Motorists face 60mph speed limit on motorways - Telegraph The sensible option of raising limits to 80 mph fell to political correctness, now we have this rubbish from the EU.
Fail to grasp how it is EU fault? There is plenty of other options UK gov could do before that. Subsides cleaner cars so they get even cheaper, subsides catalytic converters retrofitting, subsides LPG conversion, make it benefitial to not use car at all but rather mass transit (cheaper tickets) or make it benefitial to car-pool. That EU air pollution rule has been in operation for ages how come now it is the problem? Is it because when they had time to deal with it they said f-it it will sort it self and now it is bit to late?
Ah-hah! In fact, strangely interesting post and article for all sorts of reasons. The first reason is Johnv's gut reaction. He sees two things he doesn't like - the EU and speed limits - combines the two and the answer he finds has inevitably got to be worthless. He provides no evidence or thinking for why this idea is rubbish. This is a classic example from the book I am currently reading: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. I hugely recommend this book - it is fascinating if you want to understand how your mind works and the errors it produces. The second reason is that the whole article quoted is a litany of missed opportunities for informing Telegraph readers. There is no analysis, just various stakeholders voicing unsubstantiated points of view. There is a noddy graph of speed limits throughout Europe, but no mention of the correlation, or lack of correlation, between them and road deaths on the motorways per 1'000 km travelled for example. This would have been a very interesting stat. The only soundbite we get is that increasing the national speed limit to 80mph on motorways would result in 18 deaths per year. What is that as a % of total road deaths? Is it a negligible figure? Is it within the bounds of error and uncertainty for the calculation? Someone says the pollution in question is caused by lorries, but no stats are produced to prove this one way or the other, so we have no idea whether it is likely or not. No stats are produced to show what the effect on pollution is from reducing a speed limit of 70mph to one of 60mph. What is the average speed of vehicles along this section? In what way is a car less efficient at 70 mph than 60mph? I'm not implying it's not, I just want to know the maths. I can easily imagine that I am in a minority of people who want to read papers to understand what is going on, not to just be given a load of unsubstantiated partial viewpoints. As papers don't cater for people like me, I don't read them. So this may be more EU bollox but it is definitely more Telegraph bollox and you can substitute pretty much any paper title for "Telegraph".
Look...........I just spent half an hour with my doctor this morning about sorting my medication out................... .........I'm wondering now if I should take any at all............
It'll be good to get to 60mph on that stretch of road. Its currently got average speed cameras on it so the most you can do now is 50pmh. Result!
Stupid clean air. No one needs it, if it weren't for the EU we wouldn't even need to bother about it.
Nothing to do with political correctness, the Tories quietly dropped the 80 mph idea as they thought that it could lose them female votes.
