There is no typo on the title. Speed limits are dangerous, for those of you thinking that Speed limits save lives, let me break it down for you.
You are driving along a road you have never been along before, you see a sign indicating that the speed limit is 30mph, you had been in a national speed limit and so are doing 50. You brake/ease off to slow down, then what do you do? You glance at your speedometer to make sure that you are in fact doing 30mph. During which time a young girl walks out into the road, or a car pulls out of a hidden junction. Either way that is potentially the end of a life.

Of equal importance is something more relevant to those of us who travel on two wheels, a speed limit of 30 or 40 inevitably means lots and lots of signs saying SLOW painted on the road surface. Even in dry weather these can be incredibly slippery, and just to make things even worse the local authorities quite often elect to paint these signs on bends and corners. So whilst on a straight road your average biker will elect to go over the bottom of the L (it has the least paint after all) on a corner we do not get a choice. As many know a bike has least grip on the road when cornering, less of the tyre touches the tarmac and so there is less grip, combine SLOW signs and you get a great many unnecessary accidents. Bikers are often accused of riding too fast or irresponsibly when they come off, in reality some of the most major causes are SLOW signs, diesel spills and drain covers (which the council also likes to put on bends.)

The reality is that accidents don't happen because somebody breaks the speed limit, they happen because a) that person is driving irresponsibly, b) that person is driving beyond their abilities (ties in with a), c) someone is being plain idiotic or d) somebody hasn't left a sufficient gap or anticipated properly. There are of course exceptions, no-one can really help if a freak gust of wind topples a lorry, but the main cause of accidents is human error, whether it is on the part of the driver or somebody else.
It may interest you to know that figures released recently by the Department of Transport, indicate that the largest contributary factor to road accidents is "Failed to look", breaking the speed limit does not even rate in the top ten causes. Bike magazine also did a survery recently, of the people asked to identify a road sign, the only one that everyone recognised was the speed limit sign. So ask yourself do you know what the following signs look like? Uneven road, No stopping (clearway), No overtaking, No motor vehicles, Stop. Apparantly some people don't. The current government fascination with speed is related to what psychologists call consistency, Stephen Ladyman announced days after his department had released those figures that 25% of accidents involve breaking the speed limit, and that speed cameras reduced this.
So the question is of course why ahve speed limits? The simple answer is to try and reduce human error. Except that it doesn't really work as intended. How many people have driven through a accident reduction zone and nearly driven into the back of the car in front when they have slammed their brakes on for the benfit of a speed camera? OK most people will leave a sensible gap between them and the next vehicle in anticipation of this, but if people don't adhere to the speed limit inless they are passing a speed camera, what is the point in speed limits? Like many things in the law, Speed limits do not do what people believe them to. Speed limits do not save lives, they are merely an avenue for the Police to prosecute you when you endanger lives. In a perfect world this wouldn't be necessary because people would be responsible with their speed and wouldn't do 50mph past a school at 3.30, but people are stupid and they do. Its not the speed that kills the child, its the idiot behind the wheel who thought doing that speed was responsible.

Stopping distances are of course a factor effected by speed, but the reality remains that people (especially kids) do fly out of alleyways on their bikes and ride straight across the road without so much as looking. However these accidents cannot be easily avoided by the driver (short of educating their kids so that they don't do it). Other accidents should be avoidable purely through people paying more attention to the road (and not their stereo) and watching people on the pavement as well.

Speed limits seem to give people a false sense of security, they think "Oh its a 30, so I can do 30 through here" when the reality is that no matter what the speed limit is, your speed should match the situation you are in. If there are kids piling out of a school, who can really condone doing 30 through there? even if the speed limit is 30 you should not be doing that at that poihnt in time.

Unfortunately speed limits are here to stay, because the general population are not intelligent enough to be trusted to base their speed on the world around them, and so the Police must maintain a route to prosecute the idiots who decide to break the speed limit and end up causing an accident. I just hope that the government as a whole will inform the Local Councils to stop painting SLOW on the road, or to at least use street side signs isntead (though they are undeniably a distraction as well). Though it will never happen I believe the road would be a much safer place if Cars contained no entertainment facilities whatsoever, and the use of portables was banned.

Posted by Shifty_Ben