The local council has gone ahead with its proposals for half a dozen sets of traffic lights to be installed on a busy stretch along a busy local road. Excellent, so we will all be stopping more then, which will take longer to complete our journeys, which will create more pollution and harm the environment, which will upset the environmentalists who want cars off the road in the first place. Circular logic, isn't it?
Everyone whines about how dangerous and lethal it is to speed. Consider this scenario: Three cars on a motorway. Two drive at 80mph, the third drives at 20mph. Which car is the liability? In this instance, it should be obvious that the third car is, because of the speed differential. But nobody has actually thought that lack of speed can be just as dangerous.
Motorway regulations are an antiquated set of procedures designed to deal with the cars of 20 years ago, from the first Renault 5s to the Ford Escort. When the speed limit was set at 70mph, it took into account the design of the day and the potential the cars had for exceeding that speed limit. By most standards, it was a comfortable speed that could be usurped by a tiny minority of fast, expensive supercars. If you raced along at 100+ mph, you did so at your own risk. However, that has all changed. Modern cars are infinitely more reliable, and so are more capable of attaining higher speeds. Yet for all that, the organisations and legislators governing motoring in the country turn a blind eye. The rules governing motorway driving are not commensurate with the age we live in.
It's not that people are incapable of driving safely past 80mph - many do it all the time. Even 90mph is safe. You adapt to the conditions in which you drive - only a fool would go so fast in blinding rain or on black ice. It's pretty pathetic that the Government and police want to catch anyone doing 1mph over a certain speed limit than do vaguely constructive things with their time, like catch serial murderers and terrorists.
The other advantage of raising the speed limit is that it will logically take less time to complete a long-distance journey. Leaving Leeds at 8pm, I would be home in London by 11pm. The journey is 220 miles, so that's an average speed of 73.3mph, if you count the town roads at either end. I have taken as long as double that to do it in the middle of the day.
The main cause for motorway congestion is the three lane system. Truck 1 drives down the far left lane at 48mph. Truck 2 pulls out to overtake, in the middle lane, at 50mph. It seems like an age before truck 2 overtakes truck 1, but it will do so at the expense of holding up 7 faster moving cars behind it. In that event, the cars which have braked to accommodate truck 2 are likely going to pull out into the far right lane, possibly causing a serious accident, as the far right lane must necessarily be the fastest on the motorway.
It is no use building 4, 5 or 6 lane motorways to address this problem either: the problem is one that starts and ends with lane discipline and a disregard for speed differences. Everyone, if they have read their Highway Code, should know that the middle and far right lanes are overtaking ones, and you pull in once you have completed your manoeuvre. Why then is the majority of motorway traffic in the far right lane, with the two left lanes virtually empty? It is because people seem quite happy to discover their right indicator but far less to discover their left one. Sloppy driving causes people to be held up and therefore takes longer for everyone's journey to be completed. And once you have pulled out from the middle lane into the far right to overtake, you start to become the problem if you have not overtaken that car soon enough, because you will hold someone else up.
Better lane discipline is required, not the expansion of the motorway programme. Then suddenly all the problems are solved:
1: All the tree-hugging environmentalists will be happy because more rural areas will be saved from being built over.
2: All the motorists will be happy because they will be driving quicker.
3: The government will be happy because it is saving money on not building any more motorways.
Think, Labour - use your brain, not your wallet.
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