This sub­ject has been rolling along for some years now.  Basic­ally the tech­no­logy now exists to be able to instruct a car what speed it should travel at.

Now, if you’re a con­trol freak, this is like a gift from heaven.  If you’re a con­trol freak in power (yes, that includes you Jac­qui Smith) then it’s even more won­der­ful, because it hands you a whole ton of power.

Like everything, of course, it’s not all bad.  There are plenty of good reas­ons for speed lim­it­ing cars, trucks and even fire engines.  That doesn’t neces­sar­ily mean it’s a good idea.

How The Pro Speed Lim­iters Present Their Argument

Slow, yet also lethal — pub­lic domain image with thanks to Wikipedia

There are cur­rently a lot of fears in soci­ety, espe­cially West­ern soci­ety.  We’re scared of global warm­ing, the eco­nomy, ter­ror­ism, and dying in a fiery ball of fire when some chav in a mis­guidedly tuned Vaux­hall Nova comes career­ing head-on towards you as a res­ult of massive over­con­fid­ence and a lack of skill.  Throw those argu­ments into the air and you have some pretty strong argu­ments as to why we should intro­duce speed limiters.

Here’s a quick list of their key points:

• Safety — you’ll hear this a lot.  And it’s true.  Go slower and if all else is equal safety will go up.
• Eco­nomy — by being forced to go slower, you’ll drive more eco­nom­ic­ally and be able to save the world from Global Warm­ing at the same time.
• Reduced need for thirsty, fast cars — true to a degree because what’s the point in a big V8 if you hit speed-limited wall at 70mph?
• Reduced load on drivers — no need to think about speed, or worry about speed cameras.
• It’s optional, there’s no need to fit a speed lim­iter if you don’t want it.
• If you do have it, there’s an over­ride but­ton for those rare occa­sions you may need to go faster than strictly legal.
• If only a minor­ity of cars have this lim­iter, the effect will be to slow down oth­ers without it.
• Lot’s of people are killed or injured daily, and any­one arguing against speed con­trols must be in favour of those deaths.

The argu­ments are mostly presen­ted by dif­fer­ent types of organ­isa­tion.  You have the emo­tion­ally irrit­at­ing Brake, and the more calm but gov­ern­ment fun­ded (don’t for­get this fact, they may sound inde­pend­ent but they aren’t) Motor­ing Forum, the UK Com­mis­sion for Integ­rated Trans­port, and vari­ous other safety campaigners.

I can’t find a quote from Jac­qui Smith on this sub­ject, but I’m sure she’ll be along soon.

And The Argu­ment Against

Well there has to be some rational argu­ment against this, but unfor­tu­nately we’ve only got Safe Speed get­ting all the media atten­tion on the other side.  Holy Fuck­ing Shit.  I mean, really.  Have you seen them?  You wouldn’t trust these people to dec­or­ate your house, so why would you trust them with set­ting the agenda on speed lim­its and motor­ing policy?

Instead, why not get a psy­cho­lo­gist who’s stud­ied driv­ing onto your show?  Or, at a stretch, someone from the Insti­tute of Advanced Motor­ists?  But no, instead you get to listen to a  mup­pet from Brake arguing with a mup­pet from Safe Speed.  I sup­pose there’s only so many pun­dits to go round and the radio and TV sta­tions pick the easi­est ones they can find.

Sheesh.

But here we go — this is other people’s argu­ments, don’t for­get.  Mine come later.

• It’ll encour­age zom­bie beha­viour, which is almost cer­tainly true — in the US where free­ways were once lim­ited to the mind-numbingly dull speed of 55mph, you get to see a lot of this.
• It’s a symp­tom of control-freakery — yep, almost certainly.
• Speed doesn’t kill, it’s inat­tent­ive driv­ing, which kind of cycles back to the first point.
• It’s the thin end of a wedge which will end with all cars hav­ing com­puls­ory speed limiters.
• It prob­ably won’t affect KSI (Kills and Ser­i­ous Injur­ies) rates in the pos­it­ive man­ner the pro side would like to see.
• Slow­ing down can cause more accidents.

Thank­fully, spoke­folk from the RAC, AA and the likes are occas­sion­ally wheeled out to dis­cuss such issues and they tend to be a bit more rational and thought out.  But they’ve become rather dys­func­tional resellers of insur­ance and recov­ery ser­vices these days, rather than the clubs and asso­ci­ations that they ori­gin­ally star­ted out as.  Con­sequently they have to toe a fine line between keep­ing cus­tom­ers (many of whom are the unthink­ing fools I worry about) and not upset­ting the gov­ern­ment (filled with the mis­guidedly think­ing fools I also worry about) into adding more restric­tions to both their cus­tom­ers and their busi­nesses.  So they tend towards mak­ing state­ments rather than take the risk of get­ting involved on radio or TV.

Of course, avoid­ing radio or TV is a sens­ible move for many.  I’ve listened to myself on Radio and I’m clearly a ram­bling buf­foon who doesn’t know when to shut up and who talks over oth­ers.  Heaven knows what would hap­pen if I found myself on TV.  Of course, it’s not totally bad to be a buf­foon — look how well Boris Johnson’s done out of it.

The best argu­ment against this, so far, comes from the easy to respect Derek Charters, from the Motor Industry Research Asso­ci­ation, who believes lim­it­ing speed auto­mat­ic­ally could cause accidents.

“The last thing you need is one car to be over­tak­ing and then pull back in, in front of the cars in front, because that brak­ing event will then cause every­body to start to slow down, which will then com­press the traffic, which then causes an incident.”

The Dave’s Attempt to Think on this Subject

• Oh Jesus, do we need the gov­ern­ment con­trolling us just a bit more?
• Would gov­ern­ment con­trolled GPS units even­tu­ally be used to track our cars’ every movement?
• A world full of cars doing identical speeds is so hor­rific­ally sop­or­ific that I sus­pect we’d be hav­ing massive pile-ups in no time.
• The unthink­ing are the worst people to get this tech­no­logy — they’ll just turn into motor­ing zombies.
• Going faster is fun.  Some­times it’s good to be able to have a bit of fun, you know, even if it does make the world ever so slightly less safe.
• All speeds are dan­ger­ous — being crushed to death by a 2mph Audi Q7 isn’t much fun either — stop people from real­ising how dan­ger­ous cars are and boom! more dead people.
• It’ll prob­ably mean the end of the fant­astic Top Gear show.
• It’ll make mov­ing to South Amer­ica far more appealing.

The key argu­ments for or against this idea are really just noise.  The ques­tion we should be ask­ing is at what point should drivers give up respons­ib­il­ity for the move­ments of their cars?  Lane sens­ing tech­no­logy has matured enough that you could con­ceiv­ably place your Honda at the begin­ning of the M6 and drive all the way to Scot­land without touch­ing the wheel, brakes or throttle again, com­ing to a stop when the traffic in front does so, and accel­er­at­ing to a set speed when it’s pos­sible to do so.  I remain to be con­vinced that all this is a good idea, but at least it’s entirely within the con­trol of the driver — he can choose what is and is not switched on, and where.

GPS tech­no­logy is con­stantly improv­ing, as are sensors.  It’s only a mat­ter of time before we can simply climb into our cars, shout “take me to work, auto­car!” and climb into the back for a nap.  Sounds like a won­der­ful idea to me and I wouldn’t care what speed the car trav­elled at so long as it woke me up on arrival and neatly parked itself while I go for a pee.

Par­tial imple­ment­a­tion, on a wide scale, of speed lim­iters or even smart cruise con­trol could be lethal.  Each car would end up driv­ing at ever so slightly dif­fer­ent speeds.  Over­tak­ing moves could be meas­ured in miles, and it wouldn’t mat­ter if you didn’t have a speed lim­iter — you’d be stuck behind those with them fit­ted.  And those who choose to have them fit­ted would be sit­ting in a smug pool of self-superiority, know­ing they’re driv­ing at the max­imum safe speed.  They’d be wrong, of course.  70mph is safe when it’s clear and dry.  It’s safe even when it’s wet.  But in a deluge it’s lethal.  But hav­ing given up the act of think­ing about speed they would just keep their foot mashed down on the car­pet.  Until they even­tu­ally plough into the back of the car in front that they couldn’t see.

And that’s why this topic has made it into the Cam­paign for Think­ing.  Full auto­ma­tion is a good thing, it means you can go and think about some­thing else.  But a world full of drivers who believe think­ing about speed is only for the gov­ern­ment… God pre­serve us!

Now, could the gov­ern­ment get on with think­ing about things they could help us with?  Infra­struc­ture, inter­na­tional secur­ity, the eco­nomy, tax… that kind of stuff?  The big, hard prob­lems that they have the power to do some­thing about?  3,000 people a year die on the roads.  60,000 people a year die from murders in South Africa.  And provid­ing assist­ance to unstable or impov­er­ished coun­tries could save the lives of mil­lions.  Unfor­tu­nately it’s hard to get elec­ted on the prom­ise of sav­ing the lives of AIDS stricken Tan­zani­ans, but you could save or dra­mat­ic­ally improve the lives of more than 3,000 of them with the mil­lions spent on speed lim­iter stud­ies.  Yes, I know it’s a straw man argu­ment, but a little sense of per­spect­ive on the point of all this would be useful.

Link­age

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7803997.stm

http://www.cfit.gov.uk/mf/index.htm

http://www.mira.co.uk/

http://www.safespeed.org.uk/

http://www.cfit.gov.uk/

http://www.dft.gov.uk/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_in_Africa

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