Soggy and waved at for speeding
Another local lockdown shopping trip blog post. There is a direct "faster" main route from our home to the local motorway. A duel carriageway that links to the local M5 motorway junction. But it's boring and typically gets congested in "rush" hours. We typically use the back roads as they are more technically challenging, while not as fast, speed is not the issue here.
Here is a question, which is safer? When the flow of traffic is maintaining around the 60 MPH posted limit, is it safer to be 4 MPH over? Or 10MPH under?
Teaching someone to ride to test standard, as I have done thousands of times, means making sure they follow the rules. Examiners will take riders to higher speed roads to make sure they can get up to and maintain speeds to the limit. This same duel carriageway is still used to assess car drivers, although the local motorcycle test centre was closed over a decade ago. Most examiners expected to see riders reach speeds at the posted limit, which gives a little leeway for differences in the recorded speed.
We know for example that the speedo on Jaynes SV reads a few MPH higher than mine on my ZRX. So when Jaynes speedo is registering 64 it's going to be close to the actual limit. She was after all trying to catch me up and was slowing down behind me - when this unmarked police car pulled up along side to make hand gestures to slow down.
The behaviour of the vehicle ahead should be noted for context, it is clearly pulling away from Jayne, obviously doing closer to 70 in the 60, but the officer is far more interested in me than telling them off for higher speeds.
This duel is notorious for such activity, an easy hit for crime rate reduction as speeders leaving the motorway to a similar environment, no junctions between roundabouts a mile apart, obviously speeds will creep up, so easy to catch "criminals" from the constant flow of people using the road. Question is how does this contribute to improving safety?
While I am careful here not to share incriminating evidence. I have been stopped ON this same duel, on the way home from a day's training novice riders, for doing 64 in the 60.
When I asked the officers why they had chosen to stop me in a place that put us all and other road users in potential danger, rather than around the corner in a layby, they said they thought I might "try to escape through the traffic", (Guilty until proven innocent?) note evidence of my legally on the bike had already been verified by their PNC computer and as an Instructor I was required to be "a responsible person" in the eyes of the law if I wanted to keep my DVSA Instructor licence.
Now technically such roads are safer than the country lanes, not as much fun, but that's for the same reason. The reason the duels are safer is the lack of interactions. It is the junctions where we will find most accidents happening, the roundabout at the end of this one being notorious for accidents due in part to it's confusing layout that often leads to accidents
( / just-neighbourly-accident-carol-jadzia-bea... ). But the fixation with a dial is a distraction from reality.
"Managers who do not know how to measure what they want settle for wanting what they can measure" Russell Ackoff.
Music:-
"Frame of Mine" by Freedom Trail Studio
"The Hunter" by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...
Artist: http://audionautix.com/