Speed tolerance reduced for December and January

[kiwi cowboy]

Cool, another thread hijacked by the ACC debate.

Sowwy wusty.
What gets me with the speed kills bit is-when traveling through the lindas on sunday I had 3 people in cars come around corners on my side of the road (half to threequarters of the car across the centre line) To which I had to avoid and all these corners were 75km's corners.
Now these people were probably not going over 100km's so no technically speeding but couldn't drive for shit.
100-105-110km's speed is not the issue but driving to the conditions is but not enforced.

[rastuscat]

Sowwy wusty.
What gets me with the speed kills bit is-when traveling through the lindas on sunday I had 3 people in cars come around corners on my side of the road (half to threequarters of the car across the centre line) To which I had to avoid and all these corners were 75km's corners.
Now these people were probably not going over 100km's so no technically speeding but couldn't drive for shit.
100-105-110km's speed is not the issue but driving to the conditions is but not enforced.

Yeah, then we go and enforce the failing to keep left thing and suddenly it becomes revenue collecting.

Fuckit, back to the drawing board

[kiwi cowboy]

Yeah, then we go and enforce the failing to keep left thing and suddenly it becomes revenue collecting.

Fuckit, back to the drawing board

fuck mate come hide in the pigroot some weekend iv'e seen some shit driving through there that could get your performance target.
would rather see tickets written for the left rule than 105 on a straight road with no one else in sight.

Just a side note how do you explain the article on the news just now the road toll in 1970 something was over a 1000 and last year was 421 I think they said but there saying speed kills.
A- in 1970 something there were far less cars on the road.
B- the speed limit then was 80km's an hour.

So there are a shit load more cars on the road and 20km's/h faster limit and the toll is down by 2/3rds but speed kills.

[Berries]

I'd love to have a law that allows better drivers to go faster than fuckwits, but that'd mean setting up a system to define who the fuckwits are.

Is the word you are looking for discretion?

It's a shame we don't have the same fanatical level of debate, analysis and resourcing applied to reducing our nations suicide figures which are more than twice that of the road toll.

I rode my bike today and I did not purposefully kill myself. Same yesterday. I have ridden my bike quite a lot over the years and so far have managed not to commit suicide. I don't really care about the suicide stats because they don't affect me. I don't really care about the speed tolerance either because I rarely ride in that boring band between 104 and 109km/h.

[Tigadee]

Its that already innit?

Only for a very few strethes of motorway, right?

I was really surprised by SH2 where it's mostly 90kph on easy-going motorways. What gives with that?

Yeah, that'll work. A whole pile of uniformed cops out filling potholes on the state highways.

Oh c'mon! You know I don't mean the police doing that... I mean the Government, yo! (i.e. NZTA)

I think the cops have better things to do than filling potholes and busting obese German millionaires...

It's a shame we don't have the same fanatical level of debate, analysis and resourcing applied to reducing our nations suicide figures which are more than twice that of the road toll.

Tell the Government they should hand out tickets to those who survived suicide attempts. Maybe then they'll do something about that issue...

[kiwi cowboy]

There would be a number of reasons like the cars back then not being as capable at handling high speeds/impacts (no airbags), Seat belts may not have been compulsary, Drink driving may not have had as big a penalty as today.
If statistics were kept on the sort of accidents that killed back then and whether or not the same accidents killed today as regular, the differences could be accurately determined possibly

Yes quite agree with you BUT the way the police/ media portray it it is only the reduction in SPEED tollerance that is responsible

[Pixie]

I seriously hope it is a total fucking failure and the roads run with rivers of blood and gore (the substance,not the town or the eco-wanker) and of course the piggies will come up with some weak excuse..... "they didn't pay attention to us" or "cars went through a time_warp and suddenly became less safe".

[Zedder]

Yes quite agree with you BUT the way the police/ media portray it it is only the reduction in SPEED tollerance that is responsible

You can imagine then, how the people of Oz's Northern Territory, and other states, felt when the Minister for Transport refused to release the results of four taxpayer funded studies on the situation before finally going with the no speed limit trial.

In other news, I read today about Auckland Airport taxi drivers who will block airport and city streets unless their demands for higher minimum fares are met. Those guys appear to know about getting protesting right.

[Pixie]

In other news, I read today about Auckland Airport taxi drivers who will block airport and city streets unless their demands for higher minimum fares are met. Those guys appear to know about getting protesting right.

Lot of taxi drivers are immigrants.They have spines,unlike laidback kiwis who will let anyone fuck them in the arse till their eyes bulge.

[Pixie]

My turn........76% of stats are sucky.

I've oft quoted the laws of physics. Is it so hard to understand that if you fall over while walking its better than falling over while running?

Why you fell over is an entirely different issue. Sometimes its coz you're a bad runner.

I'm trying to get my head around your odd logic about it being safer to speed. Breathtakingly stupid, but challenging.

Do they force you pigs to drink the coolaid? Or do you all line up ,eagerly awaiting a cup?

[Pixie]

come now rasty, you cant tell me you actually believe that shit?! I thought you were all like 'i am cop, i enforce policy, FUCK YOU plebian'

but you actually BELIEVE slow =safe?

IHC must be the safest place out.

No.Police HQ is

[Zedder]

Lot of taxi drivers are immigrants.They have spines,unlike laidback kiwis who will let anyone fuck them in the arse till their eyes bulge.

That's quite a generalisation there about kiwis not all are like that, the Bikoi showed that and also you protest by not paying rego/licencing as do others. However, mass protesting has certainly fizzled out.

I've heard some types of immigrants like doing the arse thing as well....

[Jay GTI]

Slightly less I’ve had a bad day at work post this time...

Right, so once again we’re about to get taxed heavily in the name of “road safety”. Sure, if you have 2 brain cells and one is on warm standby, it’s as simple as “don’t speed and you won’t get caught”. But if you can actually manage breathing and thinking at the same time, you’ll probably be like me and think this is all just a scam. I have yet to find any clear, cold, hard evidence that it isn’t.

Let’s start with a wider view of political fund raising. Govts long ago realised that if they make something socially unacceptable, they can easily pass legislation to suit themselves. Global warming an issue? Well we’re all going to die if we don’t do anything about it, so here’s your carbon tax. Smoking? Definitely a killer, so let’s push up the tax on tobacco sales, way past the point where the revenue raised can easily pay for all the healthcare related costs for sick smokers. Alcohol, right... causes all sorts of issues, so a bit more tax on that too. You’ll also be hearing about the brainwave method for tackling the obesity epidemic. That’s right, tax on fatty foods. Genius. So it doesn’t take much of a leap to realise that if speeding is demonised, then it can also easily be turned into a nice little revenue stream.

Demonising speed is easy, you have lots of cooked stats that show these horrible outcomes from people having accidents at speed. You can dig deeper into those stats and start coming to the obvious conclusion that speed wasn’t a causal factor in the majority of these accidents, but that is easily rebuffed with a bit of simple physics. The people in these accidents would have had a better outcome if they were travelling more slowly. Which is true. But, that is taking one single element out of the wider picture of road safety and using it for propaganda purposes. We all have a social and financial need to get to places, reasonably quickly, and in reasonable safety. In order to ensure we can make our necessary journeys, in or on our own vehicles, in relative safety, we have road rules. These road rules are primarily designed to allow us to travel in a safe and efficient manner, without significant impact on other road users. But, they don’t remove the fundamental problem with travelling by vehicle on public roads, which is it’s dangerous. Whether you are doing 100kph, or 50kph, there are scenarios that, due to the speed at which you were travelling, will cause serious injury and death to you and the other vehicle occupants involved. We can attempt to tackle this by lessening one of the factors, your vehicle speed, but where do you actually stop? If we drop speed limits, we increase journey times, we increase congestion, we impact the economy, so it needs to be a balance. Someone, somewhere, with some reasonable thought (hopefully), put all the factors together and came up with the speed limits. These are, by their very design, a guideline of the speeds that we can travel in relative safety, with a high probability of reaching our destination without incident. No they aren’t a target, nor are they absolute, because those simple laws of physics the propagandists like trolling out also work against us.

Driving at a constant speed. Tried this recently? By constant, I don’t mean within a set tolerance, I mean sticking exactly to one speed, say 50kph, for an entire journey. It’s not possible. For a start, there’s corners, intersections, hills, other traffic, the weather, where the sun is in the sky and lots of other external factors that directly influence our speed. There is also the fact that the accelerator pedal is not a digital device, there is no 50kph setting, no 80kph setting, no 100kph setting. No, in order to even roughly maintain a constant speed, you have to constantly adjust the pressure you put on the accelerator pedal (and the brake), reacting at the same time to the road conditions, gradient, corner sharpness, other traffic and everything else we must account for when trying to drive within the speed limit. In truth, those simple laws of physics are actually working against us. And the law makers know this. They also use the laws of physics against us. They know that small incremental speeding is natural, normal, in most instances pretty darn safe, yet it is also very easy to both measure and penalise. All is needed is to convince enough people that speeding is evil and woah there buddy, we even might want this tax, sorry I mean road safety campaign.

Unless your car is really smart and has a speed limiter, you are going to exceed the speed limit by some small increment in every journey you make. You will also travel under the posted speed limit for parts of that journey. And you will do this every journey, for your life. That is a lot of journeys where you’ve exceeded the speed limit and nothing what-so-ever happened to you, or the other occupants of the vehicle, or other vehicles, or pedestrians or anyone else. You simply got in your car or on your bike, travelled to your destination and arrived safely. This is happening the world over, daily, with millions of people safely reaching their destination, while at some point, speeding. So, oddly enough, people have formed the opinion that 56kph in a 50kph zone, if all other factors are considered and accounted for in a safe enough manner, isn’t particularly fraught with danger. And they know this, because they do it every day, for years and years. Statistically, you are going to get to your destination in perfect safety, even if you just roughly match the speed limits. Statistically, you will exceed a 4kph threshold at some point and the worst that will happen is you may be ticketed.

However, the propagandists love to tell you about the reduction in serious accidents and road deaths as a direct result of the war on speeding. They point, gleefully, at the speeding campaigns and trumpet the zero tolerance weekends that showed less accidents and deaths than previous years, whilst conveniently forgetting about those zero tolerance weekends where there wasn’t the same result and in some cases, there were more road deaths and serious accidents. This is because, as anyone who has spent time on public roads will tell you, there are many, many factors that result in road accidents. Speed, in some cases, isn’t even relevant. Then there are the other shifting goal posts. Take a 1973 Toyota Corolla (you can find plenty on TM) and park it next to a 2013 Toyota Corolla. The 2013 car may as well have been built on another planet, by comparison. We now have, as standard, ABS, ESP, crumple zones, side impact bars, a cabin full of air bags, retractable seatbelts, anti-submarining seats, collapsing steering columns... all of which have had a huge impact on the driver and passenger safety in the event of an accident. Shit, now we even have cars that will do an emergency stop for you. That was pure science fantasy for the people who bought a ‘73 Corolla new. So if you want to trumpet the success of anti-speeding campaigns over the years, how about including the full picture including the evolution of road design and construction and vehicles in that statement?

Ok then, the numbers of road deaths and accidents aren’t really a good indicator of the success of anti-speeding campaigns, so what would be a good indicator? Well, there’s a really obvious one. Tickets. If the zero tolerance campaigns were doing their job, the message would be getting through and we’d be successfully adjusting the way we drive to suit. Which should, logically, mean that we should be seeing a reduction in the number of speeding tickets being issued. Well, that we most definitely aren’t. Sure, the campaign has gathered momentum, there is more focus on speeding and there are more ways to get caught, so in theory the reduction of tickets through successful campaigning will be offset by more speed cameras, vans and patrol cars. But really, the increase is incredible! Quite often we see in the press, the Police triumphantly boasting about the huge numbers of tickets issued for a particular location, or a particular weekend. “Woo-hoo” they cry, and bleat on about the positive impact they are making, the number of people that will reconsider their driving habits and slow down, as a result of their fines and demerits. Well, I seriously doubt that to be true, if speeding tickets are increasing at the rate they are, that is more an indication that the programme is failing, massively. We are not slowing down.

So, if the message isn’t getting through, what message is? Oh that’s right, resentment. Please people, hate cops. I remember when the first speed camera was installed in NZ, it was in Birkenhead near where I lived at the time. Shortly after it’s installation, somebody reversed over it, intentionally. One speed camera in New Zealand and within weeks of it operating, it was vandalised. It was a long time ago, but when the person who reversed over it went to court, I seem to remember him saying he did it because it was revenue collecting and not about road safety. Don’t hold me on that one, though. So, you can look at all the “good” work the anti-speed campaigns are doing, the lives the Govt and Police have “saved” as a result, the people who don’t have to go through the emotional distress as a result of a serious accident or road death and all the propaganda bullshit, but the real impact of these anti-speeding campaigns is more and more people are feeling serious resentment towards the Police and the Govt. How many times has this gone round and round on KB? How many times has Rastus had to copy and paste his well-rehearsed rebuttals to the next KB’r who decides that, yeah actually, it’s all bullshit? If I could fund a study on such things, I would love to see what the impact of these campaigns has had on the way the general public now perceive the effectiveness and purpose of the traffic branch of the Police and in fact, the Police in general. And how much respect they now have, as a result of more and more people seeing the war on speed as revenue collecting. I’ve been reading Rastus’s replies for a while now and even he seems to be losing the will... and it seems this is simply because the “right” message isn’t getting through, but the resentment is. I kind of feel sorry for the traffic branch guys, they are having their jobs made more and more difficult by these campaigns.

Road safety isn’t as simple as if you don’t speed you won’t get caught, or the higher the speed the bigger the mess, it’s way, way more complicated than that. No, I’m not going to pretend I have the answers, but I do think the answers we are being given, are wrong.

[thehovel]

15 vehicles in file, the front one is doing 100kph, I 'll bet the last one is doing barely 80kph. And no one's going to get pissed off??

Ants might keep a single file without the concertina effect but humans can't.

Wrong !!!! When a group of bikes are in line and the front bike is doing 100km the bike 8 back has to do 120-130kph just to keep up.
I rode a CX400 being the smallest bike I went out in front. I had to make sure that I didn't go over 100kph or I'd get bitched at. One ride one of my regular riders was leading I was #2 at the destination asked "why the speed" he replied I thought that you rode at that speed all the time. It opened my eyes a bit.

[Zedder]

[QUOTE=Jay GTI;1130643194]Slightly less I’ve had a bad day at work post this time...

Nothing is going to change until TPTB stop misrepresenting the situation and to make matters worse, generating revenue from it.

The same applies to ACC etc etc.