Driving in the UK can be quite a shock when you're used to the roads in the Netherlands. The speed at which people navigate roundabouts can feel terrifying, and the maximum speed in the countryside is something else. Going *60 mph* on narrow roads with limited visibility is just crazy. The locals just speed by. I guess it's just what you're used to.
You're not supposed to drive 60mph on those tiny roads.
Why are they 60mph? Well, the symbol they display doesn't say 60mph, it's basically just a slash symbol - it should be read "National Limit Applies" or perhaps "Derestricted" and it so happens that the law in the UK says that if there's no other rule in place that limit is 60mph and on these tiny roads nobody has put in place a more specific limit so that's the law.
[If there is carriageway separation, e.g. a larger road on which traffic flowing in the opposite direction isn't sharing the same tarmac, this global rule says 70mph, but no tiny roads have multiple carriageways, actually sometimes it feels like there's barely room for one let alone two]
However, just because there isn't a lower limit doesn't mean it's appropriate to drive at 60mph and people who do are generally maniacs. Where I grew up there are lots of these roads, steep, winding, narrow tracks paved in the 19th or 20th centuries for access to a farm here or a cottage there, and maintained by the public. You absolutely might turn a corner and find an entire flock of sheep in the road going "Baa!". If you're doing 60mph after you've killed a bunch of sheep and the bodies start smashing through your windscreen you're probably dead. Sheep don't have lights, don't know about jaywalking laws (which Britain doesn't have anyway) and aren't smart enough to have considered this risk, they're just there and now you're dead. So you drive at maybe 30-40mph on the straight parts, slower on curves and always pay a lot of attention 'cos things can go very bad, very quickly.
Roundabouts are a bit different. The UK has a lot of what are called "mini roundabouts". As a pedestrian, or perhaps on a bicycle these do just look like they're small roundabouts, too small for the island in the middle to have any purpose so it's just paint. But in a vehicle it's apparent that the island can't exist because you'd crash into it, perhaps not in a Mini but certainly in a bin truck or a bus. The mini roundabout isn't a roundabout except in the sense that the same rules apply as if it was, which means if I can see you can't enter before I do then I know you mustn't enter, I have right of way, which means I needn't slow down - you won't be in my way, you're not entering.
The same is true in the US. Most (all?) states have state-wide speed limit "defaults" for town/city roads (i.e. 25 mph), highways and rural roads (i.e. 55 mph) and freeways (i.e. 70mph).
Instead of having a speed limit sign after each and every intersection, they're placed periodically. If you enter a road and there's no sign, that's the speed limit. If there's a different speed limit than the default, and you cross through an intersection and there's not another sign after it, that means the speed limit reverted to the default.
It can be a bit confusing (MN has 35 in city roads, WI 25) but also handy (wide open plains states often have much much higher freeway speeds).
The UK does have default rules, for example if there are houses directly facing onto the street (no front garden or similar maybe hard to imagine in most of the US but common in some UK towns) then the limits are low, if there are no houses at all the default limits are much higher. You are taught some rules of thumb for this when learning to drive. The posted limit signs are in addition to these rules, though they're more obvious.
But the tiny roads are usually where there is no housing - hardly anybody lives there so even the single lane of tarmac is a great expense considering average traffic. The "No housing => faster" is part of why there aren't signs limiting them. It's still a terrible idea to do 60mph though, just not necessarily illegal.
It's probably worth noting you can be charged with a driving offence if you're driving 60mph down a country road even if it's technically national speed limit.
Just because legally you can drive at 60 doesn't mean you're legally allowed to drive recklessly. National speed limit is basically, "you're permitted to drive as fast as you like so long as you do so in a safe manner".
I hate driving on these roads. I just refuse to drive a speed where I can’t stop if there’s someone in the road on a blind corner - call me an idiot and beep your horn at me if you want.
Makes sense, and I know driving in france I've felt the same. I also know driving in Canada our speed limits often cater to some lowest common denominator, where anyone driving the limit is going dangerously slow (I'm thinking of certain country roads) and inevitably has a long line of angry people following them.
I've heard before about setting speed limits using percentile studies of people driving on the road, which in the absence of some specific safety concern (which then needs engineering like narrowing the road or adding turns) makes the most sense.
I also wish there was more of a culture of pulling over if you don't want to drive at the flow speed. If I want a leisurely drive and see someone rapidly coming up behind me, I'll happily pull over and let them pass. There seem to be these sociopaths or self-righteous jerks who will happily drive 5km/h under the speed limit with 20 cars behind them. This is way more dangerous than speeding and should be treated as such. If you just want to drive slowly, why would you want the stress or a bunch of angry drivers behind you.
A favorite past-time back in the day was driving at night from pub to pub along the 'back roads' (B-roads specifically in the UK) as fast as 'possible'. There were typically no street lights, however lights from other vehicles showed up alerting you to any possible danger. It was fun at the time, but i wouldn't do it now .. lol ..
Right, there were no street lights where I grew up because street lights cost money and the people where I lived were rich partly because they paid few taxes, so no money for street lights. I happened to move to a city when it wasn't yet concerned about the environmental impact or cost, so I went from "Of course the main road doesn't have lights, what are we made of money?" to "Of course jogging tracks in the city parks have 24/7 street lighting. what if you wanted to go jogging at midnight, you can't jog in the dark!". Today those tracks don't have lighting 'cos there's no money and the wildlife hates it but thirty years ago, sure.
However some back roads aren't even B roads, the classification keeps going through C and D but it's local numbering, the numbers are just for local maintenance crews - so a C-1234 could be duplicated a few miles away in another local government territory and that would be confusing for drivers so they won't write C-1234 on a sign, they'll just say what's in that direction or maybe a local name for the road.
Our driving test standards are also high, having spoken with US colleagues, much higher than state-side (although I imagine that varies from state to state).
The theory test you must pass before taking your practical also now includes a hazard perception test - you are shown multiple videos and must click when you first perceive a hazard - the earlier you click after the hazard presents the higher your score - but if you just click randomly you get a zero.
Some of them are tricky - for instance, one I remember is a van coming from a side road at too fast a speed, but you can only first see this hazard forming in a reflection of a shop window.
Then you get the two wheeled side of the fence. You can do a one day compulsory basic training course and convince a trainer you know what you're doing, then drive on the road with everyone on a 125cc motorcycle (or 50cc at 16 years old), and then repeat the CBT every two years to keep on the road. It's only if you go for the full license that you need to study for theory as a prerequisite, so long as you keep out of trouble.
You make it sound like motorbike riders are practically unregulated, but in a sense it's the opposite.
A few decades ago, 125cc bikes were mostly for learners practising before taking their test. But successive governments have made it harder and harder to get a full license - so loads of riders just stay on learner bikes forever.
So the status quo is, in a sense, the result of very strict regulation.
I took my test nearly 25 years ago, and this was present then -- for the avoidance of doubt, the UK test has always been very thorough, though not quite as thorough as those in places like Finland where apparently they have skid pans and similar!
Yes, and the footnote also says that "this metric is age-standardized". I did not easily find an explanation of what that means, which made me distrustful of the data.
Fortunately, good old Wikipedia has what we are both looking for:
This would introduce a bias towards countries that are large and have extensive motorway networks. They would appear safer than countries that have a smaller portion of motorway miles.
> If we look at the number of deaths per billion miles driven, we see that motorways are roughly four times safer than urban roads, and more than five times safer than rural roads. This is not specific to the UK: among 24 OECD countries, approximately 5% of road deaths occurred on motorways.5 In almost all countries, it was less than 10%.
Rural roads are far more dangerous than urban roads per mile. Higher speeds (whether by limit or driver disregard), worse infrastructure, and less police and hospitals means that the crashes that do happen are far more likely to kill.
We put white crosses on the verge, one for every dead person in an accident. I drive past many crosses every time I run to the grocery store. So...not very safe in MT.
As an American tourist in London I found the roundabouts very interesting. In big cities and small, all intersections have a roundabout. Compare that to the US. You have Stop signs which are easy to miss. Sometimes the Stop signs are ignored by people in a hurry. Sometimes people steal the Stop signs to use as decoration in dorms.
It's not just London. For example the small city I now live in (Lincoln) has very few, if any, roundabouts in the city itself - they are confined to the ring-road around the place, and roads in/out of it. Not true for all places, of course - for example Swindon is notorious for its "Magic Roundabout".
I wonder if there will be a reversal in pedestrian deaths with the rise in larger cars. I live in a large UK city and it is mad the number of SUVs you see driving around.
Yes, I really have a hard time understanding that trend.
More than just the overall sizes of the cars (and they are big) it's those very high, flat fronts. That surely must be bad for visibility and bad for fuel efficiency at speed. I can only imagine people like that style because it looks more like a car and less like a minivan, which is what those enormous SUVs really are.
The market (either producers or consumers or both) don't seem to care about visibility. If you sit in a 20 year old car vs a brand new car, visibility is clearly better in the 20 year old car; if you go back to a 40 year car, it's even better. I've got an 81 VW Vanagon, the visibility is really good: cabover [1] means there's no hood in front, clear vertical windows and no safety features makes it easy to see out in every direction. Terrible side mirror attachments are a negative, but I'm putting aftermarket windows that promise to hold position after adjustment.
[1] It's not really a cabover, the engine is in the rear. but the front seats are slightly in front of the front axle, and the windshield is at the front of the vehicle. Some contemporaries were really cab-over, like the Toyota Van (aka TownAce) although that has a sloped front which reduces drag and visibility.
Perversely they're higher partially because of pedestrian safety. More space between the engine and the bonnet and hinges that extend that space when a force is applied to the front of the car to cushion the impact. Euro NCAP has a whole category for pedestrian safety to test exactly these features.
Like every other safety regulation, it's a stupid game of stupid optimization. You "score best" by keeping the dummy's head off the windshield so you make a big giant flop/crunch zone full of engineered plastics and empty void spaces that is (ideally) at least as tall as the dummy's center of mass (belly button). This is why every car, suv, crossover, whatever that's expected to be sold in europe (including most of the small SUVs and crossovers that people complain about in North America) has a tall(er than it would have been 20yr ago) hood line these days.
It can’t be just that, surely? Or the more traditional sloped fronts would be gone completely.
I don’t think people are buying these because they’re safer for pedestrians, they’re buying them because they like the way they look, and/or because they (the drivers) feel safer when they’re in a huge box sitting high up, looming over the surrounding cars.
For the most part, cars are being designed to meet the required safety regulations in a way that constrains what they are able to build. Gone are more angular designs because sharp angles are all points which people get caught/trapped by - definitely no flip up headlights either for the same reason. Larger A pillar supports to provide roll over protection and door frame rigidity. Larger fronts to provide better small overlap collision deference.
All together it results in all cars kind of looking the same. Shame in a way because my favourite looking car of all time is the Golf Mk2, very angular and boxy but it wouldn't have been made now.
When they started it was mostly a styling thing, think like Toyota copycatting the Dodge Charger front profile. The big tradeoff was "but muh fuel economy" and those people got over-ruled. And now 10-20yr later the industry has adapted and optimized for them in the form of utilizing them for crash purposes (and big cooling systems). The safety people consider them integral and so they can't be gotten rid of and the aerodynamics people are no longer whining so hard because they've spent the years figuring out how to somewhat mitigate them.
I think in an alternative universe where none of that happened we likely would have invested the R&D elsewhere and found creative ways to get the same results (you can see inklings of this like the airbag style hood lift thing) with much lower more aerodynamics and visibility friendly hood lines.
But that's just my opinion from being on the fringes of the industry.
Except the NCAP test is flawed and everyone knows it. They are testing a SUV-pedestrian collision that doesn't actually happen and then rating the SUV's as super safe based on it when based on empirical evidence SUVs are vastly more dangerous to pedestrians in a collision as pedestrians (especially children) and vastly more likely to be dragged under than thrown onto the bonnet.
I dont see why. Like outside of specifically seppo produced coal wagons, the bigger cars\trucks\suvs are shipping with all safety features by default. I have 360 degree cameras at slow speed, sensors that go off if theres a loose branch within a meter of the car. I have more faith in my big car than I did with my older hatchback which only had a reversing cam.
Because bigger cars carry more energy, have poorer driver visibility, and are more likely to result in pedestrians going under the vehicle due to higher bonnet lines.
Big cars make drivers feel safer. But the stats are quite clear, they kill more pedestrians, and, ironically, are more likely to kill their drivers due their roll over risk.
The safety features might help, but they’re just compensating for all the additional risk bigger vehicles bring. You simply can’t beat physics.
I mean in terms of driver visibility, you can absolutely improve that. My forward camera is below a toddlers head height and fisheyed like no ones business. And thats before the sensors.
The question of IF a collision occurs, will the larger car do more damage, obviously it will. Well maybe not obviously, if the sensors are throwing on my breaks earlier than I can react there can be substantially less energy on that front too.
But in terms of frequency I feel like they have taken extreme measures to substantially reduce the risk of the collision occurring in the first place.
Do you have Individual Vehicle Approval? It’s shocking how many gigantic Dodge Rams (which do not meet EU safety rules) are driving around the Netherlands. One killed a 23 year old cyclist a few weeks ago.
Meanwhile, there's a group (mostly in Britain) that sometimes lets the air out of the tyres of inappropriate vehicles [1] and sometimes drills holes in them [2].
From [3], "My mother is in palliative care and I came to the car to go to her, but because of your vicious act, I am stuck trying to reinflate my tyres!" — I have no sympathy whatsoever. She bought the 'car', she can call a taxi if the journey is urgent.
We have IVA in the UK but it is mostly used to import Japanese cars at the moment because you only need a few modifications to most cars (fog lights, indicators) and the Yen is weak at the moment so a lot of people are importing cars like the Suzuki Jimny which meet our standards but aren't sold due to Europe wide emissions regulations. You would have to do a lot more to an American car because the safety standards are different so it isn't an attractive option unless you really want a specific vehicle at any cost.
Don't worry, our dear leaders are already hard at work giving up their people's safety and ensuring we bend over backwards to appease the US. Such vehicles will be able to drive in the EU with no hurdles.
Putting in roundabouts as a default so many years ago (as described in the article) makes a huge difference the the road infrastructure in the UK. They take up a lot more space, but the lack of stop-start traffic light intersections makes a completely changes how people move around. Bigger, more complex roundabouts do have traffic lights, but straight-up road intersections with traffic lights are the exception.
As somebody who has driven in a few places around the World, I would say that overall the standard of driving and safety is remarkably high in the UK given that the road layouts are often quite confusing (we have roads in use today from Roman, Saxon, Norman, Medieval, Tudor and more modern phases of development, so it can get confusing), and the level of signage around some confusing layouts is much lower than, say, California.
This is because the rules are more complex, but actually get a license is, too. There are plenty of bad drivers, there are still idiots who drink/take drugs/use their mobile phones while driving, but it's way, way less than in some other parts of the World. And the rules of the road are broadly followed in terms of lane discipline and right of way in a way that they aren't in much of Europe or elsewhere.
I sometimes wish that we had clearer lane signage in some parts of the road network, like that seen in the US, but overall, once you get it, it's all very straightforward.
iowa requires 30 hours of classroom training if you are under 18 - which almost everyone is when first getting a license. Once you have a licenese anywhere though you just show up. So your classroom time in frace counted in the us
20 hours? You were a quick one, that took me close to 40. Though I never was a very good driver, the car I crashed can attest to that (and thankfully with no corporal damage other than a bruised ego).
In South Kensington, they spent a fortune trying to use this non-delineated road setup where its not clear quite where the pavements (sidewalks for the USians), and road borders are, and in theory it means everybody just becomes very hyper aware of each other.
The theory goes something like how cycle lanes - just the a white line down the side of the road - can cause drivers to pass much closer to cyclists than they otherwise would without that border there, where a driver might slow and move a few feet out to the side on a single carriageway.
In reality, it's actually kind of anxiety inducing, particularly if you're in a larger crowd (common at this time of year, as Royal Albert Hall where proms season is coming to a close is at one end of this area), because drivers don't really seem to know what is going on.
I suspect it means cars are, on average, slowing down, but I can't find stats on whether its reduced accidents or not. I know it makes me nervous though.
It’s South Kensington, part of council that’s notorious for its hatred of anything that even vaguely looks like a bike or a bike lane. Their attitudes to road design are despicable, with a clear priority for cars over any other road user. It often feels like they only provide pedestrian or cycle infrastructure as a grudging acknowledgement of the fact the vast majority of people walk or cycle, and car users are in the minority.
All of that is a long way of saying that any road infrastructure South Kensington designed is going to be a long way behind best practice for pedestrian safety, even when they’re trying.
>Yeah, better to be confused and drive in to a ditch at 20 mph than confident and t-bone a family at 50.
This shouldn't be subjective at all. It's very easy to calculate out minutes lost to traffic from minor accidents vs death causing accidents and compare the two and see where the crossover points are depending upon their relative rates and impacts.
To use an extreme hypothetical example, I don't even know how old you are but it's probably perfectly justifiable 10x over to just shoot you (or me or anyone short of the pope) and throw you in the Hudson if the alternative is "the George Washington is closed for 6hr" or something.
And on the other end of the spectrum roads get closed for months on whims for maintenance reasons in rural areas all the time and probably have less cumulative life lost than, idk, some mundane waste of time.
I'm not privy to the numbers for all the real world situations that exist in the middle ground but I'm sure they're out there and once you've got them it's simple math to decide what configuration results in less life lost. Obviously you can pro-rate the years, account for disability and injury, add money to the equation, etc. But that's all easy if you've got the numbers (which we generally do for auto accidents).
By disabled I mean, for example, my father has polio and has driven his entire life in the US but would be unable to do so physically in the UK because of the demands the civil engineering would impose on him here.
He had one accident in almost 60 years of driving, so I think he'd be on the safe end of human statistics. But then again, what human is safe to drive?
[Edit: I should note that he's stopped driving over the last couple of years.]
I've lived in the UK for over 15 years now and I still can't get over people's general allergy for using indicators. And I know the test and training specifically tell you that you must use indicators when changing lanes and turning, but if I had a penny for every time I see someone on the motorway changing lanes without indicating I'd make a very good middle class salary from that alone.
But yes, other than this people do generally drive really safely. I especially like how people mostly keep to the 30mph limit in towns(but then again, people get literally offended when you say you keep to the 20mph limit, like you're some kind of idiot for doing so).
> Our World in Data is a project of Global Change Data Lab, a nonprofit based in the UK (Reg. Charity No. 1186433).
I'm a Brit too, but this article felt a bit too self-congratulatory given I've read other recent reports about other places (cites, regions, and entire countries) with overall safer roads; kinda like how we love to tell everyone how chuffed we are with how safe our AC plugs are.
The article starts off with a graph showing the UK has 2 deaths per 100k people, with Norway, Malta, Singapore, and Sweden at 1.9. It then finishes by saying:
> If every country could lower its rates to those of the UK, Sweden, or Norway, this number would be just under 200,000. We’d save one million lives every year.
The article wasn’t making the case that the UK is the absolute best, it was discussing what the UK did to change from being unsafe to much safer.
Our AC plugs are, however, the safest design on the planet.
I think if these guys are honest about their numbers - and the main number they're calling out is a 22-fold decline in road deaths per mile driven in the last 75 years, which is remarkable - and shows those other safer regions in their comparisons, what is the problem?
In 55 years I've never managed to do that, nor has anyone else I know. Plugs normally stay in the wall socket because they have a switch - each wall socket for general use must have a switch. The switch is quite hefty and very obviously off or on, with a red stripe. You get a satisfying audible and tactile click feedback when it is switched.
Recently a person brought in a laptop that had apparently been accidentally brushed off a desk, whilst closed, and had apparently fallen on an upturned plug. The plug had managed to hit the back of the screen, left quite a dent and spider cracking on the screen. The centre of the cracking did not match the dent ...
I'll have to do some trials but even if a plug is left on the ground, will it actually lie prongs upwards? I'll have to investigate lead torsion and all sorts of effects. Its on the to do list but not very high.
Don't leave them unplugged. The standard requires all modern sockets to have switches, so there is no reason to have the plugs lying around on the floor.
I've never had an experience in any house or office where anything has ever been unplugged other than to put it away (a kitchen appliance that doesn't need to live on a counter, or a hair dryer, for example).
Buy a fused extension cord with more plugs, you have now turned one socket into 4, 6, or 8 sockets. You can even get some that have USB built-in, so you don't use a socket up for a phone or tablet charger. They're not even very expensive.
And in an office, I'm pretty sure all equipment (computers, lights, controls for adjustable desks if you have them), are meant to remain permanently plugged in anyway in a properly installed desk setup. What is going on in your office where you're choosing what is plugged in and what isn't, constantly? And why can't your office manager spring £20 for an extension cord with multiple sockets?
I've never stepped on a plug myself, so I agree it's not a major problem.
However, some older houses in the UK have far fewer sockets than more modern properties - sometimes only one or two per room.
And sure, if you need to use a hairdryer and a hair straightener a person with an orderly lifestyle might return them both to a cupboard afterwards - but some people don't mind clutter and just leave them wherever.
When it comes to multiway extension leads - people in the UK are sometimes told it's bad to "overload" sockets but have only a vague understanding of what that means, so some people are reluctant to use them.
"When it comes to multiway extension leads - people in the UK are sometimes told it's bad to "overload" sockets but have only a vague understanding of what that means, so some people are reluctant to use them."
To be fair, most people work on the assumption that if the consumer unit doesn't complain, then it is fair game. They are relying on modern standards, which nowadays is quite reasonable. I suppose it is good that we can nowadays rely on standards.
However, I have lived in a couple of houses with fuse wire boards, one of which the previous occupants put in a nail for a circuit that kept burning out.
Good practice is to put a low rated fuse - eg 5A (red) into extension leads for most devices. A tuppence part is easy and cheap to replace but if a few devices not involved with room heating/cooling blow a 5A fuse, you need to investigate. A hair dryer, for example, should not blow a 5A fuse.
because sometimes you unplug it and leave it around. unless you live like a king sometimes there is 2 sockets and you have 5 devices to plug at different times. european and other ones will be on the side so stepping on it is no problem but uk ones will be the pointy end up
>kinda like how we love to tell everyone how chuffed we are with how safe our AC plugs are.
I would actually love to see some data that compares total deaths and injuries per capita from electrocution from plugs across different countries. I have a feeling the total worldwide figures are tiny in comparison to injuries from stepping barefoot/putting your knee on UK plugs.
Also, UK plugs tend to have the wire coming out the bottom and then curving upwards as the electrical device is usually above the socket, over time resulting in an exposed wire, while most other plugs have the wire coming out the centre.
I've never seen a plug that has an exposed wire for that reason - all the plugs have a heavy clamp internally that attaches to the outer sheath, preventing the movement that would cause this. I would suspect that any plugs where wear has caused exposure are either properly ancient, or were wired incorrectly (eg by trimming the outer sheath short of the clamp).
The nominal idea is that having them come straight out encourages people to remove plugs by pulling on the cord, which introduces even more strain than having a curved wire - although maybe this ends up being an argument to mount UK sockets the other way up?
It would be more interesting to compare the rates of serious injury (including death), I think. That would remove the effect of improvements in medical treatement over time.
I chose active travel over car dependency at an early age. I also worked in the cycle trade. My opinion is that roads have become far more dangerous, however, most of what can be killed by the car has already been killed and the reason for fewer deaths is slimmer pickings.
Children and the elderly are two canaries in the coal mine.
Kids used to get new bicycles at Christmas, play in the streets and be 'free range' in the UK. Nowadays they are all welded to mobile phones and cocooned in SUVs. Only something like one on four know how to ride a bicycle nowadays and that Christmas trade in bicycles died thirty years ago.
Although you see a fair few Lime bikes and people commuting by bicycle in London, most bicycles are sold to rich people for them to strap to cars, for them to drive to a designated safe spot, for them to ride from the car park in a loop back to the car park. You never see these bicycles parked up next to the door at a supermarket or even at a railway station, partly due to the risk of theft, but also due to the dangers of the road.
As for the elderly, nowadays they are boomers and they all have cars. They only give up their car keys when they get condemned to retirement homes. Hence, like kids, old people are not to be found in the streets, unless cocooned in tin boxes.
As for being cocooned in a tin box, what happened to spirited driving? In the 1970s it was normal for people to cross the country with no sat nav or seat belt, driving as if they were in a Group B rally car, taking their special shortcuts, drunk, with cigarette in hand. Nowadays this doesn't happen, people in cars just shuffle from traffic light to traffic light fearing CCTV and speed cameras.
We have also priced out younger motorists, who would have been the 'spirited drivers'.
Hitchhiking used to exist in the 1970s. Thatcher era stranger danger put an end to that, so nobody hitchhikes these days. Does this mean that hitchhiking is safer? No!
There is another aspect of car dependency and 'safety'. Sure, you might not get killed in an ultra-violent crash in a tin-box cocoon, however, what about cardiovascular disease? Being car dependent and eating the convenience foods of the car dependent is a shortcut to obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, cognitive decline and death by blocked arteries.
The government knows this, and this is why 'active travel' is a phrase. By 2030 the UK government wants more than half of all journeys in built up areas to be 'active travel' rather than lame car dependency.
But why is it that countries that are culturally close to Britain (eg colonies) have much higher fatality rates? You'd expect them to have implemented some of the same policies. Singapore and Malta have similar rates, but the others are much higher.
Regarding roundabouts, it makes sense when explained like in the article. But I've always felt like they were dangerous, especially the ones they have in Britain where you have multiple lanes with lights and connecting roundabouts. Perhaps that sense of fear is what actually makes them safe.
Finally something positive about the UK. Usually the crowd will come in with pitchforks swinging everytime there is something about UK housing or politics going wrong.
I have children who are now approaching, or have approached large independence milestones. By the time I was my eldest's age (no just in high school [11-13 years old]) I knew of at least one kid from my school (a school of 55) who had died in a road accident.
By the time I had left sixth form (18), two other people from my high school had died in RTAs and two others had life changing injuries.
Granted this was rural east of england, so the roads were/are more dangerous.
However those last crashes triggered changes to the layout of the roads where they happened. This wasn't some line painting thing either, complete junction change from a y junction to a roundabout with re-grade of the road to improve visibility.
Much as it pisses me off, speed cameras, bumps and "low" speed limits are almost always a reaction to road deaths.
All of this means that my kids, who go to a much bigger school (500 and 1500 respectively) have not lost people they know to road crashes.
objectively kids are much much safer outside than any 80s kids. Yet, for whatever reason we don't think thats the case.
Similarly, Ireland has seen a massive drop in road deaths, but one problem is that a lot of that improvement came from removing vulnerable road users - the kids biking and walking to school, etc are now much more likely to be in a car. (The US is similar - biking or walking to primary school was once the norm). Similarly you’d have zero drownings if you threw sharks in every pool. I do wish we could acknowledge that a lot of the improvement in road “safety” was a result of people just removing themselves from places where cars are.
No, that’s not true. Walking and cycling did decline, but risk per kilometre for has also fallen sharply (by approximately 50%) over the same period. Vulnerable road users are safer now than they ever were, despite similar actual numbers using the road network due to population growth and profile.
So the “sharks in the pool” analogy is absurd. Everyone is safer, including the most vulnerable road users, so a better analogy is the road network has changed from shark-infested seas to a managed watercourse with swimmers, surfers, and boaters are seeing vastly fewer deaths or injuries.
> By the time I had left sixth form (18), two other people from my high school had died in RTAs and two others had life changing injuries.
I think your experience is extremely unlucky. I went to a school in London (in the 80s) with around a 1,000 kids from 8 to 18 and there was one road death, and two injuries, all in the same accident, in all the time i was there. I did not know the buy who died personally, although i knew
one of the others who was in the car.
I agree with you about the improvements in general. I do think the 20mph limits where I now live (and in some other places) seem a bit random, and there are some difficult A road junctions that I think the really could do with lower limits or other improvements that do not have them.
Absolutely true that kids are objectively much safer, but people have grown fearful. I wonder whether being safer has made people less tolerant of risk more than risks have diminished. Its common to hear arguments that anything that might save even one life is worth doing.
I'm in a london suburb now as well, which may also has something to do with it. I think the big difference is that there isn't anywhere where you can drive on to a 70mph road in the dark without a long merging lane.
> I do think the 20mph limits where I now live (and in some other places) seem a bit random,
I don't mind them being random so much, but what I hate is that they dont (or didn't) put repeater speed limit signs in 20mph zones. They normally put the signs on the road at junctions, where I'm looking for other dangers (pedestrians/cyclists and other cars)
So its fairly easy to either be dawdling in 30 or doing point/fine incurring speeds in a 20
I agree entirely that A roads and city roads are a LOT safer than country lanes. Easier to drive on too. I find London more stressful and harder work to drive in - it may well be safer, but its harder. I far prefer public transport in big cities and I have not driven in London for years.
The only time I have tripped a speed camera was doing 57 on an A road after missing the temporarily lower 50 limit for road works in the night.
The road I currently I find hardest is one road where the limit keeps changing. its pretty much the same all the way along (residential area, so default would be 30, but wide as its an A road or a continuation of one). It changes four or five times over a few miles.
Rural and metro areas, especially before traffic calming mesures of the last 20 years, were very different. I'm not from the UK, but in Brittany, everybody know of a schoolmate who died from traffic (especially since you have one high-school for like 15 towns, so in a way, you're schoolmate with half the kids in your area)
In my opinion some of this is simply due to how congested built up areas are today. It's genuinely hard to get up to 30 in a city or any populated area in the UK today, and most cities in the UK now have 20mph speed limits when there's likely to be pedestrians around.
It's pretty hard to kill people if you're driving under 30, and anywhere people are driving in excess of 30 it's not that populated and cars these days are pretty safe unless you have a head on collision at significant speed.
As an American who drove for 20 years before obtaining a license in the UK, I can offer some observations.
First, driving in the UK is much more a privilege than a right as in the US. You can live a complete life in the UK without a license because of the wide availability of public transit. In the US however, if you want to maintain a steady job outside of NYC, Chicago, DC, Boston or perhaps a few others, you'll have to drive. Revoking a driver's license in the US can be life-altering in a way that it just won't in the UK. Fewer people bother getting the license and fewer still drive.
Second, driving is much more physically and mentally demanding in the UK. Perhaps that serves to reduce traffic deaths by forcing focus, but it also imposes a limit on the types of people who can drive here. This selects against too young, too old, too small, disabled, etc. in a way that would not be tolerated in the US for the above reasons.
Third, annual vehicle inspections are much more stringent in the UK which takes a lot of older vehicles off the road and again selects against those of lower socio-economic status in a way that would be unconscionable in the US.
I don't know I'm the same and find being in the valley more stressful than the drive to wembley from central London. More taxing mentally to have insane people passing you at 100mph. The licensing is harder but still was a one shot 5 hour prep thing for me.
304 women were killed over the 12 months, while the report recorded 956 male deaths. 792 deaths occurred during weekdays and 474 victims were killed over a weekend."
The breakdown on where the crashes happened is interesting
"A total of 326 people died in major cities across Australia, with 581 deaths in regional Australia and 63 in remote or very remote parts of the country."
Given that the vast majority of Australians live in major cities it's surprising.
It's really surprising how many accidents are single vehicle :
"Out of 1266 deaths, 490 victims were involved in multiple-vehicle road incidents, whereas 776 people who died were involved in single-vehicle crashes."
On top of this it should be added that in a review of fatalities in Victoria ~52% of the crashes involved a driver who tested positive for alcohol or drugs or both.
The national speed limit for a single carriageway is 60mph, and for two or more carriageways is 70mph.
That's the default. These were introduced in the 1950s - before then, there was no national speed limit.
Councils and highway agencies can then decide due to a number of factors to reduce that number to what they deem appropriate. Most councils pull that down to 40mph in unpopulated areas, 30mph in built-up areas. Some councils - and the whole of Wales - pulled the built-up limit down to 20mph.
The Highways Agency has deemed some parts of the motorway network aren't safe at 70mph, so will drop the speed appropriately. Sometimes permanently (50mph on junctions is common), sometimes dynamically (overhead gantrys). It's all fine.
This is how the UK works - you set a default, and then let councils figure out things for themselves.
What you seem to be missing is that this is not a speed target. In most of the UK (notable exceptions include Greater Manchester and Hull, in my experience), drivers do not aim to get to that speed, they use their judgement.
On that road, there is no way much over 30mph is safe, as you don't have line of sight to oncoming traffic within a stopping distance. Do you know how I know that? The driving lessons and tests I took are far, far better than most in the World, even those my parents took.
Nobody is driving that road at 60mph without a death wish, but it doesn't mean we need to spend thousands of pounds per mile dropping the limit and then struggling to actually enforce it.
> The national speed limit for a single carriageway is 60mph, and for two or more carriageways is 70mph.
> That's the default. These were introduced in the 1950s - before then, there was no national speed limit.
There's no reason the default can't be changed. Ireland recently dropped the default speed limit on rural roads from 80km/h to 60km/h and regional from 100km/h to 80km/h. Councils can and do override the limits where appropriate, but in practice it requires an engineer's report which often doesn't, as the roads genuinely aren't suitable.
That would place the road above at a 37mi/h speed limit, which while still too fast for the conditions (it should be a 10 km/h or 6 mi/h road to support vulnerable road users) sends a much more reasonable message.
As others have said, a limit not a target. But also, how fast you can travel along a road sensibly very much depends on conditions. If you do let people think of the limit as a target, you'd better set the limit low enough that it's still appropriate in terrible conditions.
My general take is that I try to drive as if a maniac (meaning anyone who might think it's reasonable to drive faster than I do) is about to come the other way along the road. I should be able to stop within my sight-lines if the road is wide enough to take evasive action, and well within half that distance if the road is narrow.
I think this type of road combined with satnavs makes them more dangerous - number of times ill enter a destination on my satnav and its trying to send me on some lane
I notice it when cycling too - there is more traffic on these lane - and the drivers think they can drive along like some A-road
I like the 60mph limit. I'm coming from a rural background where it's unlikely anyone would set the speed limit for each individual road correctly. National speed limit is saying "you can go up to 60mph, this isn't necessarily the correct speed for the road"
There are quite a few rural roads where it is a perfectly reasonable speed (straight, wide, 2 lane), and plenty of roads where you physically couldn't get your car past 40mph without fecking it into a hedge. It's a limit, not a maximum, and it's that way so we can trust people's judgement based on the current conditions of a road, which is (at least in a rural context) almost certainly more accurate than what a council would set.
You don't have to drive 60 mph there though. You can use your judgement.
I'm more used to France's 90 km/h countryside roads (now 80 km/h for most of them) but it's the same, sometimes you can only drive 70 or 50, but sometimes 90 is perfectly fine. But you should be able to see it for yourself, and in the specific places where you can't see the danger there are generally signs and a lower speed limit.
I drive 20 miles a day on single track roads. The widths vary from a few passing places which you have to reverse if you meet a horse or bike coming the other way, let alone a tractor or lorry, to places where you can just about pass a large vehicle without stopping, and easily pass a car. There’s even a handful of places you can overtake if the car in front stays to the left and nothing is coming.
Safe speeds vary from 15 to over 60 depending on the visibility.
If you get stuck behind an idiot it can add 10 minutes to the journey. On a clear road it takes under 15 minutes to do the 10 miles each way, but get stuck behind someone who hasn’t hit a clue, prevents you from overtaking in the places you can (one of which is about half a mile of 30mph where the idiots inevitably speed), refuses to pull in to let you past, spends forever trying to get into a passing place etc and it can take nearer 30. Get that in each direction and that’s an extra half hour a day — it’s very frustrating.
There should be a separate license for driving on country roads
It's not country road driving. What you're calling an "idiot" is probably just someone who doesn't know the roads. You'd have the same problem elsewhere.
Given that it's the A836, it's worth constrasting this with the fact that in 2025 many of the people committing traffic offences on the coastal part of that road just to the north were locals, not "townies" unfamiliar with the area.
Any slow speed can be appropriate for those vulnerable users, if they let other people pass them where appropriate. (On roads that don't have a speed minimum.)
That doesn't make it appropriate in general. 15mph is not appropriate for a paved line through nothing with gentle curves and great visibility.
I recently saw one with a 'national speed limit' (i.e. 60mph) sign, and right below it: 'not suitable for motor vehicles' (an advisory sign, so no legal weight behind it). It's the default for anything considered a road, and generally unless proven otherwise the government is reasonably happy to let people use their judgement on lower-traffic areas.
I think a national speed limit is a sensible system. In many countries, every random stretch of road has a different speed limit, as though driving speeds have been centrally planned - usually poorly.
Expecting the driver to be an educated and safe driver who is capable of judging the appropriate speed for the road is far superior. This also inculcates a better attitude in the driver - the speed limit is not a target.
Proper road, very common type of road in the countryside. You're lucky there it doesn't have grass up the middle. You'd realistically be doing about 20mph on it, although speeding up when you can see far ahead and it's straight, slowing down coming up to a bend where you cant see what's coming.
UK is extremely risk-averse. In the case of road safety, it shows: a lot of time and cash goes into minimising deaths.
This is not only road users: roadworks have restrictive speed limits, which are not taken down when there is no workforce out, to minimise risk to workers setting and unsetting limits, traffic cones etc. Things that in other countries would close a lane often close the whole road, again because of risks to road users and maintenance people.
This is of course great, but also very expensive - and I cannot shake the feeling that the UK loses so much money on this risk aversion that is actually causes more hazard due to underinvestment elsewhere. NHS is crumbling, the very safe roads take forever to navigate, introducing inefficiencies and starving the central budget of cash. GDP per capita has barely grown since 2008. Even a small annual boost would unlock a lot of cash for investment, in particular into NHS and saving lives.
It's like putting all your pension investments into bonds, because they are safer. But you swap market risk for the risk of not having enough cash when you retire.
But maybe it's easy to have this perspective because I have a desk job and commute by public transport.
Seems a rather tenuous link to the state of the NHS. The UK has a lower tax regime than most equivalent nations. If we wanted a better NHS we could just collect similar tax rates to that of Germany or other western nations.
One of the issues is we’re trapped with a media ecosystem that won’t even allow progressive parties to say “we’ll take a bit more in tax and in return you’ll get a functioning health service”, instead they feel they have to promise to run the economy like the Tories (which is mind numbing).
It’s not just the recent Labour election I’m referring to. The first time Blair got in it was the same.
It's not just the roads, it's everything. Most pension money is invested in UK bonds. UK treasury department focuses on a set of very narrow spending criteria, so much so that it's hard for governments to spend money on investments.
And then it's not just the NHS. My point is, rather, that extreme risk aversion in the short term can actually increase the medium-term risk. If the UK could generate a few extra 0.1% of GDP growth per year in exchange for some risk, that would seem an overall better world to be in.
> The UK has a lower tax regime than most equivalent nations. If we wanted a better NHS we could just collect similar tax rates to that of Germany or other western nations.
This is largely untrue today since the Conservatives have significantly increased taxes over the last decade. As it stands I think Germany only taxes around 1-2% more of GDP than us.
The primary difference between Germany and the UK in terms of public service funding is that the UK funds most of it's healthcare via taxation where as Germany operates a duel model which means healthcare isn't funded so much from taxation, meaning they have more money for other things.
Additionally, Germany has a much higher per-capita GDP which means they can afford significantly better public services even if they tax an equivalent share of GDP.
Finally what Germany funds with additional taxation the UK more than makes up for by running much larger deficits. The issue isn't that the UK government isn't spending enough as a share of GDP.
I'll guess you've probably not done a huge amount of project management for infrastructure projects then. I can wager most road projects wouldn't be completed quicker if safety barriers had to be removed/reconstructed on a daily basis.
Equally, nobody in the construction trade gets into it to get killed in an accident, especially ones avoided by just having traffic move at slightly lower speeds.
Driving in the UK can be quite a shock when you're used to the roads in the Netherlands. The speed at which people navigate roundabouts can feel terrifying, and the maximum speed in the countryside is something else. Going *60 mph* on narrow roads with limited visibility is just crazy. The locals just speed by. I guess it's just what you're used to.
You're not supposed to drive 60mph on those tiny roads.
Why are they 60mph? Well, the symbol they display doesn't say 60mph, it's basically just a slash symbol - it should be read "National Limit Applies" or perhaps "Derestricted" and it so happens that the law in the UK says that if there's no other rule in place that limit is 60mph and on these tiny roads nobody has put in place a more specific limit so that's the law.
[If there is carriageway separation, e.g. a larger road on which traffic flowing in the opposite direction isn't sharing the same tarmac, this global rule says 70mph, but no tiny roads have multiple carriageways, actually sometimes it feels like there's barely room for one let alone two]
However, just because there isn't a lower limit doesn't mean it's appropriate to drive at 60mph and people who do are generally maniacs. Where I grew up there are lots of these roads, steep, winding, narrow tracks paved in the 19th or 20th centuries for access to a farm here or a cottage there, and maintained by the public. You absolutely might turn a corner and find an entire flock of sheep in the road going "Baa!". If you're doing 60mph after you've killed a bunch of sheep and the bodies start smashing through your windscreen you're probably dead. Sheep don't have lights, don't know about jaywalking laws (which Britain doesn't have anyway) and aren't smart enough to have considered this risk, they're just there and now you're dead. So you drive at maybe 30-40mph on the straight parts, slower on curves and always pay a lot of attention 'cos things can go very bad, very quickly.
Roundabouts are a bit different. The UK has a lot of what are called "mini roundabouts". As a pedestrian, or perhaps on a bicycle these do just look like they're small roundabouts, too small for the island in the middle to have any purpose so it's just paint. But in a vehicle it's apparent that the island can't exist because you'd crash into it, perhaps not in a Mini but certainly in a bin truck or a bus. The mini roundabout isn't a roundabout except in the sense that the same rules apply as if it was, which means if I can see you can't enter before I do then I know you mustn't enter, I have right of way, which means I needn't slow down - you won't be in my way, you're not entering.
The same is true in the US. Most (all?) states have state-wide speed limit "defaults" for town/city roads (i.e. 25 mph), highways and rural roads (i.e. 55 mph) and freeways (i.e. 70mph).
Instead of having a speed limit sign after each and every intersection, they're placed periodically. If you enter a road and there's no sign, that's the speed limit. If there's a different speed limit than the default, and you cross through an intersection and there's not another sign after it, that means the speed limit reverted to the default.
It can be a bit confusing (MN has 35 in city roads, WI 25) but also handy (wide open plains states often have much much higher freeway speeds).
The UK does have default rules, for example if there are houses directly facing onto the street (no front garden or similar maybe hard to imagine in most of the US but common in some UK towns) then the limits are low, if there are no houses at all the default limits are much higher. You are taught some rules of thumb for this when learning to drive. The posted limit signs are in addition to these rules, though they're more obvious.
But the tiny roads are usually where there is no housing - hardly anybody lives there so even the single lane of tarmac is a great expense considering average traffic. The "No housing => faster" is part of why there aren't signs limiting them. It's still a terrible idea to do 60mph though, just not necessarily illegal.
More specifically, “built-up areas” where the lower limits apply are those with streetlights at least every 200 yards - definitionally.
aka "it's a speed limit, not a target"
It's probably worth noting you can be charged with a driving offence if you're driving 60mph down a country road even if it's technically national speed limit.
Just because legally you can drive at 60 doesn't mean you're legally allowed to drive recklessly. National speed limit is basically, "you're permitted to drive as fast as you like so long as you do so in a safe manner".
I hate driving on these roads. I just refuse to drive a speed where I can’t stop if there’s someone in the road on a blind corner - call me an idiot and beep your horn at me if you want.
That's the speed you're supposed to drive at.
Makes sense, and I know driving in france I've felt the same. I also know driving in Canada our speed limits often cater to some lowest common denominator, where anyone driving the limit is going dangerously slow (I'm thinking of certain country roads) and inevitably has a long line of angry people following them.
I've heard before about setting speed limits using percentile studies of people driving on the road, which in the absence of some specific safety concern (which then needs engineering like narrowing the road or adding turns) makes the most sense.
I also wish there was more of a culture of pulling over if you don't want to drive at the flow speed. If I want a leisurely drive and see someone rapidly coming up behind me, I'll happily pull over and let them pass. There seem to be these sociopaths or self-righteous jerks who will happily drive 5km/h under the speed limit with 20 cars behind them. This is way more dangerous than speeding and should be treated as such. If you just want to drive slowly, why would you want the stress or a bunch of angry drivers behind you.
A favorite past-time back in the day was driving at night from pub to pub along the 'back roads' (B-roads specifically in the UK) as fast as 'possible'. There were typically no street lights, however lights from other vehicles showed up alerting you to any possible danger. It was fun at the time, but i wouldn't do it now .. lol ..
Right, there were no street lights where I grew up because street lights cost money and the people where I lived were rich partly because they paid few taxes, so no money for street lights. I happened to move to a city when it wasn't yet concerned about the environmental impact or cost, so I went from "Of course the main road doesn't have lights, what are we made of money?" to "Of course jogging tracks in the city parks have 24/7 street lighting. what if you wanted to go jogging at midnight, you can't jog in the dark!". Today those tracks don't have lighting 'cos there's no money and the wildlife hates it but thirty years ago, sure.
However some back roads aren't even B roads, the classification keeps going through C and D but it's local numbering, the numbers are just for local maintenance crews - so a C-1234 could be duplicated a few miles away in another local government territory and that would be confusing for drivers so they won't write C-1234 on a sign, they'll just say what's in that direction or maybe a local name for the road.
Our driving test standards are also high, having spoken with US colleagues, much higher than state-side (although I imagine that varies from state to state).
The theory test you must pass before taking your practical also now includes a hazard perception test - you are shown multiple videos and must click when you first perceive a hazard - the earlier you click after the hazard presents the higher your score - but if you just click randomly you get a zero.
Some of them are tricky - for instance, one I remember is a van coming from a side road at too fast a speed, but you can only first see this hazard forming in a reflection of a shop window.
Then you get the two wheeled side of the fence. You can do a one day compulsory basic training course and convince a trainer you know what you're doing, then drive on the road with everyone on a 125cc motorcycle (or 50cc at 16 years old), and then repeat the CBT every two years to keep on the road. It's only if you go for the full license that you need to study for theory as a prerequisite, so long as you keep out of trouble.
You make it sound like motorbike riders are practically unregulated, but in a sense it's the opposite.
A few decades ago, 125cc bikes were mostly for learners practising before taking their test. But successive governments have made it harder and harder to get a full license - so loads of riders just stay on learner bikes forever.
So the status quo is, in a sense, the result of very strict regulation.
> also now includes a hazard perception test
I took my test nearly 25 years ago, and this was present then -- for the avoidance of doubt, the UK test has always been very thorough, though not quite as thorough as those in places like Finland where apparently they have skid pans and similar!
The article says "safest roads," but the statistic used to demonstrate that is deaths per 100K people rather than deaths per kilometer driven.
Seems to me the latter would be a much better metric for the safety of the physical roads.
Yes, and the footnote also says that "this metric is age-standardized". I did not easily find an explanation of what that means, which made me distrustful of the data.
Fortunately, good old Wikipedia has what we are both looking for:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
For me the upshot is that UK still comes out quite good amongst its European peers, but the difference appears to be smaller.
This would introduce a bias towards countries that are large and have extensive motorway networks. They would appear safer than countries that have a smaller portion of motorway miles.
> If we look at the number of deaths per billion miles driven, we see that motorways are roughly four times safer than urban roads, and more than five times safer than rural roads. This is not specific to the UK: among 24 OECD countries, approximately 5% of road deaths occurred on motorways.5 In almost all countries, it was less than 10%.
Montana would be amazingly safe based on your metric.
Rural roads are far more dangerous than urban roads per mile. Higher speeds (whether by limit or driver disregard), worse infrastructure, and less police and hospitals means that the crashes that do happen are far more likely to kill.
We put white crosses on the verge, one for every dead person in an accident. I drive past many crosses every time I run to the grocery store. So...not very safe in MT.
No actually on that metric Montana is one of the most dangerous and Massachusetts is one of the safest.
Nope. It's top-10 for most dangerous [1].
[1] https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...
As an American tourist in London I found the roundabouts very interesting. In big cities and small, all intersections have a roundabout. Compare that to the US. You have Stop signs which are easy to miss. Sometimes the Stop signs are ignored by people in a hurry. Sometimes people steal the Stop signs to use as decoration in dorms.
> In big cities and small, all intersections have a roundabout.
As someone that has lived in London for nearly 30 years, I can safely say - no they don't. Most intersections have traffic lights.
OK, I meant at least have a roundabout, and I meant in England not in London.
It's not just London. For example the small city I now live in (Lincoln) has very few, if any, roundabouts in the city itself - they are confined to the ring-road around the place, and roads in/out of it. Not true for all places, of course - for example Swindon is notorious for its "Magic Roundabout".
There are large numbers of roundabouts in parts of the US too now. E.g. Montana.
I wonder if there will be a reversal in pedestrian deaths with the rise in larger cars. I live in a large UK city and it is mad the number of SUVs you see driving around.
Yes, I really have a hard time understanding that trend.
More than just the overall sizes of the cars (and they are big) it's those very high, flat fronts. That surely must be bad for visibility and bad for fuel efficiency at speed. I can only imagine people like that style because it looks more like a car and less like a minivan, which is what those enormous SUVs really are.
The market (either producers or consumers or both) don't seem to care about visibility. If you sit in a 20 year old car vs a brand new car, visibility is clearly better in the 20 year old car; if you go back to a 40 year car, it's even better. I've got an 81 VW Vanagon, the visibility is really good: cabover [1] means there's no hood in front, clear vertical windows and no safety features makes it easy to see out in every direction. Terrible side mirror attachments are a negative, but I'm putting aftermarket windows that promise to hold position after adjustment.
[1] It's not really a cabover, the engine is in the rear. but the front seats are slightly in front of the front axle, and the windshield is at the front of the vehicle. Some contemporaries were really cab-over, like the Toyota Van (aka TownAce) although that has a sloped front which reduces drag and visibility.
Perversely they're higher partially because of pedestrian safety. More space between the engine and the bonnet and hinges that extend that space when a force is applied to the front of the car to cushion the impact. Euro NCAP has a whole category for pedestrian safety to test exactly these features.
Not partly, pretty much wholly.
Like every other safety regulation, it's a stupid game of stupid optimization. You "score best" by keeping the dummy's head off the windshield so you make a big giant flop/crunch zone full of engineered plastics and empty void spaces that is (ideally) at least as tall as the dummy's center of mass (belly button). This is why every car, suv, crossover, whatever that's expected to be sold in europe (including most of the small SUVs and crossovers that people complain about in North America) has a tall(er than it would have been 20yr ago) hood line these days.
It can’t be just that, surely? Or the more traditional sloped fronts would be gone completely.
I don’t think people are buying these because they’re safer for pedestrians, they’re buying them because they like the way they look, and/or because they (the drivers) feel safer when they’re in a huge box sitting high up, looming over the surrounding cars.
For the most part, cars are being designed to meet the required safety regulations in a way that constrains what they are able to build. Gone are more angular designs because sharp angles are all points which people get caught/trapped by - definitely no flip up headlights either for the same reason. Larger A pillar supports to provide roll over protection and door frame rigidity. Larger fronts to provide better small overlap collision deference.
All together it results in all cars kind of looking the same. Shame in a way because my favourite looking car of all time is the Golf Mk2, very angular and boxy but it wouldn't have been made now.
When they started it was mostly a styling thing, think like Toyota copycatting the Dodge Charger front profile. The big tradeoff was "but muh fuel economy" and those people got over-ruled. And now 10-20yr later the industry has adapted and optimized for them in the form of utilizing them for crash purposes (and big cooling systems). The safety people consider them integral and so they can't be gotten rid of and the aerodynamics people are no longer whining so hard because they've spent the years figuring out how to somewhat mitigate them.
I think in an alternative universe where none of that happened we likely would have invested the R&D elsewhere and found creative ways to get the same results (you can see inklings of this like the airbag style hood lift thing) with much lower more aerodynamics and visibility friendly hood lines.
But that's just my opinion from being on the fringes of the industry.
Except the NCAP test is flawed and everyone knows it. They are testing a SUV-pedestrian collision that doesn't actually happen and then rating the SUV's as super safe based on it when based on empirical evidence SUVs are vastly more dangerous to pedestrians in a collision as pedestrians (especially children) and vastly more likely to be dragged under than thrown onto the bonnet.
I dont see why. Like outside of specifically seppo produced coal wagons, the bigger cars\trucks\suvs are shipping with all safety features by default. I have 360 degree cameras at slow speed, sensors that go off if theres a loose branch within a meter of the car. I have more faith in my big car than I did with my older hatchback which only had a reversing cam.
Because bigger cars carry more energy, have poorer driver visibility, and are more likely to result in pedestrians going under the vehicle due to higher bonnet lines.
Big cars make drivers feel safer. But the stats are quite clear, they kill more pedestrians, and, ironically, are more likely to kill their drivers due their roll over risk.
The safety features might help, but they’re just compensating for all the additional risk bigger vehicles bring. You simply can’t beat physics.
I mean in terms of driver visibility, you can absolutely improve that. My forward camera is below a toddlers head height and fisheyed like no ones business. And thats before the sensors.
The question of IF a collision occurs, will the larger car do more damage, obviously it will. Well maybe not obviously, if the sensors are throwing on my breaks earlier than I can react there can be substantially less energy on that front too.
But in terms of frequency I feel like they have taken extreme measures to substantially reduce the risk of the collision occurring in the first place.
Do you have Individual Vehicle Approval? It’s shocking how many gigantic Dodge Rams (which do not meet EU safety rules) are driving around the Netherlands. One killed a 23 year old cyclist a few weeks ago.
I hope there's progress being made to close the import loophole: https://www.ecf.com/en/news/eu-commission-acknowledges-regul...
Meanwhile, there's a group (mostly in Britain) that sometimes lets the air out of the tyres of inappropriate vehicles [1] and sometimes drills holes in them [2].
From [3], "My mother is in palliative care and I came to the car to go to her, but because of your vicious act, I am stuck trying to reinflate my tyres!" — I have no sympathy whatsoever. She bought the 'car', she can call a taxi if the journey is urgent.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/who-are-the-tyre-extinguishe... / https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/29/tyre-ext...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/07/activist...
[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg67xeqp296o
We have IVA in the UK but it is mostly used to import Japanese cars at the moment because you only need a few modifications to most cars (fog lights, indicators) and the Yen is weak at the moment so a lot of people are importing cars like the Suzuki Jimny which meet our standards but aren't sold due to Europe wide emissions regulations. You would have to do a lot more to an American car because the safety standards are different so it isn't an attractive option unless you really want a specific vehicle at any cost.
Don't worry, our dear leaders are already hard at work giving up their people's safety and ensuring we bend over backwards to appease the US. Such vehicles will be able to drive in the EU with no hurdles.
Fuck me
You don't need to wonder, the reversal is already well under way.
There is a compensating rise in small EV also so hopefully that will cancel things out
Putting in roundabouts as a default so many years ago (as described in the article) makes a huge difference the the road infrastructure in the UK. They take up a lot more space, but the lack of stop-start traffic light intersections makes a completely changes how people move around. Bigger, more complex roundabouts do have traffic lights, but straight-up road intersections with traffic lights are the exception.
As somebody who has driven in a few places around the World, I would say that overall the standard of driving and safety is remarkably high in the UK given that the road layouts are often quite confusing (we have roads in use today from Roman, Saxon, Norman, Medieval, Tudor and more modern phases of development, so it can get confusing), and the level of signage around some confusing layouts is much lower than, say, California.
This is because the rules are more complex, but actually get a license is, too. There are plenty of bad drivers, there are still idiots who drink/take drugs/use their mobile phones while driving, but it's way, way less than in some other parts of the World. And the rules of the road are broadly followed in terms of lane discipline and right of way in a way that they aren't in much of Europe or elsewhere.
I sometimes wish that we had clearer lane signage in some parts of the road network, like that seen in the US, but overall, once you get it, it's all very straightforward.
Getting my driver's license in France required 20 hours of instruction by an accredited driving school.
Getting my license in the US (CA and NJ) required... showing up with my own car.
And in New Jersey, they even forgot to make me take the actual driving test.
In California it's more than showing up (although I think none of the tests are particularly rigorous).
Minors must:
- Complete a 30 hour driver's education course and 6 hours of driver's training
- Pass a knowledge test with 80% or more questions answered correctly
- Apply for and receive an instruction permit
- Maintain the permit for 6+ months
- Drive with an 25+ year old adult supervising for at least 50 hours (including 10 night hours)
- Pass a behind-the-wheel test
Adults must:
- Pass a knowledge test with 80% or more questions answered correctly
- Apply for and receive an instruction permit
- Maintain the permit for 6+ months
- Drive with an adult supervising for at least 50 hours (including 10 night hours)
- Pass a behind-the-wheel test
Minors have additional restrictions on recently issued licenses.
iowa requires 30 hours of classroom training if you are under 18 - which almost everyone is when first getting a license. Once you have a licenese anywhere though you just show up. So your classroom time in frace counted in the us
20 hours? You were a quick one, that took me close to 40. Though I never was a very good driver, the car I crashed can attest to that (and thankfully with no corporal damage other than a bruised ego).
20 hours was the mandatory (minimum) amount. I think I did around 25.
Confusing roads are safer though, it forces drivers to pay more attention
Kinda.
In South Kensington, they spent a fortune trying to use this non-delineated road setup where its not clear quite where the pavements (sidewalks for the USians), and road borders are, and in theory it means everybody just becomes very hyper aware of each other.
The theory goes something like how cycle lanes - just the a white line down the side of the road - can cause drivers to pass much closer to cyclists than they otherwise would without that border there, where a driver might slow and move a few feet out to the side on a single carriageway.
In reality, it's actually kind of anxiety inducing, particularly if you're in a larger crowd (common at this time of year, as Royal Albert Hall where proms season is coming to a close is at one end of this area), because drivers don't really seem to know what is going on.
I suspect it means cars are, on average, slowing down, but I can't find stats on whether its reduced accidents or not. I know it makes me nervous though.
It’s South Kensington, part of council that’s notorious for its hatred of anything that even vaguely looks like a bike or a bike lane. Their attitudes to road design are despicable, with a clear priority for cars over any other road user. It often feels like they only provide pedestrian or cycle infrastructure as a grudging acknowledgement of the fact the vast majority of people walk or cycle, and car users are in the minority.
All of that is a long way of saying that any road infrastructure South Kensington designed is going to be a long way behind best practice for pedestrian safety, even when they’re trying.
More importantly, it selects against a lot of nervous, disabled, young, drunk and other bad drivers.
Yeah, better to be confused and drive in to a ditch at 20 mph than confident and t-bone a family at 50.
Not sure what you mean about disabled?
If nothing else a confusing road will get drivers to put the goddamn phone down.
>Yeah, better to be confused and drive in to a ditch at 20 mph than confident and t-bone a family at 50.
This shouldn't be subjective at all. It's very easy to calculate out minutes lost to traffic from minor accidents vs death causing accidents and compare the two and see where the crossover points are depending upon their relative rates and impacts.
To use an extreme hypothetical example, I don't even know how old you are but it's probably perfectly justifiable 10x over to just shoot you (or me or anyone short of the pope) and throw you in the Hudson if the alternative is "the George Washington is closed for 6hr" or something.
And on the other end of the spectrum roads get closed for months on whims for maintenance reasons in rural areas all the time and probably have less cumulative life lost than, idk, some mundane waste of time.
I'm not privy to the numbers for all the real world situations that exist in the middle ground but I'm sure they're out there and once you've got them it's simple math to decide what configuration results in less life lost. Obviously you can pro-rate the years, account for disability and injury, add money to the equation, etc. But that's all easy if you've got the numbers (which we generally do for auto accidents).
By disabled I mean, for example, my father has polio and has driven his entire life in the US but would be unable to do so physically in the UK because of the demands the civil engineering would impose on him here.
To be honest, that sounds like he's not safe to drive in the US either.
He had one accident in almost 60 years of driving, so I think he'd be on the safe end of human statistics. But then again, what human is safe to drive?
[Edit: I should note that he's stopped driving over the last couple of years.]
I've lived in the UK for over 15 years now and I still can't get over people's general allergy for using indicators. And I know the test and training specifically tell you that you must use indicators when changing lanes and turning, but if I had a penny for every time I see someone on the motorway changing lanes without indicating I'd make a very good middle class salary from that alone.
But yes, other than this people do generally drive really safely. I especially like how people mostly keep to the 30mph limit in towns(but then again, people get literally offended when you say you keep to the 20mph limit, like you're some kind of idiot for doing so).
30mph is an unsafe speed for towns or anywhere where cars coexist with pedestrians or bikes.
From the footer:
> Our World in Data is a project of Global Change Data Lab, a nonprofit based in the UK (Reg. Charity No. 1186433).
I'm a Brit too, but this article felt a bit too self-congratulatory given I've read other recent reports about other places (cites, regions, and entire countries) with overall safer roads; kinda like how we love to tell everyone how chuffed we are with how safe our AC plugs are.
The article starts off with a graph showing the UK has 2 deaths per 100k people, with Norway, Malta, Singapore, and Sweden at 1.9. It then finishes by saying:
> If every country could lower its rates to those of the UK, Sweden, or Norway, this number would be just under 200,000. We’d save one million lives every year.
The article wasn’t making the case that the UK is the absolute best, it was discussing what the UK did to change from being unsafe to much safer.
Our AC plugs are, however, the safest design on the planet.
I think if these guys are honest about their numbers - and the main number they're calling out is a 22-fold decline in road deaths per mile driven in the last 75 years, which is remarkable - and shows those other safer regions in their comparisons, what is the problem?
> Our AC plugs are, however, the safest design on the planet.
Not if you step on them with bare feet - those things are worse than LEGO. They could punch through a horse's hoof.
In 55 years I've never managed to do that, nor has anyone else I know. Plugs normally stay in the wall socket because they have a switch - each wall socket for general use must have a switch. The switch is quite hefty and very obviously off or on, with a red stripe. You get a satisfying audible and tactile click feedback when it is switched.
Recently a person brought in a laptop that had apparently been accidentally brushed off a desk, whilst closed, and had apparently fallen on an upturned plug. The plug had managed to hit the back of the screen, left quite a dent and spider cracking on the screen. The centre of the cracking did not match the dent ...
I'll have to do some trials but even if a plug is left on the ground, will it actually lie prongs upwards? I'll have to investigate lead torsion and all sorts of effects. Its on the to do list but not very high.
Don't leave them unplugged. The standard requires all modern sockets to have switches, so there is no reason to have the plugs lying around on the floor.
I’ve never had an experience in any house or office where there’s been enough sockets to leave everything plugged.
I've never had an experience in any house or office where anything has ever been unplugged other than to put it away (a kitchen appliance that doesn't need to live on a counter, or a hair dryer, for example).
Buy a fused extension cord with more plugs, you have now turned one socket into 4, 6, or 8 sockets. You can even get some that have USB built-in, so you don't use a socket up for a phone or tablet charger. They're not even very expensive.
And in an office, I'm pretty sure all equipment (computers, lights, controls for adjustable desks if you have them), are meant to remain permanently plugged in anyway in a properly installed desk setup. What is going on in your office where you're choosing what is plugged in and what isn't, constantly? And why can't your office manager spring £20 for an extension cord with multiple sockets?
I've never stepped on a plug myself, so I agree it's not a major problem.
However, some older houses in the UK have far fewer sockets than more modern properties - sometimes only one or two per room.
And sure, if you need to use a hairdryer and a hair straightener a person with an orderly lifestyle might return them both to a cupboard afterwards - but some people don't mind clutter and just leave them wherever.
When it comes to multiway extension leads - people in the UK are sometimes told it's bad to "overload" sockets but have only a vague understanding of what that means, so some people are reluctant to use them.
"When it comes to multiway extension leads - people in the UK are sometimes told it's bad to "overload" sockets but have only a vague understanding of what that means, so some people are reluctant to use them."
To be fair, most people work on the assumption that if the consumer unit doesn't complain, then it is fair game. They are relying on modern standards, which nowadays is quite reasonable. I suppose it is good that we can nowadays rely on standards.
However, I have lived in a couple of houses with fuse wire boards, one of which the previous occupants put in a nail for a circuit that kept burning out.
Good practice is to put a low rated fuse - eg 5A (red) into extension leads for most devices. A tuppence part is easy and cheap to replace but if a few devices not involved with room heating/cooling blow a 5A fuse, you need to investigate. A hair dryer, for example, should not blow a 5A fuse.
Hair dryer and straightener would both be on a counter, right? No stepping issue there. And the same for appliance switching.
The only thing I plug in at ground level that isn't semi-permanent is a vacuum. No plugs are left lying around all day.
they are also really tough to swallow
why are you stepping on them?
Sometimes you've just got to put your foot down.
because sometimes you unplug it and leave it around. unless you live like a king sometimes there is 2 sockets and you have 5 devices to plug at different times. european and other ones will be on the side so stepping on it is no problem but uk ones will be the pointy end up
> european and other ones will be on the side
There's almost a dozen different plug/socket types used in Europe though: https://www.plugsocketmuseum.nl/Overview.html
I will say, you definitely can tread on a German "Schuhko" plug (if it has a flat face) just like a UK one.
Live like a king!
Are these prices beyond your means?
https://www.argos.co.uk/search/extension-lead/
That’s a nice reminder that they should be respected. Not left lying around.
>kinda like how we love to tell everyone how chuffed we are with how safe our AC plugs are.
I would actually love to see some data that compares total deaths and injuries per capita from electrocution from plugs across different countries. I have a feeling the total worldwide figures are tiny in comparison to injuries from stepping barefoot/putting your knee on UK plugs.
Also, UK plugs tend to have the wire coming out the bottom and then curving upwards as the electrical device is usually above the socket, over time resulting in an exposed wire, while most other plugs have the wire coming out the centre.
I've never seen a plug that has an exposed wire for that reason - all the plugs have a heavy clamp internally that attaches to the outer sheath, preventing the movement that would cause this. I would suspect that any plugs where wear has caused exposure are either properly ancient, or were wired incorrectly (eg by trimming the outer sheath short of the clamp).
The nominal idea is that having them come straight out encourages people to remove plugs by pulling on the cord, which introduces even more strain than having a curved wire - although maybe this ends up being an argument to mount UK sockets the other way up?
The big danger from outlets and plugs is fire rather than electric shock, which is what you'd need to compare.
> kinda like how we love to tell everyone how chuffed we are with how safe our AC plugs are.
I never see Brits saying this. Only people from other nations.
The plugs are the safest though!
Oblig: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEfP1OKKz_Q
Oblig:
https://youtu.be/139Q61ty4C0?feature=shared
https://youtu.be/92YHhed3B-Y?feature=shared
https://youtu.be/dTPuYf30B1M?feature=shared
https://youtu.be/efh4k6TJa2c?feature=shared
https://youtu.be/2rQiiOKIEcU?feature=shared
https://youtu.be/eeT5xtc_Dd4?feature=shared
+1000s more…
> I never see Brits saying this
...but that was my point: Tom Scott is British.
Right. I had never seen it. That was my point.
Now I’ve seen 1.
It would be more interesting to compare the rates of serious injury (including death), I think. That would remove the effect of improvements in medical treatement over time.
Definitely self-congratulatory.
I chose active travel over car dependency at an early age. I also worked in the cycle trade. My opinion is that roads have become far more dangerous, however, most of what can be killed by the car has already been killed and the reason for fewer deaths is slimmer pickings.
Children and the elderly are two canaries in the coal mine.
Kids used to get new bicycles at Christmas, play in the streets and be 'free range' in the UK. Nowadays they are all welded to mobile phones and cocooned in SUVs. Only something like one on four know how to ride a bicycle nowadays and that Christmas trade in bicycles died thirty years ago.
Although you see a fair few Lime bikes and people commuting by bicycle in London, most bicycles are sold to rich people for them to strap to cars, for them to drive to a designated safe spot, for them to ride from the car park in a loop back to the car park. You never see these bicycles parked up next to the door at a supermarket or even at a railway station, partly due to the risk of theft, but also due to the dangers of the road.
As for the elderly, nowadays they are boomers and they all have cars. They only give up their car keys when they get condemned to retirement homes. Hence, like kids, old people are not to be found in the streets, unless cocooned in tin boxes.
As for being cocooned in a tin box, what happened to spirited driving? In the 1970s it was normal for people to cross the country with no sat nav or seat belt, driving as if they were in a Group B rally car, taking their special shortcuts, drunk, with cigarette in hand. Nowadays this doesn't happen, people in cars just shuffle from traffic light to traffic light fearing CCTV and speed cameras.
We have also priced out younger motorists, who would have been the 'spirited drivers'.
Hitchhiking used to exist in the 1970s. Thatcher era stranger danger put an end to that, so nobody hitchhikes these days. Does this mean that hitchhiking is safer? No!
There is another aspect of car dependency and 'safety'. Sure, you might not get killed in an ultra-violent crash in a tin-box cocoon, however, what about cardiovascular disease? Being car dependent and eating the convenience foods of the car dependent is a shortcut to obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, cognitive decline and death by blocked arteries.
The government knows this, and this is why 'active travel' is a phrase. By 2030 the UK government wants more than half of all journeys in built up areas to be 'active travel' rather than lame car dependency.
But why is it that countries that are culturally close to Britain (eg colonies) have much higher fatality rates? You'd expect them to have implemented some of the same policies. Singapore and Malta have similar rates, but the others are much higher.
Regarding roundabouts, it makes sense when explained like in the article. But I've always felt like they were dangerous, especially the ones they have in Britain where you have multiple lanes with lights and connecting roundabouts. Perhaps that sense of fear is what actually makes them safe.
Because they don't have the same road use culture.
Ireland has followed the same trend, slightly behind the UK.
Finally something positive about the UK. Usually the crowd will come in with pitchforks swinging everytime there is something about UK housing or politics going wrong.
I have children who are now approaching, or have approached large independence milestones. By the time I was my eldest's age (no just in high school [11-13 years old]) I knew of at least one kid from my school (a school of 55) who had died in a road accident.
By the time I had left sixth form (18), two other people from my high school had died in RTAs and two others had life changing injuries.
Granted this was rural east of england, so the roads were/are more dangerous.
However those last crashes triggered changes to the layout of the roads where they happened. This wasn't some line painting thing either, complete junction change from a y junction to a roundabout with re-grade of the road to improve visibility.
Much as it pisses me off, speed cameras, bumps and "low" speed limits are almost always a reaction to road deaths.
All of this means that my kids, who go to a much bigger school (500 and 1500 respectively) have not lost people they know to road crashes.
objectively kids are much much safer outside than any 80s kids. Yet, for whatever reason we don't think thats the case.
Similarly, Ireland has seen a massive drop in road deaths, but one problem is that a lot of that improvement came from removing vulnerable road users - the kids biking and walking to school, etc are now much more likely to be in a car. (The US is similar - biking or walking to primary school was once the norm). Similarly you’d have zero drownings if you threw sharks in every pool. I do wish we could acknowledge that a lot of the improvement in road “safety” was a result of people just removing themselves from places where cars are.
No, that’s not true. Walking and cycling did decline, but risk per kilometre for has also fallen sharply (by approximately 50%) over the same period. Vulnerable road users are safer now than they ever were, despite similar actual numbers using the road network due to population growth and profile.
The main factors behind the fall in deaths:
* drink-driving enforcement, * seatbelt enforcement, * speed limits and speed cameras, * NCT improving the vehicle fleet, * road engineering changes, * driver training.
So the “sharks in the pool” analogy is absurd. Everyone is safer, including the most vulnerable road users, so a better analogy is the road network has changed from shark-infested seas to a managed watercourse with swimmers, surfers, and boaters are seeing vastly fewer deaths or injuries.
> By the time I had left sixth form (18), two other people from my high school had died in RTAs and two others had life changing injuries.
I think your experience is extremely unlucky. I went to a school in London (in the 80s) with around a 1,000 kids from 8 to 18 and there was one road death, and two injuries, all in the same accident, in all the time i was there. I did not know the buy who died personally, although i knew one of the others who was in the car.
I agree with you about the improvements in general. I do think the 20mph limits where I now live (and in some other places) seem a bit random, and there are some difficult A road junctions that I think the really could do with lower limits or other improvements that do not have them.
Absolutely true that kids are objectively much safer, but people have grown fearful. I wonder whether being safer has made people less tolerant of risk more than risks have diminished. Its common to hear arguments that anything that might save even one life is worth doing.
> I think your experience is extremely unlucky
You're probably right on that.
I'm in a london suburb now as well, which may also has something to do with it. I think the big difference is that there isn't anywhere where you can drive on to a 70mph road in the dark without a long merging lane.
> I do think the 20mph limits where I now live (and in some other places) seem a bit random,
I don't mind them being random so much, but what I hate is that they dont (or didn't) put repeater speed limit signs in 20mph zones. They normally put the signs on the road at junctions, where I'm looking for other dangers (pedestrians/cyclists and other cars)
So its fairly easy to either be dawdling in 30 or doing point/fine incurring speeds in a 20
I agree entirely that A roads and city roads are a LOT safer than country lanes. Easier to drive on too. I find London more stressful and harder work to drive in - it may well be safer, but its harder. I far prefer public transport in big cities and I have not driven in London for years.
The only time I have tripped a speed camera was doing 57 on an A road after missing the temporarily lower 50 limit for road works in the night.
The road I currently I find hardest is one road where the limit keeps changing. its pretty much the same all the way along (residential area, so default would be 30, but wide as its an A road or a continuation of one). It changes four or five times over a few miles.
Rural and metro areas, especially before traffic calming mesures of the last 20 years, were very different. I'm not from the UK, but in Brittany, everybody know of a schoolmate who died from traffic (especially since you have one high-school for like 15 towns, so in a way, you're schoolmate with half the kids in your area)
Rural roads still often lacking in safety in the UK.
In my opinion some of this is simply due to how congested built up areas are today. It's genuinely hard to get up to 30 in a city or any populated area in the UK today, and most cities in the UK now have 20mph speed limits when there's likely to be pedestrians around.
It's pretty hard to kill people if you're driving under 30, and anywhere people are driving in excess of 30 it's not that populated and cars these days are pretty safe unless you have a head on collision at significant speed.
That and the speed limits are actually enforced, at least significantly more so than they seem to be here in California:
- Lots more speed cameras
- Average speed cameras especially make a huge difference vs spot enforcement
- Tolerance for enforcement is normally 10% rather than 10 mph (i.e. 30 limit means no more than 33mph rather than no more than 40mph)
As an American who drove for 20 years before obtaining a license in the UK, I can offer some observations.
First, driving in the UK is much more a privilege than a right as in the US. You can live a complete life in the UK without a license because of the wide availability of public transit. In the US however, if you want to maintain a steady job outside of NYC, Chicago, DC, Boston or perhaps a few others, you'll have to drive. Revoking a driver's license in the US can be life-altering in a way that it just won't in the UK. Fewer people bother getting the license and fewer still drive.
Second, driving is much more physically and mentally demanding in the UK. Perhaps that serves to reduce traffic deaths by forcing focus, but it also imposes a limit on the types of people who can drive here. This selects against too young, too old, too small, disabled, etc. in a way that would not be tolerated in the US for the above reasons.
Third, annual vehicle inspections are much more stringent in the UK which takes a lot of older vehicles off the road and again selects against those of lower socio-economic status in a way that would be unconscionable in the US.
I don't know I'm the same and find being in the valley more stressful than the drive to wembley from central London. More taxing mentally to have insane people passing you at 100mph. The licensing is harder but still was a one shot 5 hour prep thing for me.
There is data for Australia as well that shows a similar decline.
It's worth looking at the road deaths data in wikipedia at :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...
The road toll of 1266 in 2023 and 4.8 fatalities per 100K residents is and comparing it to 1970 where it was 3,798 and 30.4 per 100K residents.
Even the trend on deaths per 100K residents is down from 8.15 per 100K residents in 2003 and has declined to 4.4 in 2023.
In terms of road fatalities per billion kilometres driven it's down from 44 per billion kilometres traveled in 1971 to 4.4 in 2020.
It's really interesting to see how many single vehicle accidents there were and the breakdown of who was killed.
From : https://www.carexpert.com.au/car-news/australias-catastrophi... "48 per cent of deaths recorded were drivers, while 20 per cent were motorcyclists, 16 per cent were passengers and 12.5 per cent were pedestrians.
304 women were killed over the 12 months, while the report recorded 956 male deaths. 792 deaths occurred during weekdays and 474 victims were killed over a weekend."
The breakdown on where the crashes happened is interesting
"A total of 326 people died in major cities across Australia, with 581 deaths in regional Australia and 63 in remote or very remote parts of the country."
Given that the vast majority of Australians live in major cities it's surprising.
It's really surprising how many accidents are single vehicle :
"Out of 1266 deaths, 490 victims were involved in multiple-vehicle road incidents, whereas 776 people who died were involved in single-vehicle crashes."
On top of this it should be added that in a review of fatalities in Victoria ~52% of the crashes involved a driver who tested positive for alcohol or drugs or both.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00014...
41% of fatalities are estimated to involve speeding.
https://www.transport.nsw.gov.au/roadsafety/topics-tips/spee...
My least favourite part of driving in the UK is that a road like this[1] (chosen at random from rural roads) has a speed-limit of 60mph/95kmh
0: https://www.google.com/maps/@51.358056,-2.6822578,3a,75y,344...
The national speed limit for a single carriageway is 60mph, and for two or more carriageways is 70mph.
That's the default. These were introduced in the 1950s - before then, there was no national speed limit.
Councils and highway agencies can then decide due to a number of factors to reduce that number to what they deem appropriate. Most councils pull that down to 40mph in unpopulated areas, 30mph in built-up areas. Some councils - and the whole of Wales - pulled the built-up limit down to 20mph.
The Highways Agency has deemed some parts of the motorway network aren't safe at 70mph, so will drop the speed appropriately. Sometimes permanently (50mph on junctions is common), sometimes dynamically (overhead gantrys). It's all fine.
This is how the UK works - you set a default, and then let councils figure out things for themselves.
What you seem to be missing is that this is not a speed target. In most of the UK (notable exceptions include Greater Manchester and Hull, in my experience), drivers do not aim to get to that speed, they use their judgement.
On that road, there is no way much over 30mph is safe, as you don't have line of sight to oncoming traffic within a stopping distance. Do you know how I know that? The driving lessons and tests I took are far, far better than most in the World, even those my parents took.
Nobody is driving that road at 60mph without a death wish, but it doesn't mean we need to spend thousands of pounds per mile dropping the limit and then struggling to actually enforce it.
> The national speed limit for a single carriageway is 60mph, and for two or more carriageways is 70mph.
> That's the default. These were introduced in the 1950s - before then, there was no national speed limit.
There's no reason the default can't be changed. Ireland recently dropped the default speed limit on rural roads from 80km/h to 60km/h and regional from 100km/h to 80km/h. Councils can and do override the limits where appropriate, but in practice it requires an engineer's report which often doesn't, as the roads genuinely aren't suitable.
That would place the road above at a 37mi/h speed limit, which while still too fast for the conditions (it should be a 10 km/h or 6 mi/h road to support vulnerable road users) sends a much more reasonable message.
As others have said, a limit not a target. But also, how fast you can travel along a road sensibly very much depends on conditions. If you do let people think of the limit as a target, you'd better set the limit low enough that it's still appropriate in terrible conditions.
As a specific (and horrific) example, this doctor was found to be mostly liable for a collision that happened due to her speed, while still under the speed limit: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-66121540
My general take is that I try to drive as if a maniac (meaning anyone who might think it's reasonable to drive faster than I do) is about to come the other way along the road. I should be able to stop within my sight-lines if the road is wide enough to take evasive action, and well within half that distance if the road is narrow.
I think this type of road combined with satnavs makes them more dangerous - number of times ill enter a destination on my satnav and its trying to send me on some lane
I notice it when cycling too - there is more traffic on these lane - and the drivers think they can drive along like some A-road
I like the 60mph limit. I'm coming from a rural background where it's unlikely anyone would set the speed limit for each individual road correctly. National speed limit is saying "you can go up to 60mph, this isn't necessarily the correct speed for the road"
There are quite a few rural roads where it is a perfectly reasonable speed (straight, wide, 2 lane), and plenty of roads where you physically couldn't get your car past 40mph without fecking it into a hedge. It's a limit, not a maximum, and it's that way so we can trust people's judgement based on the current conditions of a road, which is (at least in a rural context) almost certainly more accurate than what a council would set.
You don't have to drive 60 mph there though. You can use your judgement.
I'm more used to France's 90 km/h countryside roads (now 80 km/h for most of them) but it's the same, sometimes you can only drive 70 or 50, but sometimes 90 is perfectly fine. But you should be able to see it for yourself, and in the specific places where you can't see the danger there are generally signs and a lower speed limit.
I drive 20 miles a day on single track roads. The widths vary from a few passing places which you have to reverse if you meet a horse or bike coming the other way, let alone a tractor or lorry, to places where you can just about pass a large vehicle without stopping, and easily pass a car. There’s even a handful of places you can overtake if the car in front stays to the left and nothing is coming.
Safe speeds vary from 15 to over 60 depending on the visibility.
If you get stuck behind an idiot it can add 10 minutes to the journey. On a clear road it takes under 15 minutes to do the 10 miles each way, but get stuck behind someone who hasn’t hit a clue, prevents you from overtaking in the places you can (one of which is about half a mile of 30mph where the idiots inevitably speed), refuses to pull in to let you past, spends forever trying to get into a passing place etc and it can take nearer 30. Get that in each direction and that’s an extra half hour a day — it’s very frustrating.
There should be a separate license for driving on country roads
It's not country road driving. What you're calling an "idiot" is probably just someone who doesn't know the roads. You'd have the same problem elsewhere.
If you are causing a delay you are responsible for pulling over.
Most slow vehicles do - bikes, horses, tractors. Just the idiot townies who filled their sat nav rather than the diversion signs.
You get people doing 15mph down a road like this
https://maps.app.goo.gl/76GxECaTe9ESePGY9?g_st=ic
They should be banned.
> You get people doing 15mph down a road like this
What speed do you think is appropriate on that road?
Given that it's the A836, it's worth constrasting this with the fact that in 2025 many of the people committing traffic offences on the coastal part of that road just to the north were locals, not "townies" unfamiliar with the area.
* https://www.johnogroat-journal.co.uk/news/vast-majority-of-s...
And then, of course, there's the part of the A836 further south known as the Balblair Straight.
* https://news.stv.tv/highlands-islands/death-of-pensioner-ang...
Yeah. I do think 15mi/h or 24km/h is appropriate speed for that road if you want it to be usable by vulnerable road users.
I just wondered what hdgvhicv considered appropriate.
Any slow speed can be appropriate for those vulnerable users, if they let other people pass them where appropriate. (On roads that don't have a speed minimum.)
That doesn't make it appropriate in general. 15mph is not appropriate for a paved line through nothing with gentle curves and great visibility.
You don't have to do 60mph, this is true, but there are lots of people that will try to.
Correct - it's a LIMIT not a TARGET.
I recently saw one with a 'national speed limit' (i.e. 60mph) sign, and right below it: 'not suitable for motor vehicles' (an advisory sign, so no legal weight behind it). It's the default for anything considered a road, and generally unless proven otherwise the government is reasonably happy to let people use their judgement on lower-traffic areas.
I think a national speed limit is a sensible system. In many countries, every random stretch of road has a different speed limit, as though driving speeds have been centrally planned - usually poorly.
Expecting the driver to be an educated and safe driver who is capable of judging the appropriate speed for the road is far superior. This also inculcates a better attitude in the driver - the speed limit is not a target.
If I was doing 60mph instead of ~50mph these motorbikers would be dead (me too probably):
https://www.reddit.com/r/IdiotsOnBikes/comments/debwm4/2_bik...
you're pullin my leg. is that a proper road or a bicycle path?
It's a road. And it's also used for cycling, and walking. You just have to be extra careful.
Proper road, very common type of road in the countryside. You're lucky there it doesn't have grass up the middle. You'd realistically be doing about 20mph on it, although speeding up when you can see far ahead and it's straight, slowing down coming up to a bend where you cant see what's coming.
> You'd realistically be doing about 20mph on it
This is not my experience riding as a passenger with locals
It's a road, and people will do 60 mph down these.
tldr; speed limits
UK is extremely risk-averse. In the case of road safety, it shows: a lot of time and cash goes into minimising deaths.
This is not only road users: roadworks have restrictive speed limits, which are not taken down when there is no workforce out, to minimise risk to workers setting and unsetting limits, traffic cones etc. Things that in other countries would close a lane often close the whole road, again because of risks to road users and maintenance people.
This is of course great, but also very expensive - and I cannot shake the feeling that the UK loses so much money on this risk aversion that is actually causes more hazard due to underinvestment elsewhere. NHS is crumbling, the very safe roads take forever to navigate, introducing inefficiencies and starving the central budget of cash. GDP per capita has barely grown since 2008. Even a small annual boost would unlock a lot of cash for investment, in particular into NHS and saving lives.
It's like putting all your pension investments into bonds, because they are safer. But you swap market risk for the risk of not having enough cash when you retire.
But maybe it's easy to have this perspective because I have a desk job and commute by public transport.
Seems a rather tenuous link to the state of the NHS. The UK has a lower tax regime than most equivalent nations. If we wanted a better NHS we could just collect similar tax rates to that of Germany or other western nations.
One of the issues is we’re trapped with a media ecosystem that won’t even allow progressive parties to say “we’ll take a bit more in tax and in return you’ll get a functioning health service”, instead they feel they have to promise to run the economy like the Tories (which is mind numbing).
It’s not just the recent Labour election I’m referring to. The first time Blair got in it was the same.
We get the services we deserve.
It's not just the roads, it's everything. Most pension money is invested in UK bonds. UK treasury department focuses on a set of very narrow spending criteria, so much so that it's hard for governments to spend money on investments.
And then it's not just the NHS. My point is, rather, that extreme risk aversion in the short term can actually increase the medium-term risk. If the UK could generate a few extra 0.1% of GDP growth per year in exchange for some risk, that would seem an overall better world to be in.
That's pretty much been Lib Dem policy since 1992, but they finally gave up on it in 2023: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66910334
Two paragraphs and a couple of sentences ...
Imagine how much further forward we could have been if we started at this simple point of truth.
> The UK has a lower tax regime than most equivalent nations. If we wanted a better NHS we could just collect similar tax rates to that of Germany or other western nations.
This is largely untrue today since the Conservatives have significantly increased taxes over the last decade. As it stands I think Germany only taxes around 1-2% more of GDP than us.
The primary difference between Germany and the UK in terms of public service funding is that the UK funds most of it's healthcare via taxation where as Germany operates a duel model which means healthcare isn't funded so much from taxation, meaning they have more money for other things.
Additionally, Germany has a much higher per-capita GDP which means they can afford significantly better public services even if they tax an equivalent share of GDP.
Finally what Germany funds with additional taxation the UK more than makes up for by running much larger deficits. The issue isn't that the UK government isn't spending enough as a share of GDP.
I'll guess you've probably not done a huge amount of project management for infrastructure projects then. I can wager most road projects wouldn't be completed quicker if safety barriers had to be removed/reconstructed on a daily basis.
Equally, nobody in the construction trade gets into it to get killed in an accident, especially ones avoided by just having traffic move at slightly lower speeds.