The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #130207 Message #2928863
Posted By: Geoff the Duck
16-Jun-10 - 05:29 AM
Thread Name: Lower drink-drive limit proposed UK
Subject: RE: Lower drink-drive limit proposed UK
Usually the justification for "reducing the current limit" whether it is alcohol, or speed of cars, is that someone at several times the current limit killed a person. The people interviewed on telly are always someone whose family was devastated by an excessively drunken or speeding driver. It is never due to the actual current safe limit causing a problem.
I have never seen any rational argument to explain that if a speed limit is reduced from 30mph to 20mph that it would suddenly make the people who drive drunk and incapable at 60pmh along that road change their behaviour. They do not go out with the principle "I will drive at exactly TWICE the posted limit, so if the limit is 20 I will reduce my usual 60mph down to 40mph". It doesn't work like that. An irresponsible idiot will drive dangerously whatever the legal limit.
I can see good reasons for dynamically changing speed limits in specific locations at certain times - 30mph to 20 near a school when kids are arriving or leaving, but not permanently fixed, so someone would break the law driving at 30mph at midnight during school holidays.
Anyone who tries to speak sense is shouted down with the accusation that they want to encourage the idiots by keeping existing limits, and that they are in some way condoning the behaviour of the people responsible for deaths due to inexcusable behaviour. They ignore that the reason these people have killed is that they completely ignored the existing limits, and if they had stayed within them, there would not have been a fatal accident.
Just remember that someone suffering from a head cold can have considerably slower reaction time than someone driving within current UK legal limits for blood alcohol. Tiredness can also kill, even at slow speeds, as the driver asleep at a wheel has no control at all.
In all I personally do not see any reason that current limits should be altered at all.
Quack!
GtD.