speed limits and being involved in accidents at high speeds will most likely affect your insurance and possibly bring prosecutions - its never quite as clear cut as it seems.

Re: Motorway Speed Limits Revisited : Sat Jun 22, 2013 10:43 pm  

Horatio Yed wrote:

Yes, you're right because rubbishing my idea is easy.

Rubbishing your rubbish ideas is easy.

If the govt deems it okay to drive over 100mph on British roads, what kind of nonsense is it to then make their insurance invalid if they are involved in an accident at a speed over 100mph?

Lets punish the majority of sensible people because 'some' idiot will cause a crash.

They are not punishing the majority because of some idiots. They are protecting the majority from the idiotic actions of a minority.

I drive relatively (by others standards) slow on the motorway i'm usually around 65-72 mark but i'd love the opportunity to be treated like an adult, like the German government treat their people, and be in a position of having an empty road and being able to do a bit more, safely.

Anyone with a brain simply ignores the 70mph limit anyway if it is an empty road.

What you want is the limit taken away, which will just mean that the idiot in his 911 Turbo will be bombing past at 150mph. But for some ridiculous reason you don't want him to have valid insurance while he's doing it.

Re: Motorway Speed Limits Revisited : Sat Jun 22, 2013 10:49 pm  

No i think you're misrepresenting what i said, you'd be valid with you insurance but if you crash you won't get the costs to replace the car.

Why don't you go back to insulting people on the football thread, skirting round the swear filter and get yourself a proper ban.

Re: Motorway Speed Limits Revisited : Sat Jun 22, 2013 11:03 pm  

Even that's a nonsense, because the insurance company might be let off the 70k to replace the Porsche, but they're still liable to millions because the Porsche driver has hit another driver and paralysed him.

Re: Motorway Speed Limits Revisited : Sun Jun 23, 2013 12:55 am  

Why is everyone so paranoid about speed. At what point does it become 'unsafe'?

Someone who knows what they are doing in a high-powered sports car is almost certainly less of a risk than an 18 year old who thinks their 10 year old Corsa is a world rally car, just because they have stuck a spoiler on the back and a go faster stripe on the bonnet.