To: The North Carolina State House, The North Carolina State Senate, and Governor Roy Cooper
Safer Highway Speed Limits - Grow Up & Stop Stealing Our Lunch Money.
Speed laws are old. Cars are advanced beyond these falsely low speed limits, which cause INATTENTIVE driving. Inattentive driving is the top 5 major causes of accidents. SAFER laws are SMARTER laws; Falsely Low, Old speed limits CAUSE ACCIDENTS.
Why is this important?
OLD speed laws CAUSE inattentive driving, which accounts for 45%+ cause of accidents. Speeding only accounts for 3%.
SAFER driving means a velocity which keeps drivers attentive and aware. A falsely low speed limit (30+ years old) while using advanced vehicles (ABS, impact warnings, better tires, handling, braking) CAUSES MORE ACCIDENTS.
Excessive Highway Patrol CAUSES SLOWDOWNS and DANGEROUS conditions on highways via 1 citation at rush hour causing STOPPED traffic in both highway lanes. Highway Patrol causes 7 accidents/week in NC alone.
Work Smart, Not Hard. Our driving speed laws need a higher acceptable velocity to keep drivers more safe.
References:
http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/26/2627.asp
http://www.carbibles.com/speeding_facts.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1061808/Speeding-drivers-cause-3-car-accidents-figures-reveal.html
http://abc11.com/archive/7450495/ (Highway Patrol)
IS SPEED A CONTRIBUTING FACTOR IN MOST ROAD ACCIDENTS? TRL323
The short and politically incorrect answer is no, and here's why. TRL Report 323 entitled "A new system for recording contributary factors in road accidents" was a joint project between the TRL and the DETR (Department of Environment, Transport and Regions). It was designed to give true figures for the real causes of accidents taken across 8 representative police forces over 6 months in the summer of 1996. They devised a system based on two main categories: what went wrong, and why? Each of those is divided into subcategories such as failures of the driver or rider, failures of pedestrians etc. The report is a fascinating read for someone like me who has a website to maintain, but could be incredibly dull to most people. So to cut to the chase, there's two sections of information we need to look at.
1. Overall incidence of contributary factors
This is a categorised list of all the factors in the report which could contribute to but not necessarily cause an accident. I've reproduced the top 5 items from the report here:
All factors involved in accident Definite factors involved in accident
Description Number % Number %
Failure to judge other person's path or speed 623 10.7% 218 10.3%
Behaviour - carelessness / thoughtlessness / recklessness 513 8.8% 210 10%
Inattention 465 8% 130 6.2%
Looked but did not see 436 7.5% 149 7.1%
Excessive speed 424 7.3% 126 6%
What this means is that in 7.3% of the accidents, speed was one of many factors, and in only 6% of the accidents was it a definite causal factor. Look at the top 4 factors and you'll see that they can generally be categorised as the old police adage of "driving without due care and attention." More to the point, if you take into account "loss of control" accidents (which covers a multitude of sins including wheels coming off the vehicle, black ice, etc) then according to the report, only 4% of all accidents are caused by loss of control of the vehicle with excessive speed as the primary contributing factor.