| Micele |
15 april 2013 10:59 |
Citaat:
Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door Micele
(Bericht 6600873)
Ze gaan idd "snelheid" moeten afschaffen. :roll:
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Als ze al OCMW afschaffen - wie kent die afkorting ? - wegens de negatieve bijklank tja dan kan men best ook het woord snelheid afschaffen, want dat woord wordt gedemoniseerd # (zie link uit .au)... :-) :roll:
Ik zou snelheid veranderen in rijden want zonder snelheid kan men niet rijden. Een roekeloze snelheid of extreem onaangepaste snelheid wordt dan roekeloos rijden, gevaarlijk rijden naargelang omstandigheden ofzo. Gevaarlijk te traag rijden eveneens.
Citaat:
Speed Kills....
But are we really sure...?
Actually, we’re not. Crash data is collected primarily by police, and most often it is general duties officers with no real crash investigation training who attend crashes. Investigation into crash causality is not a high priority for the officers who attend most crashes.
What’s not debatable is that it is very dangerous to drive at a speed excessive to the prevailing conditions, or beyond the driver’s or car’s ability. The determination of ‘excessive speed’ is quite complex, yet it is a decision drivers must consider continuously. It is over-simplistic to suggest that exceeding the posted limit is always ‘excessive’ and that never exceeding the limit isn’t.
The term ‘speed’ has itself become so demonised and semantically promiscuous that its use defies common sense. It is commonly used to mean both ‘speeding’ and ‘excessive speed’, making meaningful debate impossible.
In truth, all crashes are speed related … because cars that are stopped cannot crash. Speed is an intrinsic feature of transport.
Speeding implies driving faster than the posted limit. Whether or not this is actually dangerous depends on many factors, including whether the posted limits are appropriate.
The only term that relates directly to road safety is ‘excessive speed’, which means driving dangerously fast. Our regulators know this, but include in their definitions of ‘excessive speed’ such bizarre phenomena as ‘trucks jacknifing’ (actually caused by brake and steering imbalances, not excessive speed) plus a raft of non-expert opinion that predisposes those at the coalface of crash reporting to nominate ‘excessive speed’ and thus promote current statistical theory.
When the world-renowned British Transport Research Laboratory commissioned research into crash causes that precisely defined what ‘excessive speed’ was, it found in 1999 that only 7.3 per cent* of crashes were caused by it.
Bottom line: Is speed really linked to risk to the degree officially purported? If not, it means drivers should be concentrating on learning about many more variables than just their travelling speed.
It begs an obvious question: Where does the official speed-demonising data come from?
According to road safety researcher Peter Ivanoff, a former NSW police officer (15 years’ service, five years in the highway patrol and three more as a police driving instructor) “speculation, opinion and at best calculated guesswork routinely pass for fact as the cause of crashes”. He says that while in some cases, the ‘how’ of crashes is reasonably well understood, “we do quite poorly when it comes to understanding why they occur”.
This is why cause is so poorly understood in road safety policy. Ivanoff says it’s common for officers to link a crash’s physical outcomes with pre-determined criteria (such as speed) in the absence of conclusive evidence.
This is a convenient process, not an academically robust one. Drivers rarely choose to incriminate themselves, and investigation is not a high police priority at most crashes. The usual police agenda is to restore traffic flow, establish how the crash happened (not ‘why’) and take action against driver(s) deemed responsible.
Even when trained crash investigators turn up, Ivanoff says, a better picture of ‘how’ sometimes emerges, but ‘why’ is often no clearer. Crash investigations are commonly inconclusive. “What often becomes apparent … is the lack of a clear reason why the impact occurred, despite having information that indicates how the crash happened.” This is especially true of fatalities, where human factors (such as driver distraction or underlying mental state, such as anger or fatigue) are often impossible to establish. Ivanoff adds that the highly presumptuous “old chestnut” of reasoning – if the driver had been going slower perhaps the crash could have been avoided – often leads to an expedient determination of excessive speed in the absence of conclusive evidence.
Many cars run off otherwise good roads for no apparent reason. Even the best crash investigators are unable to forensically decompile the crash to the extent that it is possible to determine whether the principal cause was falling asleep, distraction, swerving to avoid an animal and subsequently losing control, or the intent to commit suicide. If a high-energy impact occurs with a rigid roadside object, damage will be significant, and it is very easy to nominate speed as an easy option.
Data from police crash reports is received and ‘processed’ by state regulators, something that occurs, apparently, in secret – at least in the NSW RTA. Ivanoff says the determination of cause by the RTA happens without any reference to the people involved in the crashes or to those who conducted the investigations. “This is a process that forms conclusions about specific causal factors from data that does not provide a basis from which to draw such conclusions,” he adds. “I was particularly keen to study the exact workings of [this process], as well as the roles and qualifications of those involved but unfortunately the RTA refused to participate in my research.
“Experience has shown me that losses of control primarily occur because of a failure on the part of drivers to recognise and respond to hazardous road conditions. Poor judgement, poor risk perception, ignorance of risk, inattention, complacency, poor driver education and unsafe road environments are all more significantly involved as causal factors of road trauma [than] speeding.” Many of these criteria, conveniently, do not even exist as causes to be recorded on any database as far as the RTA and its counterparts are concerned.
Ivanoff says the system is rife with inequity. He claims that while only three per cent of road trauma occurs in 110km/h zones, speed traps in these regions predominate. Why? Authorities claim enforcement is “intelligence driven” but Ivanoff argues the “deployment of mobile speed detection is much more designed around the [convenient] acquisition of targets”.
He adds that the system supports itself. “State governments continue to fund and use statistically derived research to justify their policies of road trauma reduction when clearly, actual results show the research is inaccurate and/or misleading.” In other words, a system pre-disposed to identifying speed as a major contributor to crashes exists. This justifies a regulatory obsession with speed that leads to greater speed-related enforcement initiatives when perhaps better road safety solutions exist, such as public education about risk management or roadcraft. Certainly there is no ‘church and state’ style separation of research and enforcement policy. One hand feeds the other.
Even when short-term road-death reductions take place, the regulators are quick to claim all the glory. No control is made, nor credit given, for economic factors, better vehicle safety technology, improved roads or more effective medical treatment. In these situations politicians like to claim it is they alone who are ‘winning the battle’ by ‘getting tough’ on drivers.
http://www.privatefleet.com.au/links...s/Speed-kills/
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* in Nederland - alle wegen - zelfs maar 3,5 % (gemiddelde van 1999-2000-2001) geregistreerd onder toedracht "te snel rijden". Op de NL snelweg ca. 1-2 % (waar vele vtg nooit de limiet kunnen halen), bronnen van de overheid kan ik citeren ;-) |
