Well, full marks for trying, I guess. Ross Clark – a columnist whom I enjoy reading – argues that the fuss about proposals to reduce certain speed limits on UK roads are unwarranted. This is his argument:
It didn’t take long for the militant motorists’ lobby to get into gear to attack the Government’s proposal to reduce the national speed limit from 60mph to 50mph.
That’s true.
To lop 10 mph off the speed limit on country lanes, apparently, is tantamount to declaring a fascist dictatorship. “These corporate Nazi New Labour bastards are intent on turning law-abiding citizens into criminals,” began one of hundreds of angry posts on the website of a prominent motorists’ pressure group yesterday – before, bizarrely, imploring his fellow petrolheads to vote for the British National Party.
A classic bait and switch. For sure, some opponents of speed limits might like to clam they are the equivalent of bringing back the Gulag, but for most of us who do not see the logic of ever more draconian controls on the car, the case can be made without invoking images of Soviet Russia or Hitler’s Germany.
That the leaders of the motorists’ lobby are not quite the defenders of liberty they often profess to be is obvious from reading their output over the years. They have never been slow to demand the prosecution of cyclists, jaywalking pedestrians and motorists who drive too slowly or in any other fashion that impedes their progress.
That has probably something to do with the fact that a lot of pedestrians and cyclists do not think the highway codes in countries such as the UK applies to them. But he does make a fair point, but so what? Just because some motorists are hypocrits does not undermine the broader point.
Unfortunately, Mr Clark descends into nonsense:
The assertion that tighter motoring law is tantamount to dictatorship is further confused by a paradox. The world’s most illiberal regimes happen to have some of the most anarchic and dangerous of roads, while the most liberal nations tend to have the strictest traffic enforcement and safest roads. For all the conspiracy theories, Morgan Tsvangirai now says that the car crash that tragically killed his wife on Friday was an accident. It shouldn’t come as a surprise: reporters who have used the road between Harare and Beitbridge paint a terrifying picture of speeding, overloaded lorries and complete lawlessness – this in a country where if you criticise the President you can expect a rapid visit from Robert Mugabe’s thugs.
He’s right that consistently enforced rules of the road are hardly the same as political oppression, forced labour or torture. Of course. Rules of the road are a bit like etiquette: if consistently followed, it helps us all to rub along, which in a small island like the UK is not a trivial matter. But Mr Clark needs to think this through. Take countries such as post-war Germany or France, with their excellent motorways. Speed limits are, and can be, quicker than in the UK and in the case of Germany, some of their autobahns have had no limits at all (this may have changed, I’ll have to check). When that fella with the silly moustache was in power, the autobahns got built, and the quality of driving in Germany is, in my experience, high. But that example, when set against the chaos of Zimbabwe, proves little. In India, which is a democracy and fairly free place, the driving is absolutely terrible. There’s no correlation between oppression and driving like Jeremy Clarkson on crack. None.
Local authorities would love to reduce speed limits on a great number of roads, but they are hampered by bureaucracy. Whenever they want to designate a limit on a rural road lower than the default 60mph they must justify it through accident statistics. It may be obvious that motorists are driving too fast on a stretch of road, but a council must wait for the required number of people to be killed or injured before it can take any action. And even when, finally, sufficient coffins have been filled to justify a speed limit on a rural road, it remains legal to drive along surrounding lanes at 60mph, giving reckless motorists an incentive to divert on to even more dangerous rat-runs.
Well obviously, if we had privately owned roads, rather than roads run by bureaucrats, then speed limits would be dealt with without the need for all this sort of wrangling. This is, by the way, a powerful argument for privately owned roads.
The only problem is that the proposal does not go far enough. Many country roads are no more than cart tracks covered with tarmac, where 50mph is still far too fast.
Match the speed to the conditions – that is a sensible principle. But if that is the case, that does rather mess up the idea of blanket speed limits in the first place, unless one is going to adopt a sort of “if in doubt, walk” approach to getting from A to B.
And Mr Clark makes no reference whatever to the glaringly obvious fact that the profusion of speed cameras is, and has been, driven in part by a desire to raise revenue. Now, if roads were privately owned and the driver, as consumer, knowingly signs up to the deal, that would not be an infringement of liberty. But as things stand, the obsession with restricting use of the car is all of a broader assault on these machines, for ideological and environmentalist reasons. And the proposal to cut speed limits comes across, at a time like this, as just another, petty little squeeze on private citizens and their desire to get around relatively quickly. It has nothing to do with a yobbish desire to drive as fast as one likes and damn the results.
Notwithstanding traffic congestion – which private road ownership would help solve – the car is a symbol of freedom for millions. Mr Clark, who has written brilliantly about the assaults on freedoms in this country, should focus his ire elsewhere.
Pro-car rants don’t show libertarianism in its best light. There need to be plenty of rules and regulations about how someone hurtles about in a ton of metal at high speed in confined public spaces. We don’t want such people chatting on the phone for example, or swigging form a bottle of beer.
As for the revenue raising capabilites of speed cameras all I can say is that I frequently drive in an area of the country that has at least its fair share of these gadgets and they haven’t raised any revenue from me. As a sppeding fine is essentially a voluntary donation of funds to the government I don’t se why we need worry about those who choose to make such payments.
May be worth a read
http://www.abd.org.uk/jjleeming.htm
Pete, read what I wrote rather than what you imagine I wrote. Nowhere did I say that speeding isn’t a problem, or that rules are not needed. I attacked Mr Clark’s proposal for a blanket reduction in a speed limit and contested his rather bizarre logic about how oppressive regimes have terrible driving.
Not sure that private roads would help, actually.
The M6 toll road around Birmingham is privately-owned, but guess what, its speed limit is the same as everywhere else, and is enforced by the very same plod, in the very same capricious and arbitrary way.
Looks like the Statists got there before us, again.
Andrew, well it plainly is not entirely privately owned but still comes under the regulation of the state. Not quite what I had in mind.
Deaths on the road come from bad driving not fast driving. There are plenty of country roads where speeds far higher than the limit would be perfectly safe. That is not justification for insisting all country roads get a much higher speed limit. That logic is just as false the other way.
Drivers should be driving to suit the conditions and know the signals that are already on the roads that signify dangerous roads. They shouldn’t need lower and lower limits.
Essentially you can boil it down to one of two positions:
1) Blanket 60mph with sensible lower exceptions.
2) Blanket 50mph with sensible higher exceptions.
Option 1 requires councils and highways authorities to justify reductions in speed limits. This is costly. Nannying the speed downwards becomes expensive. Option 2 would require councils and highways authorities to expend money where they wanted a higher limit, which they by and large probably won’t. Nannying the speed downwards becomes cheap.
It won’t reduce road deaths due to bad driving.
In our most recently acquired car, there is a well designed cruise control that I find useful. When in a lowish speedlimit (50mph or below), I often set it to the speedlimit. This is to prevent me from inadvertently breaking the speedlimit.
Very interestingly, I notice two particular things. Firstly, there are large expanses of road where it would be safe, often by a large margin, to drive at a higher speed. Secondly, and most importantly, there are portions of road where, in my judgement, it is not safe to drive even as fast as the speedlimit. The reason for the latter is, most usually, lack of forward visibility of hazards.
I am thus highly sceptical of the true benefit of average speed cameras (except for the manufacturers). It is far more important to drive no faster than the right speed for a particular section of road.
Driving well is a matter of training and judgement and both of these are improved by experience. In fact (as I have just lectured my youngest as she acquired her first driving licence), driving is the most dangerous and responsible thing that nearly everyone does; and every driver should never, for a moment, forget that.
By removing a major aspect of that responsibility from drivers all of the time, many drivers will fail to remember that safety is their responsibility; an even greater number will fail to acquire the experience necessary for the occasional bad driving conditions that they will come across.
The current obsession of government with technology is a great disappointment to me. They seem to think that blanket regulation is a substitute for judgement. It is not a substitute for the judgement of drivers. Nor is such blanket technology a substitute for the judgement of the police etc, for enforcement of traffic regulations (nor for other aspects of life).
By concentrating on using technology to enforce what technology can enforce, society weakens the ability to enforce that which is necessary for society to enforce.
In similar vein, especially in the UK, we dragoon our children into an educational system where personal excellence is taught out: this is by setting expectations to be the same and low for everyone so that everyone may feel ‘equal’ in society. More importantly, on both inappropriate use of technology and failure to encourage our children to strive to do their best, society risks losing the ability to do that which should be allowed: to be free and able to improve self (and so society). Without this implicit permission, societal evolution will stagnate: and we will all end up poorer than otherwise would be the case. Though many may think I go too far in equating low speedlimits to educational dumbing down, I must disagree. The causes are closely related: firstly a belief that there is no limit to how closely society may be brought to ‘perfection’; secondly, a naive analysis of both the problems and potential solutions.
Returning to road speedlimits, and as I have written before, setting too low a speedlimit on (especially) open roads brings the whole concept of speedlimits into disrepute. Thus those speedlimits that do matter, eg in built-up areas with high densities of pedestrians and road junctions, are devalued.
The only ‘safe’ road is one where all the vehicles are stationary. Any other speedlimit requires a properly thought out and presented cost benefit analysis.
Much more was written on the front page of the Sunday Times. This struck me as raising several issues of fallacious thinking. Firstly, it was bemoaned that the UK’s ranking in road safety had dropped from first to sixth in Europe; what stupidity: surely we should be delighted that the Dutch, the Swedes and others are not killing themselves in quite such numbers. Secondly, no account was taken of other causation of the UK’s road accident statistics (for instance population increases and vehicle increases). In fact, over the last few years, the UK has had a poor record of improving roads to motorway or similar standards as traffic increases. This fails us as motorways have around one third of the death rate per vehicle mile than do other out-of-town roads and might explain some of the drop in ranking. Thirdly, we have a problem with driving on the left, as there is an increase in European traffic with left-hand drive, particularly goods vehicles for which there is a well-known problem with high numbers of accidents arising from ‘right-side swiping’, caused by pulling out when the road is not clear. Fourthly, most improvements in road safety come from better roads, better vehicles and better in-vehicle safety devices; open road speedlimits are a much lesser factor. Fifthly, I notice many open-road sections are having their streetlights turned off, presumably as a cost saving. Not only is this a danger where there is less illumination; it also increases wear on drivers, reducing their ability to drive safely for the rest of their journey, even on other portions of road. Finally, accidents are significantly affected by bad weather (which has been on the increase over the last decade): government statistics do not properly take this into account, allow presentation of more recent accident rates as worse than they really are.
There are, ultimately, two important aspects that should be relied upon much more than speedlimits: (i) can the driver see and interpret the vast majority of potential hazards; (ii) can the vehicle be brought safely to a halt before collision with any potential hazard that becomes an actual danger.
Put more simply: drive within your stopping distance. Any speedlimit that requires significantly more than this is over-zealous, a distraction and so foolhardy regulation. Any average speed enforcement at or below current UK speedlimit levels, outside of built-up areas or specific (mostly short) sections of open road, is IMHO unlikely to avoid these criticisms.
Best regards
The only problem is that the proposal does not go far enough. Many country roads are no more than cart tracks covered with tarmac, where 50mph is still far too fast.
This stuff is driving me bloody crazy – does the new speed limit need to be variable in case of rain, fog, sleet, snow- it can make a road best driven at 50 one that’s best driven at 20. If not why not?
Why the hell do we need someone to set an ‘appropriate’ speed limit for every road? And why is everyone assuming that the people who are crashing and dying are doing so at the current limit of 60? And that reducing that to 50 (whether enforced or not) would address the problem?
Every single car in the UK is driven by a human being – with a brain – who should at least have been trained in how to drive the vehicle their operating. Therefore they should be more than capable of adjusting their speed appropriately.
typical Government spin – the chap talked about road kill but threw in carbon emissions for good measure. If he says it is going to save lives then how can we reasonably oppose him. The fact that it won’t is buried in the small print.
BTW a private road (e.g M6Toll) is only subject to the same rules as public roads because the owners allow it. I’m guessing it was either a condition of the contract or they were spooked by the health and safety wallahs
It hasn’t, as long as there is no sign saying otherwise, you are still allowed to drive as fast as you want on our “Autobahnen” (I live in Germany, near Stuttgart). Every once in a while politicians discuss introducing a general limit of 130 km/h (about 80 mph if I’m not mistaken, which is the advised maximum speed even when there is no binding limit), but I’m pretty sure this won’t happen anytime soon.
I think the judge of a speed limit would be if people are expected to follow it, or is it expected that most people will break it. If they really wanted everyone to go 50mph for safety they would get a couple of police cars to go 50mph side-by-side across all lanes.
I don’t think the authorities would want everyone to follow the speed limit. In the United States I can’t imagine what would happen if everyone at rush hour drove the speed limit. Colossal traffic jams, reduced productivity… it would be a mess.
My guess is that Ross Clark doesn’t do a lot of driving. When someone spouts crap like that, it’s usually the case.
(Case in point: Andrew Sullivan whining about how everyone should just stop driving, when he himself lives in Manhattan and doesn’t need a car to get around.)
Road deaths are at an all time low again at around 2,500 per year for 2008, down from 2,940 in 2007.
http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/statistics/datatablespublications/accidents/rcgbq32008
If road deaths were increasing year on year, then there would clearly be a case for tightening up speed limits and the various driving restrictions.
But they’re not increasing, so surely driving should be less restricted.
Watch the serial comma in “political oppression, forced labour or torture.” An extra comma never hurts but leaving it out can sometimes be painful as in “I’d like to thank my parents, Sarah and God.”
[every thread needs a grammar nazi]
Aside, in the US marketing folks never use the final comma. Regular folks do. Just convention, no good reason.
Which is quite how it should be – the argument is about safety, is it not?
Lowering the limit completely arbitrarily will lead to more people determinedly pottering along at 49mph, looking at their speedometers rather than the road, causing frustration in other drivers and unsafe overtaking.
If all the new speed cameras we already have were having a beneficial effect on safety, surely the accident rate should be going down, not up.
California Basic Speed Law:
22350. No person shall drive a vehicle upon a highway at a speed greater than is reasonable or prudent having due regard for weather, visibility, the traffic on, and the surface and width of, the highway, and in no event at a speed which endangers the safety of persons or property.
One of the few CA laws that anyone can respect (and damn well better follow). Also, generally speaking, posted speed limits are supposed to be derived from a survey of actual traffic, and then set at the (IIRC) 85% speed from the survey. It used to be a defense to a speeding citation if one could demonstrate that this rule had not been followed.
I am frustrated with the furious defence some ‘road-libertarians’ give when their freedoms are reduced. It’s for the same reason all the energy expended opposing computer chips on wheelie-bins made me sigh uncontrollably: why are so many people roused like this only over relatively trivial issues? I’m not accusing you of that, Jonathan, but for a lot of people these are the only times you’ll hear them even suggest they are oppressed.
“
I can’t cite the UK equivalent, but isn’t that the case here?
Ten minutes observation on any reasonably busy road will rapidly demonstrate that a very high proportion of those driving are not safe to do so. Tailgating, driving too fast for the conditions, no lights, defective lights, lack of control of the vehicle, braking for no good reason…
The 85% requirement might have been that imposed by the federal Manual of Uniform Traffic-Safety Control Devices, which applies to federal highways, and, by state law/regulation, to state highways and perhaps other roads. Reckless driving is an offense distinct from its speeding criterion. I once had an incompetent young cop give me a ticket (which I beat) for speeding, when I merely had been violating a poorly-set caution sign.
I would suppose that reckless-driving laws are there for liability purposes and for clear-cut violations, not for cops that are having a bad day or career.
I don’t recall having seen minimum-speed laws lately, but IMHO driving too slowly is more likely to be reckless than driving too quickly — at least without flashers on.
Speed limits, if any, should be set by the owner of the road – and this owner should certainly not be the government.
The government road system has had many bad effects.
If people want big roads let them pay for them – by turnpike trust or in some other nongovernment way.
And no theft of land to build them either – if someone says “you can not have my bit of land for any price” that should be the end of the matter.
If you do not feel like building round him – then forget it.
Paul Marks makes a familiar comment: “… if someone says “you can not have my bit of land for any price” that should be the end of the matter.”
I live in Minnesota, where we have had a lot of hooha about routing powerlines through farming territory. My position on those is similar to Paul’s – but with a difference. If they don’t want a powerline on their land, that’s their choice. So the power company won’t build one.
The power company will, however, disconnect said farmer from the grid. Let him live with the consequences of his action.
Johnathan
Thanks for blogging on that. I was surprised to see so little libertarian comment on the subject.
I’ve posted a piece on the LPUK blog(Link) which makes some of the useful points that have been made by commentators on this thread.
Dr. Ellen:
Where is the difference? Isn’t it obvious that if someone would not allow a power line on their land, they would not be able to get power? There is no problem with this if the power company is private. Same with roads.
Notwithstanding traffic congestion – which private road ownership would help solve
What tripe. Ever seen the motorways in France over the summer?
Alisa – To me, the difference is active vs. passive. Saying “no” to a road taking your land (even with payment) still leaves you able to use other nearby roads. I’m saying “we all like to use electricity. If you won’t help, we’ll take the electricity and go away.” It’s the difference between being unable to use the new road, and being unable to use any road, even the ones you’re accustomed to.
Let the landowner go back to windmills and batteries; cooperation is a two-way street. (And I will note that the Amish have shown that having no electricity on a farm is not cruel and unusual punishment.)
Ellen, sorry, but I have no idea what your point is. Of course cooperation is a two way street – it goes without saying. How does the word “punishment” come into it, I have no idea either, unless, again, we are talking about government, not private companies. If I own a road company, and you won’t let me run a road over your property, I can either threaten to block you from using my other roads (hardly a punishment, just one of the several business decisions available to me), or I can decide that your use of my other roads is way to profitable for me to forgo (maybe I run a trucking company?). Chances are, if we both are reasonable enough, we’ll find a way to compromise. Whoever is more reasonable, loses out more. Every decision in life carries a price tag. Where is the problem?
I meant you run a trucking company, of course.
And, whoever is more reasonable loses out less. I should be reasonable enough now to close this damn computer and go to bed.
For a courier company slower speeds cost money. Having drivers do 50mph instead of 60mph could easily be like giving each one an extra two weeks holiday per year.
So the problem here is that speed limits are over-regulated – the level of government that owns, maintains, and polices a given section of road has to wade through a mountain of red tape to change the speed limit to a reasonable one, and this bureaucracy is preventing them from keeping roads set to safe limits. The solution being proposed is to have just as much needless bureaucracy, but from a slightly different starting point.
I’m not even going to get into libertarian arguments for private roads, I’ll just make an argument that even a lot of socialists could agree with. If the local government owns the road, the local government sets the speed limit as they see fit. Maybe the feds impose some limits – nothing below 25 MPH or above 60, say – but other than that, let them run their own roads. More local input, less wasted effort on doing the same thing three times, and safer roads because the speed limits can be set properly. You know, the way most countries do it.
The reason is that such things affect many ordinary people personally, in ways that immediately brings home what state controls mean. I accept that these examples can be shown to be relatively “trivial”; and of course a lot of the time, this blog tends to focus on bigger, much more encompassing threats. Now and again, though, it is important to highlight the prosaic encroachments of the nanny-state. One of the reasons why I focus on this stuff from time to time is that Middle England – to use that rather crude term – has to be motivated against this stuff; to reach that demographic, you need to reach the sort of guy that watches Top Gear rather than reads Reason Magazine.
And without sounding juvenile about it, I like cars.
, writes someone who disagrees with the idea that private road ownership can fix some of these issues.
Well, I have driven on them at that time of year and yes, there is sometimes big congestion. The tolls should go up during the peak times to encourage people to use the roads at different times, maybe. That is how a fully privately owned road network would work.
Voila!
You should see the buggers here in Costa Rica. Most liberal country in Latin America, and one of the wealthiest, and they all drive like they were possessed by the shades of Dick Dastardly and Penelope Pitstop.
Well put Nigel,
“(ii) can the vehicle be brought safely to a halt before collision with any potential hazard that becomes an actual danger.”
isnt the answer to this more often a Yes when travelling at lower speeds?
I wonder if Mr Clarke has ever spent much time driving on those cart tracks covered with tarmac? The speed limit is 60mph, but there is no reason to lower it because nobody would try driving even that fast in the first place. Doesn’t he realise that people can actually make rational decisions for themselves rather than having to rely on the Word handed down from on high?
Explain to me what is “daft”, Fred, about opposing a blanket reduction in speed limits? Rather than cast out insults, give an argument. The floor is yours.
And Peter was talking only half-sense. Of course one needs rules of the road; the point is how strict they should be and whether we reach the level where the rules are clearly designed to restrict or even stop people from driving at all. What next: fines or scratching your nose while driving?
Roy responds at March 11, 2009 06:47 PM to my comment at March 10, 2009 02:30 PM:
Roy’s response is so short that it might easily by misinterpreted. However, I currently take it as argument against my point and in favour of lower speedlimits.
The problem is that Roy’s argument favours any speedlimit below the safe speed for the portion of road, even down to zero. This is, as far as I can see, the (illogical) view of many people, including those in government proposing the current change. It is the well known excess of (the current interpretation of) the precautionary principle: if there is any involved risk, no matter how small, more restrictive measures are justified, no matter how draconian.
In my view, a speedlimit on non-urban roads is justified if there is no significant portion of that road, for no significant time, by no significant type of vehicle, by no significant competence of driver, under no significant conditions of light, weather, other traffic, etc at which a greater speed can be driven without being outside one’s stopping distance.
Do not forget that every restriction of normal human behaviour does have a cost: with speedlimits set too low, it is unnecessarily slower journey times. Also, by restricting the possibility to overtake where it is safe, there is potential for increased frustration, leading to more overtaking where it is less safe, which itself will lead to more accidents.
What we currently have on a great many out-of-town single lane roads is lower speedlimits than that outlined above. The current proposal is for an even more draconian limitation: the assumption being that every road is too dangerous above 50mph unless a special exception is made; this is rather than the speedlimit being set for those roads at the time of building, or having changed, eg by extra sideroads or urbanisation.
This setting of blanket restrictions is, from what I see, an increasingly common aspect of government: particularly in the UK since the New Labour Government came to power, and also by EU government. It is not dissimilar to the restrictions placed on hand-baggage for passenger aircraft: all scissors are forbidden because scissors could be lethal weapons in the hands of terrorists. No drinks (above 100ml) are allowed because bombs can be disguised as drinks (though this is usually only done by bombers). Likewise with care of children: no teacher or carer may comfort a child because the necessary touching is also a part of sexual assault.
In all these cases, normal behaviour is criminalised because there are some criminals whose behaviour is ‘too similar’ for law enforcement or government to differentiate. Is that not a case of incompetent or lazy government, or of government not willing to tolerate its inability to achieve the impractical.
On roads, don’t forget that part of the stated problem is down to government failing to build sufficient new motorways and dual carriageways: another incompetence, in which their ‘different’ priorities are more important than saving lives.
Best regards
Dr Ellen – I agree.
No one should be forced to sell a product – if the farmer does not want a power line on his land, he does not get power any more. At least not from this company.
If he can convince another company to come along, fine – but if not, also fine.
After all most farmers were not on the grid till after the 1930’s anyway.
Rurual electrification was a government subsidized New Deal program – that was carring on its work decades later.
It makes no economic sense to run a power line hundreds of miles to a few farm buildings (the United States is a big place).
Let them generate power via micro generation.
Dr Ellen – I agree.
No one should be forced to sell a product – if the farmer does not want a power line on his land, he does not get power any more. At least not from this company.
If he can convince another company to come along, fine – but if not, also fine.
After all most farmers were not on the grid till after the 1930’s anyway.
Rurual electrification was a government subsidized New Deal program – that was carring on its work decades later.
It makes no economic sense to run a power line hundreds of miles to a few farm buildings (the United States is a big place).
Let them generate power via micro generation.
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Well I think It all boils down to Personal judgment. If it’s bad weather, slow down. But the problem is most people have bad judgment and regardless of road conditions they will still go fast.. It will never change. A shame…