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The science often does boil down to measuring the average speed. It's not really practical to do an assessment for every mile of tarmac out there.

Here is a good read. It's about preventing accidents generally, but the author makes a few good points about those times when road saftey policy is decided with no real consideration of how people should drive or how they actually do.

Ireland is also insane. In cities like Dublin, it's a free for all with Bus drivers that have long since stopped caring if they run someone off the road and coked up taxi drivers popping up on the curbs when needed to clear traffic.

Ireland doesn't stop being insane when you leave Dublin - in fact, it's somewhere about a third of the way from safest in terms of "road deaths per 100,000 population in Europe"

Having said that, I'd describe even that as a minor miracle. They only instigated a penalty points system in 2002 and waiting lists to take your driving test are so long that a lot of people are reported to be driving illegally for years. Every winter there's terrible weather - maybe heavy snow, maybe fog - and the resulting pile-ups are the stuff of legend. A couple of years ago there was something like 100 accidents in the course of a couple of hours - ISTR it was on the M50 heading south out of Dublin - the cause was a combination of heavy fog and drivers who decided that it was still perfectly safe to drive at 70mph in heavy fog with visibility reduced to about 50 yards.

Just look at fatal accident rates for 100,000,000 vehicle miles: it's been steadily decreasing since 1920, by at least an order of magnitude.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b6/UsFatalAutoAccidentRates.png

Furthermore, if you look at the German statistics, accident rates have been decreasing despite steadily increasing speeds (85th percentile speed is 95mph):

http://www.abd.org.uk/images/mway_sl3~.gif

So: new technologies are making us safer and let us travel at higher speeds. Sorry, but this isn't even a glass-half-empty situation.

Also, the speed limit on a dual carriageway is 70mph (for a car) unless otherwise indicated. The only practical difference between a dual carriageway and a motorway is that motorways have restrictions on the type of vehicles that can use them.

The Association of British Drivers
North East Safety Camera Partnership
CBRD

Consider this Ambulance Driver.

ID Cards for the Brits, wait, here's why they can get angry!

From the Association of British Drivers press release: "The EU is already planning to use Galileo to enforce continental-wide road tolling, and the car-hating British government wants to be first. You won't be able to drive anywhere without the EU knowing where you are going, who you are travelling with, and what speed you are travelling at."

In Norway they have done something even more extreme. They have a camera taking your picture at one place, then several kilometers further down they take a new picture and calculate how fast you have driven between the two cameras, basically, your speed on average must meet the speed limit on average over quite a distance... They are testing this solution right now and it most likely will be legal to set it up.

We've had these in Britain for a while now, it's called SPECS over here. The first such system was set up here in 2000

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/468150 7.stm
http://www.abd.org.uk/specs.htm
http://www.speedcamerasuk.com/SPECS.htm

So I say if you really want to protect the environment from car emissions, find some way to double the price of oil rather quickly.

One document that came up easily mentions speed-limiters, but it seems they are only required for heavy vehicles. Further research seems to confirm that all vehicles over 12 metric tons require speed limiters in the EU.

This document is quite dated (1995!), but it seems speed limiters were suggested for all automobiles in the UK, but it was eventually dropped. I was not able to find very much at all about limiters for regular vehicles, so I would say they are not required over there.

This report from 2002 also mentions no other country requires them. (The US government does not, but allows the states to set more stringent regulations.) It also mentions the obvious argument for why: There are plenty of cars out there without the limiters: Imposing speed limiters on only new vehicles could encourage people to purchase "hot rod" style used vehicles, which would be less safe than standard new models.

Protesting groups will always find something to moan about, because if the world follwed their advice then they'd be out of a job. First we have fossil fuels, protesters moan, we invent nuclear, protesters moan, we build wind farms, protesters moan, we build tidal power stations, protesters moan. What makes you think they wont complain about solar or fusion?

Of course protesters complain about other protesters. Local people complain about trucks passing through their village, we build a bypass. Then rent-a-protest move in andcomplain about the great swathes of land being taken up. (Even Motorway interchanges and Junctions are mostly fields)

What a dumb hippy. "Tear up the roads and plant them with trees"? Even the UK, pretty high population density, has a tiny 0.5 square km of motorway per 1000 sq km, thats 1 part motorway per 2000 parts. This picture doesn't exactly show intercity roads flattening the country does it? If you want to plan trees, a couple of fields worth would be equivelent of getting rid of roads. Read This book instead of beliving the mumbo jumbo spouted by the environmentalists.

One of my favourite indicators was the ludicrous M4 bus lane - this is supposed to be only for taxis, buses and coaches, not the evil car. Unless you are the President^h^h^h^h^h^h^hime Minister who decided that the rules don't apply to him. It's a short step to banning the taxis etc and reserving this lane for Party Members (a genuine 'In Soviet Russia' reference). Of course Jeremy Clarkson hired a bus/coach for himself to make a point.

see the Association of British Drivers for more info on the present governments anti-car crusade. And this is when it is cheaper for a family of four to travel from London to Liverpool (for example) by car than to (attempt) to go by train. The tories had enough faults of their own but were less restrictive on personal freedoms, and they didn't believe that everyone lives in big towns.

Yes I am paranoid. But 'they' may be out to get all of us.

People may find the Association of British Drivers interesting. I'm too lazy to post what it is about, check it out yourself :-)

> The bill is sent to the owner of the car
Actually, no. It's sent to "the registered keeper" which may or may not be the owner. There is no centralised registery of ownership in the UK.

> This has been used a number of times, and has been upheld in a court of law on several occasions (due to the UKs abysmal online record keeping, i cant find a link).
The reason you can't find a link is because this defence has not, in fact, been upheld. Indeed, a magistrate's court cannot aquit based on this (due to a decision in a higher court). There is, however, a possibility that you may _at a later date_ be able to get such a conviction overturned. Try Association of British Drivers for more info on this. It turns out that if the registered keeper fails to provide the requested information, they can get prosecuted for the offence anyway.

Unfortunately, many (not all) cameras are placed in places with ridiculously low speed limits, so many people spend more time looking out for cameras than keeping an eye on the road ahead. Anyone who holds a driving license in the UK will know this.

Btw, head over to ABD (assoc. of British drivers) to join the fight against hidden speed cameras, and speed limits based on political correctness. The ABD campaigns for increased driver education, rather than anti-driver legislation.

Hear, hear. That's exactly how it will be done; the devices will be introduced first voluntarily ("fit one of these and get cheaper car insurance!"). Then they will be made compulsory, with the usual bleating of "what about the chilllldreen?".
These will be accompanied by the usual misrepresentation of the accident statistics by the anti-mobility lobby. OK, we may not see *this* technology implemented, but something similar is going to happen, and this is how it will be done.
UK drivers, join the Association of British Drivers (which I do not speak for, but am a member of.)