Should car accidents have more prominent reporting?

61653 HTAFC said:

Just for clarity, are you suggesting that we have different speed limits depending on how "qualified" a driver is? So for example you're allowed to do 80 on a motorway if you've gone through the IAM course?
How would you enforce that? Sounds like it's just an extra layer of complication and paperwork for traffic cops to deal with.
Having two otherwise identical vehicles with different speed limits due to the person behind the wheel sounds absurd and difficult to enforce.

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Yes (although I'd have something better than IAM).

You could easily enforce it the same way that those who just passed their test have lower speed limits enforced on the Isle of Man or Island of Ireland - R plates (although a different letter, or perhaps the Prince symbol)

It's totally unworkable to have a subset of road users who can ignore the posted speed limit, and not a good idea anyway. Speed is a risk factor in collisions - I would feel competent and confident doing 40 in many 30s but that doesn't make it a good idea if I hit a pedestrian through no fault of my own. Doing 100 on the motorway is fine until some dodder doing 62 needs to overtake a lorry and doesn't look properly.

I have found a 2024 gov.uk publication which states that Great Britain (as indicated there rather than UK) has been tied the fourth safest with Denmark, both having 24 road deaths per million people with Japan and Luxembourg not further behind at 26 and 27 respectively. The info can be found under 'Chart 13'.

Country	Road fatalities per million population
Norway	16
Sweden	20
Malta	21
Great Britain	24
Denmark	24
Japan	26
Luxembourg	27
Switzerland	28
Finland	31
Slovenia	32
Irish Republic	32
Germany	33
Northern Ireland	36
Spain	36
Netherlands	38
Austria	38
Belgium	40
Lithuania	42
Cyprus	42
Israel	44
Czech Republic	45
Australia	48
France	48
Slovakia	48
Estonia	50
Italy	51
Poland	52
Hungary	52
New Zealand	55
Portugal	60
Latvia	60
Croatia	62
Greece	64
Bulgaria	74
Romania	77
Serbia	78

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Egg Centric said:

Yes (although I'd have something better than IAM).

You could easily enforce it the same way that those who just passed their test have lower speed limits enforced on the Isle of Man or Island of Ireland - R plates (although a different letter, or perhaps the Prince symbol)

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Having a defining plate only works if the car is only ever driven by a sole driver, wouldn't work if there's others driving it.

Especially if there's a highly qualified driver with a learner driver in the household using the same car.

The Ham said:

Having a defining plate only works if the car is only ever driven by a sole driver, wouldn't work if there's others driving it.

Especially if there's a highly qualified driver with a learner driver in the household using the same car.

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It could work exactly the same as R plates (or if you're not familiar with them, L plates) - a simple magnetic thing that takes seconds to apply or disapply. Do L plates cause loads of difficulty? (Rhetorical question)

Egg Centric said:

It could work exactly the same as R plates (or if you're not familiar with them, L plates) - a simple magnetic thing that takes seconds to apply or disapply. Do L plates cause loads of difficulty? (Rhetorical question)

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The thing with L plates is that they can be left on a vehicle with limited legal consequences.

If such plates were inadvertently left on it could allow drivers who weren't entitled to do so to get away with speeding (as the vast majority of speeding is detected by cameras).

The main issue with L plates is a driver may be stopped for driving on a motorway when they have a full license or a young driver stopped when driving on their own (for example a 19 year old and a 17 year old driver the same car on a household) but there's two difference.

Firstly these are almost entirely enforced in person and a simple conversation and presenting the valid license with the police officer would clear up the matter.

Secondly, whilst not a presumption of guilt, the starting point is one of it appears that this driver is doing something they shouldn't. That's quite different from assuming that they are entitled to go faster.

Unless we move to speed cameras which take an image of the driver and they then need to provide their exemption documents and all the administration costs which go with that (which would likely require the financial cost for speeding to increase to offset those costs, or those exempt having to pay an admin fee, but avoiding the points on their license).

In addition, given that such an advantage is likely to be limited to higher speed roads and therefore of very limited benefit to most people who could benefit from it (a significant amount of roads by distance which have a 60 limit are not suitable to actually be driven at that speed, either due to the fact there's potential to encounter a pedestrian and/or there's bends on single track roads), whicj would primarily limit the advantage to the trunk road network.

Even then the saving from 80mph over 70mph would be 6.5 seconds per mile. As such a driver would need a clear road of around 45 miles to save 5 minutes. Given that the vast majority wouldn't even have an extra qualification as basic as Pass Plus and just how busy our roads are, few would be able to get that sort of saving on a journey of less than an hour.

As such in practice it's unlikely to be unworkable in practice.

Egg Centric said:

It could work exactly the same as R plates (or if you're not familiar with them, L plates) - a simple magnetic thing that takes seconds to apply or disapply. Do L plates cause loads of difficulty? (Rhetorical question)

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What is to stop anyone putting on the plate and driving faster?

GB said:

What is to stop anyone putting on the plate and driving faster?

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The same things which stops being table their R plates off in Northern Ireland and driving faster

The Ham said:

Even then the saving from 80mph over 70mph would be 6.5 seconds per mile. As such a driver would need a clear road of around 45 miles to save 5 minutes. Given that the vast majority wouldn't even have an extra qualification as basic as Pass Plus and just how busy our roads are, few would be able to get that sort of saving on a journey of less than an hour.

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No one's going to do this hypothetical scheme so that they can legally drive at 80mph (they may do it to improve their driving with no intention of going quicker than the limits, but that's a different thing)! The point would be to be doing 150mph+ where appropriate.

It is of course true that there are diminishing returns with every extra 10mph, but on a long distance journey on decent roads you'd certainly be getting useful ones up to 200mph at least.

There's also myriad other advantages like being able to exceed the limit to overtake, which suddenly makes a lot more 55mph dawdler overtakes plausible. Not to mention just being taught to overtake - this is something that the IAM or whatever currently can teach you but there'd be more incentive for drivers to actually learn it; you rarely see a proper roadcraft style overtake out on the roads*, a tailgate lunge and hope style seems to be far more common.

The German car industry has benefited a lot from the autobahn and how it's ended up with cars that are completely effortless and drama free at speeds that provoke a lot of pearl clutching in this country; if we were to join them there along with other stuff to encourage the EV industry (which has trickier problems at a sustained genuinely high speed for any distance at the moment as you'll give back everything saved in extra charging) it would be good for us. Will never happen of course, as neither will my dreams of massive motorways everywhere, bringing back the London ringways, etc etc... but that is what it is.


*Here's a beautiful example of how to overtake properly by a trained driver, called by the author "worst overtake I've ever seen", which just goes to show how little understanding most drivers have and also how annoying dashcam warriors are:

Egg Centric said:

*Here's a beautiful example of how to overtake properly by a trained driver, called by the author "worst overtake I've ever seen", which just goes to show how little understanding most drivers have and also how annoying dashcam warriors are:

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Not the worst I've seen by a long streak, however if that maneuver was undertaken in a driving test it would be an automatic fail as there was no indicator signaling prior to the lane change, and arguably there was an unnecessarily long period driving in the right hand lane of the carriageway before passing the truck. Don't take my word for it. See items 2 and 9

rangersac said:

Not the worst I've seen by a long streak, however if that maneuver was undertaken in a driving test it would be an automatic fail as there was no indicator signaling prior to the lane change, and arguably there was an unnecessarily long period driving in the right hand lane of the carriageway before passing the truck. Don't take my word for it. See items 2 and 9

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Well that's fine for "driving test" but it goes to show the difference between basic driving and advanced driving. No indication both as no one would benefit from it and it may give a misleading impression to the driver behind (perhaps correctly sussed as someone who has no clue) who may have otherwise closed the gap between him and the police car. Secondly sitting in the right hand lane for some time to gather information (and to an extent impart it to the lorry in front, perhaps looking for an indication of being seen in their mirrors so that they're not going to cut the right hander) before committing to the overtake rather than lunging for it. It's a totally different level to basic test stuff and wonderful to watch if you understand what's going on.

I'm impressed you've managed to deduce all that from a 25 second one angle video. And I wish you the best of luck if you get pulled over in a similar scenario using the defense "Sorry officer, I didn't follow the lawful highway code road rules because I am an advanced driver and understand what's going on"

Egg Centric said:

No one's going to do this hypothetical scheme so that they can legally drive at 80mph (they may do it to improve their driving with no intention of going quicker than the limits, but that's a different thing)! The point would be to be doing 150mph+ where appropriate.

It is of course true that there are diminishing returns with every extra 10mph, but on a long distance journey on decent roads you'd certainly be getting useful ones up to 200mph at least.

There's also myriad other advantages like being able to exceed the limit to overtake, which suddenly makes a lot more 55mph dawdler overtakes plausible. Not to mention just being taught to overtake - this is something that the IAM or whatever currently can teach you but there'd be more incentive for drivers to actually learn it; you rarely see a proper roadcraft style overtake out on the roads*, a tailgate lunge and hope style seems to be far more common.

The German car industry has benefited a lot from the autobahn and how it's ended up with cars that are completely effortless and drama free at speeds that provoke a lot of pearl clutching in this country; if we were to join them there along with other stuff to encourage the EV industry (which has trickier problems at a sustained genuinely high speed for any distance at the moment as you'll give back everything saved in extra charging) it would be good for us. Will never happen of course, as neither will my dreams of massive motorways everywhere, bringing back the London ringways, etc etc... but that is what it is.


*Here's a beautiful example of how to overtake properly by a trained driver, called by the author "worst overtake I've ever seen", which just goes to show how little understanding most drivers have and also how annoying dashcam warriors are:

Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure that wouldn't stand up on an IAM test either. It is indeed a poor overtake. The overtaking vehicle cannot see past that trailer before pulling out. It can make sense to move slightly to the offside of the vehicle in front to get a better view but crossing fully into the lane of opposing traffic when you couldn't see past is a massive risk. Bear in mind that if you're driving to limit points you need to be able to stop in the distance of road you can see to be clear in front of you, but when you're in a lane potentially facing oncoming traffic, such as a single track road or in this case the opposing lane, you need to half that distance to account for any opposing moving vehicles.

They then sit in the offside lane maintaining the same speed as the vehicle in front, don't accelerate quickly enough to make the second phase of the overtake as short as necessary, and it's on a left hand slight bend which is just before a right bend as denoted by the warning sign, so their view will have been limited (perhaps evidenced by the fact that they only just make their overtake in time before colliding with a vehicle coming the opposite direction). Yes, IAM and RoSPA will teach drivers to make progress where they can, but that doesn't look like this.

Interestingly, part of the problem is that they've left their decision making too late by letting themselves get wedged so closely between the cam car driver and the trailer. Lack of driving plan.

And indicators, when there was another road user who could've benefitted.

Reg Local has a good video on overtaking for advanced driving tests:
I think it's right to call the driver out in this example.

That overtake isn't great. Sitting in the right hand lane to make a decision risks a bozo behind deciding "oh well he's gone then" and closing up to the lorry, which would reduce any safe space to suddenly pull back in if required. You always have to drive assuming other drivers are daft and will make a mistake.

Egg Centric said:

No one's going to do this hypothetical scheme so that they can legally drive at 80mph (they may do it to improve their driving with no intention of going quicker than the limits, but that's a different thing)! The point would be to be doing 150mph+ where appropriate.

It is of course true that there are diminishing returns with every extra 10mph, but on a long distance journey on decent roads you'd certainly be getting useful ones up to 200mph at least.

There's also myriad other advantages like being able to exceed the limit to overtake, which suddenly makes a lot more 55mph dawdler overtakes plausible. Not to mention just being taught to overtake - this is something that the IAM or whatever currently can teach you but there'd be more incentive for drivers to actually learn it; you rarely see a proper roadcraft style overtake out on the roads*, a tailgate lunge and hope style seems to be far more common.

The German car industry has benefited a lot from the autobahn and how it's ended up with cars that are completely effortless and drama free at speeds that provoke a lot of pearl clutching in this country; if we were to join them there along with other stuff to encourage the EV industry (which has trickier problems at a sustained genuinely high speed for any distance at the moment as you'll give back everything saved in extra charging) it would be good for us. Will never happen of course, as neither will my dreams of massive motorways everywhere, bringing back the London ringways, etc etc... but that is what it is.


*Here's a beautiful example of how to overtake properly by a trained driver, called by the author "worst overtake I've ever seen", which just goes to show how little understanding most drivers have and also how annoying dashcam warriors are:

Click to expand...

There's no realistic chance of having any driving speed limits of over 100mph.

First up our roads are too busy, there would be so few chances to travel at over 90mph that it's just not worth the change.

The biggest barrier however is likely the fact that other traffic would just not be competent enough to allow for such high speeds to be used.

Don't believe me, how many times have you seen a car on a road with more than one lane per direction not read the road ahead and end up braking behind a lorry. If their driving skill is so poor that they do that for a vehicle with a (say) 15mph speed difference in front and is much larger than them, what's the chances that they'll not notice a smaller vehicle approaching at speed from behind and pull across into their path?

Now to combat that the advanced driver would need to slow down to ensure they have time to react if that were to happen.

As such, even if the road was lightly enough used that there was only traffic in the left lane, for a significant amount of time the advanced driver is going to be gong much closer in speed to the existing limits than the higher speeds.

Likewise at each junction, there's a chance that two cars join and the rear one pulls out after merging to overtake the front vehicle, so again the advanced driver would need to slow down.

It would also only be possible to do so on roads the driver used fairly frequently, as at 120mph they would need to be aware of around 55m of road every second. That includes being aware of changes in camber, debris, surface defects, what's happening 50m in front of the vehicle (1 second away), 100m in front of the vehicle (2 seconds away), 400m in front of the vehicle (highway code stopping distance would be about this far) and over 1km out (20 seconds away).

Even then, the time savings would be fairly limited. Averaging 90mph rather than 70mph would mean a 180 miles of motorway driving (which amounts to a few journeys a year for 0 million drivers) might save around 30 minutes, however that's likely to be on a journey of over 3 hours.

Also I assume that is not a pass once test and you're good for the rest of your time driving, so that's probably 90 minutes every 3 years just for the assessment (could be more depending on journey time to get to the assessment), so overall few withs actually save time.

So that's a load of admin to save 0 million drivers 0 days of time.

The bigger time saving for drivers would be if the number of miles travelled dropped by 10% as that would significantly reduce congestion and most likely onthe journeys they spend the most time doing.

The Ham said:

The bigger time saving for drivers would be if the number of miles travelled dropped by 10% as that would significantly reduce congestion and most likely onthe journeys they spend the most time doing.

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Multiply that if it's HGVs. One of the reasons getting HS2 done matters. Freeing up our roads so people can travel are more consistent speeds on trunk roads and motorways will also reduce emissions.

rangersac said:

I'm impressed you've managed to deduce all that from a 25 second one angle video. And I wish you the best of luck if you get pulled over in a similar scenario using the defense "Sorry officer, I didn't follow the lawful highway code road rules because I am an advanced driver and understand what's going on"

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It's literally a video of highly trained police driver* doing it.

styles said:

Reg Local has a good video on overtaking for advanced driving tests:

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Reg always used to be highly approachable although he doesn't seem to be online so much these days. I'd be much more interested in what he thinks than random uncredentialed posters (or possibly credentialed but hiding it, which is a perfectly reasonable choice but intrinsically comes with a credibility gap. Again the highest trained driver - most likely - out of any of us is the police driver in that video). If you want a more detailed explanation of why I disagree with your post I can provide it but I'm in Greece on holiday atm where frankly any sort of driving lesson at all, even by a drunk toddler, would improve a lot of the locals' driving.

The Ham said:

There's no realistic chance of having any driving speed limits of over 100mph.

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I am well aware of this which is why I don't push hard for it. The only way it happens is some sort of concerted campaign by far more influential people than me! This doesn't mean it would be the wrong thing to do though.

*I mean we don't know this for sure but it's the logical assumption.

Egg Centric said:

It's literally a video of highly trained police driver* doing it.
*I mean we don't know this for sure but it's the logical assumption.

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That's one assumption. The bigger assumption is that because someone is highly trained they don't make poor decisions, which unfortunately is all too often not the case (e.g. Elstow). Anyway, enjoy your holiday and yes watch out for those Greek drivers!

rangersac said:

That's one assumption. The bigger assumption is that because someone is highly trained they don't make poor decisions, which unfortunately is all too often not the case (e.g. Elstow). Anyway, enjoy your holiday and yes watch out for those Greek drivers!

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Sure, but watching the video it makes sense to me (making - yet another assumption - about what the driver was seeing i.e. an opening sweeping left/right hander with gradual revalement of the future road). But yes anyone can make a poor decision, it is what is.If you keep it secret I might confess I have even made poor decisions myself!

Thanks for the good wishes btw - genuinely appreciated, I enjoy we can have civil disagreements about things on this forum without it disintegrating into personal enmities and other nonsense like a lot of the internet...

Egg Centric said:

Thanks for the good wishes btw - genuinely appreciated, I enjoy we can have civil disagreements about things on this forum without it disintegrating into personal enmities and other nonsense like a lot of the internet...

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Why thank you kind sir (I assume!). As a better man than me once said "Disagreement is the most vital ingredient of any decent, civilized, and free society".