Police will get powers to fine careless drivers, rather than taking them to court, as part of a government strategy to make Britain's roads safer. Ministers say motorists who tail-gate, undertake or cut others up often go unpunished and that introducing instant penalties would be more efficient.
Offenders would get a fine of at least £80 and three points on their licence.
The speed limit doesn't need to be raised.
Even though it is now at 70, 80mph is the unofficial limit. Loads of people drive at 80, and often enough at 85. People only get fined now for going over 90.
If the official limit was raised to 80, too many people would start creeping higher than that when they or their cars can't handle that speed.
>>1375 I think this is just a headline-grabbing attempt. I'd love to see it happen, but you know that at the last minute the Health & Safety nazis will intervene.
>>1378 I think there should be more focus on speed limits on country lanes rather than motorways.
My experience of motorways is mainly from using the M62 and, apart from around Manchester and 50 zones for roadworks, you're on open road and there's no real need for a speed limit. IIRC the only reason the speed limit is 70 is because of the economy in the 70's as it was used as a fuel saving measure. Cars have come on a long way since then and the majority of motorway accidents are not at full speed or head on; even so in these cases it wouldn't make a difference if you were travelling at 70 or 80.
Yes, it's due to traffic/congestion. I imagine many cars travelling at a similar speed keep a better distance from eachother on the road, meaning less starting and stopping, whereas many cars accelerating to the maximum of the speed limit one after the other will invariably reach places of less road capacity faster and cause greater jams.
Really? I thought it was the increased frequency and ferocity of accidents.
>it wouldn't make a difference if you were travelling at 70 or 80.
I take it you have no understanding of physics, lad? Don't worry - plenty of HE colleges will be fine with taking you through a GSCE and 'A' level in the subject.
>>2629 No, lad, he's right. 70 to 80 isn't going to make a difference. If an accident at 70 is fatal, then the same accident at 80 would certainly be fatal too. If the accident is survivable at 70, then in all likelihood it'll still be survivable at 80.
The most important issue is that of braking distances. Increasing your speed from 70 to 80mph will increase a typical car's stopping distance from 95m to 120m. Braking is non-linear, so most of the speed is lost in the last few metres of braking. At the point where a car travelling at 70mph would be completely stationary, a car doing 80mph would still be travelling at about 40mph.
A car in motion has a given amount of kinetic energy, which increases with speed. The car's restraint systems are designed to reduce the amount of energy that is transferred to the occupants. Modern cars do a remarkably good job of this, but these energy-absorbing systems have a finite capacity.
Once a crumple zone has crumpled, it's useless - all the remaining crash energy is transferred to the passenger cell. This is where the real differences in outcomes occur. So long as no intrusion occurs into the passenger cell, crash outcomes tend to be fairly good. Once the passenger cell begins to fail, you tend to get increasingly severe intrusion with very little extra energy. The cell's structure is unavoidably quite brittle, so once a column has buckled, you tend to get severe deformation with fairly modest amounts of extra energy. Now rather than a bit of whiplash and a couple of cracked ribs, you're looking at multiple fractures of the legs and pelvis.
The safety campaigners are absolutely right when they say that a small increase in speed can drastically increase your chances of being killed or seriously injured, or of killing or seriously injuring someone else. That said, motorways are intrinsically safe roads (straight and wide with plenty of run-off), so I'd be happy to allow an 80mph limit on the motorway if the speed limit on single carriageways was reduced to 50mph.
