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.
I live in the US in a town with particularly bad drivers. I know I know, everyone's area has the worst drivers. But I've lived in dozen cities across the US so have some frame of reference. The sad thing is, it's a small town with what -should- be little traffic.
It's one of those places there will only be 2 other cars in sight, but they're driving side by side and 10 under the speed limit. And for some reason, everyone seems to just hold down their brake pedal at all times so you can never tell when they're actually slowing. I presume they're driving an automatic with two feet and keep just enough pressure to trigger the brakelights. And everyone, even the Kia Rios, drives in the opposite lane before turning so they can swing wide like a semi. I could go on and on but I digress.
Anyways, it had been an enigma to me for the last few years since I moved here, until one day I was asked to take a lady to her driving test. Sure, why not.
The entirety of the 5 minute road test was turning out right onto a sparsely populated 2 lane highway, driving anxiously at 35 in a 55 for a mile or so, then turning around and coming back. Passed. Suddenly, everything made more sense to me.
And I'm sure this isn't probably even the easiest test nationally, just one I became familiar with recently.
Wow - if it's a driving test that lets you drive anywhere in the States, then you'd think it'd be a national standard with set manoeuvres and situations to cover.
Can confirm that 6 right turns from getting into the car, comprising a single trip around the block was the full extent of my San Jose, CA driving test.
I left the DMV office significantly more scared of my fellow drivers than I had arrived…
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!
Makes sense that Finland has such things though, when the roads are covered in snow and ice for a lot of the year.
Though this year we did good in our capital: "Helsinki has not recorded a single traffic fatality in the past 12 months, city and police officials confirmed this week."
Seems like we were either side of a threshold - I took mine ~35 years ago and the only "theory" test was the examiner asking me three basic questions after the practical test, like "what can lead to skidding" to which the answer was "rapid acceleration, steering or braking". The theory side of things hardly existed essentially.
Same in Norway. Skid pans and also motorway driving. The course also includes a piece where the instructor picks a place an hour's drive away and tells the student to get there and demonstrate that they can not only drive under instruction but also plan their own route and react properly to challenges along the way.
Interestingly, I saw data from a road safety programme for young people that showed skid pan training actually made young men less safe not more, because they became even more overconfident about their ability to “react quickly” if bad things happened. Turns out that a bit of humility and slowing down are the main skills needed to avoid accidents!
That's true, on the other hand it made young women safer. This happened in Norway when the skid pan was made a compulsory part of the course a couple of decades ago and the insurance companies soon noticed an increase in reckless driving among young men but the opposite in young women.
> having spoken with US colleagues, much higher than state-side (although I imagine that varies from state to state).
You know, it does vary but relative to any other developed country it's pitiful in every state. The reality is we just hand out driver's licenses to whomever.
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.
The regulation I want for motorbikes is less noise. Its absolutely absurd what is allowed in most places. And if you modify the bike to make more noise you should never be allowed to drive again.
getting a full motorbike license is also expensive. there's a chicken and egg problem, which is that for an unrestricted license you must do the Mod1 and Mod2 on a 600cc bike or greater, which ofcourse you're not allowed to ride if you're on a CBT.
so you have to pay a school, and itll cost in total probably £1k or a bit more. when i did it, the guys also told me, there's basically only one company now that provides insurance for instructors/riding schools.
motorbiking i think is becoming less of a guy thing and more like skiing - an expensive, occasional thrill, but very much an upmarket upper-middle-class type of activity. there were more girls than guys at my lessons too, which was pretty surprising at first, but not really once you consider the prior.
which was very much at odds with the instructors, who were all guys' guys - when they got into it at 16, motorbiking was much cheaper than a car, and had a real economic argument to make (it was much cheaper all-round) - today, if you add up the insurance, protective gear, bike, and school money, you will be on-par with a car, which is far more practical.
I did my CBT a few months ago after driving for 30 years. It was harder than I assumed it would be. But what scared me the most was the 18 year old who did his at the same time, never driven on the road before. The phrase organ donor seemed appropriate, as mcarbre as it sounds.
This is probably a huge factor for sure. Both the UK theory and practical tests are somewhat tricky, at least compared to those in places like the US. Many people will fail them the first time around, and a fair few will fail them multiple times.
The official statistics have a rate of about 40-60% for these tests:
It's closer to a school exam in terms of difficulty, rather than the quick drive around a parking lot that it seems a lot of places have.
So people seem a lot more prepared than in many other places, since they actually have to be able to spot hazards and do driving maneuvers to get their license in the first place.
It covers some, lets say non-beginner situations that are pretty real and can make a difference between OK situation and multiple fatalities crash. A junior driver can still kill people as easily as anybody else, standards should be high.
And you should certainly drive in other countries, namely much worse and much better than yours (presumably US), they are both out there.
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.
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".
the US used to have unrestricted speeds outside town. The speed limit would be "reasonable and prudent". I think 1975 the 55mph national speed limit put an end to all of that.
> You're not supposed to drive 60mph on those tiny roads.
You are supposed to drive 60mph where appropriate, e.g. on straight stretches with good visibility and no junctions. It's very possible to fail your driving test for not going fast enough on a single carriageway.
> What you’re supposed to do is drive at a speed that gives you chance to react to dangers given your visibility and road surface conditions.
Indeed, I always think of my instructor's words "can you stop within the distance you can see". As that distance decreases, you should be slowing down; potentially there's a cyclist or horse right around the corner.
There’s an old guy that walks round the small country lanes at rush hour where I live. He wears a hi vis jacket but that doesn’t do much when you have trees and hedges blocking visibility.
I’m constantly amazed that some idiot hasn’t hit him.
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.
Sort of. That used to be the case, and it's still what they teach on those courses. However there are now "20mph zones". These are signed on entry, but do not have the repeated small 20 signs of a normal 20mph limit. This means that you can no longer tell whether you are in a 30 or a 20. I have once seen something marked as a "40mph zone" but I suspect that this was a local aberration and did not have a similar rule.
The difference is that in the US the defaults are jokes nobody abides by whereas in the UK they are, in some cases, numbers the "perhaps not lowest but normal person on a normal day" denominator will not find themselves wanting to exceed in basically every location where they apply.
Having just come back from visiting the in-laws in Gloucestershire (American raised on American roads), it took me a minute to comprehend the national speed limit rule. Nonetheless, I don’t think the rule matters much.
What matters more is the far stricter driver licensing and “Scarlet L” (my words) that the learners have to display.
That and the fact that it is bloody impossible to conduct 2 way traffic down country roads thanks to all the hedgerows and so everyone is extra careful and courteous (usually).
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.
In practice there seems to be a ton of correlation between people who say things like that and people who think their Fiat 500 stops like a garbage truck.
Yep. I remember being driven around roads like this with a friend with a high performance car who knew what he was doing, so could go what seemed like a terrifyingly high speed to me, but was perfectly safe for him. Then we hit some other cars going slower and he just followed at the same speed, infinitely patient for someone with a thirst for speed. Just completely happy to adjust to the appropriate speed for the situation.
People who know those roads drive fast, indeed, but it is not safe.
Visibility is poor and you cannot safely go through a bend at 50+ mph when you cannot see what's beyond it. There might be a stationary vehicle, a horse, a cyclists, even a pedestrian and you wouldn't know or be able to stop in time. This is how lethal collisions happen in those roads.
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.
I think the concept of a “speed limit” is part of the problem. On controlled-access roads, I think it would be better for the posted speed to be advisory and, instead, train drivers to think of driving too slow for your lane as being just as dangerous as speeding because, in a moving group of cars, you want to be as close to 0mph relative to the other cars as is feasible.
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.
That’s great just so long as your county roads doesn’t have any dog walkers or wildlife like deer.
The best case scenario then, is that you write off your car with a deer shaped hole in the front. The worst case scenario is you have a death on your conscience for the rest of your life.
If you're walking in the middle of the street in the middle of the night, in the middle of the woods, with no reflective clothing, and I hit you, it's your fault. I know how fast I'm driving. I can live with that.
I went to a wedding in Devon recently, friend of my wife’s whose family are all farmers and her brother was joking that it’d be fine to drive back drunk because the car would just bounce off the hedgerows…
As I suspected, poisoning most likely includes drug overdose. They have this comment about the 2023 data:
> #1: Poisoning: 100,304 deaths
> Largely due to the opioid epidemic affecting millions of people in the United States
You can see more recent data than 2004 in their interactive charts. It is interesting to see that deaths from road accidents has much reduced for teenagers and young adults, compared to the rest of the population.
For the pedestrians they might hit the opposite has happened in the US as cars have been replaces with giant trucks and SUVs with extremely poor visibility.
The US is a mobility and automobile obsessed society. Walking and cycling are usually associated with exercise or inability to drive due to lack of resources.
Combine that with an obsession to make cars available to anyone, even if they are known dangerous. Look up videos on YouTube of police pursuits in Florida, Georgia, Arkansas, Michigan. Those aren't exceptions, they are glimpses into a mass pathology. I believe Madison, Wisconsin was tracking multiple police pursuits per day in recent years. The subjects there frequently and deliberately drive on the wrong side of roads to compel the police to terminate the pursuits.
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.
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:
Not sure I completely agree (if the definition of vehicles is cars). That disregards miles travelled by cyclists and pedestrians etc. If 10% of the population switched from driving to cycling to work but the death numbers stayed the same, that metric would go up but really nothing would have changed, either mortality wise or in terms of number of people using the roads.
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%.
I prefer the death per people metric as I am more interested in how likely I am to receive some bad news than some metric based on distance.
Both measures have bias, the "per people" metric doesn't take into account when people are actually driving while the "per kilometer" metric puts too much emphasis on long distance driving, which is usually done on motorways where it is the safest. Maybe the best metric would be "per time spent on the road, including as a pedestrian on the sidewalk", but I guess it is harder to estimate.
Possibly even per trip? I'm confident my bicycle trips to the supermarket in the Netherlands is safer than a trip to Walmart in the US by car, but I spend way fewer kilometres doing the same job. That only makes it even safer, but I think is discounted in per-KM statistics?
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.
For those unaware, Boston (largest city in Massachusetts) has a reputation for incredibly aggressive drivers (so does New York City). Is Massachusetts relatively safer because it has so few freeways? I find it hard to believe this can be explained by "quality of drivers". Another idea: Maybe local police are very, very strict about drink/driving, thus reducing the number of deaths.
The conduct of the law enforcement professionals and people they associate with leading up to the events relevant to the trail is relevant to a discussion of how seriously they take DUI.
OK, how about this: how would someone who knows nothing about you other than your 2 comments here determine whether you think MA police take DUI seriously enough or whether you think they go too easy on DUI?
Read did drive under the influence and police and prosecutors laid harsh charges against her, but they could've laid those harsh charges (first- and second-degree murder IIRC) against her even if she had been stone sober that night, so it seems to me that the Read case says nothing about how harshly police and prosecutors treat ordinary DUIs.
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.
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.
The visibility is great and the side impact survivability is roughly equal to that of a claymore mine operated by an expert. Who knows you cheated on his sister.
The IIHS didn’t even start side impact ratings until 2003, which is a lot more recent than I would have ever guessed.
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.
You are correct, they are more dangerous. But the way the EuroNCAP test is constructed doesn't capture that danger. Leading to perverse, bogus results where SUVs are rated more safe for pedestrian collisions than small cars due to the artificial standard being applied.
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.
Does the Euro NCAP test for the likelihood of a collision occurring or only what happens if we assume a collision will occur? It's important, because if a class of vehicles is safer under the assumption of a collision but the collisions happen more frequently versus another class of vehicles, then it's pretty easy to imagine numbers such that the second class of vehicle is actually much safer for pedestrians in spite of a worse safety rating.
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.
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.
One small bit of good news is the Netherlands FINALLY closed the tax exception for these things. Until this year you’d pay no import tax if it was for “business” (NL has a huge number of self employed people who just lie about what the truck is for). It made a dodge ram ridiculously cheap. Notice they all have V plates signifying a business vehicle.
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.
Probably mitigated by the fact that the most popular SUVs in the UK are effectively just tall hatchbacks. People think Range Rovers but the bestsellers are like Kia Sportage and Ford Puma.
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.
A camera is no substitute for actual visibility, at best it’s a mediocre workaround to the problem. There is no evidence at all that I’ve seen that there are fewer pedestrian collisions in modern large vehicles - I would be interested if you have any such data.
Regardless, all of these “extreme measures” could be applied to a smaller car (or even just one with a smaller wall at the front) for the best of both worlds. And collisions will happen regardless, sensors and cameras are not a magic solution.
> I mean, the risk was already socially acceptable
What society considers acceptable changes over time. Just because it was socially acceptable, doesn’t mean we continue to accept it forever. Don’t forget slavery, the idea of women as chattel, kings as having a god given right to rule etc etc were all “socially accepted” once upon a time. I doubt you would advocate for a return to medieval times on the basis that it was “socially accepted”.
> it has further been reduced as far as practicable.
This is obviously untrue. Car safety for drivers and pedestrians has continued to improve year-over-year (except in the U.S., where pedestrian safety has got worse). There’s no reason to believe the trend toward increased safety is suddenly going to halt now.
> I dont even know what point you are trying to make here. Seeing things a different way is not seeing things? Make it make sense.
Obviously, last I checked I spent my time looking out of the windscreen of my car when driving, not staring at a screen in the centre console. Being able to see everything by looking an out of a single window is always going to be better than having to swap between looking out the window, and looking down at a screen.
Is the rise in SUVs about (displaying/increasing) social status? I am curious why people in the UK "need" SUVs. In many areas of the US, having a huge car is about social status.
Poor driving skills rather than social status. But who of those brilliant folks would admit that even to themselves. Also suvs are not some expensive car category, you can find dirt cheap (and crappy as suvs in general anyway are) ones.
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.
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.
As usual the UK is much more flexible, but perhaps also more pragmatic than France: there is no requirement to take any lessons to take the driving test. They don't care. What they care about is your driving.
Now, in practice this means you probably need more than 20 hours with an instructor plus practicing with family to pass the test.
It also doesn't match what I experienced in 2015, though having a foreign driver's license may have skipped some of the requirements (though they never actually asked for for it when getting my provisional license, they might have just assumed?), the actual testing felt like a joke compared to the equivalent in the UK.
I've had a CA license for going on three decades and they largely match what I had to do. And, yes, paperwork was checked as far as driver's ed. and whatnot. Regardless. The current requirements are all spelled out fairly clearly:
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).
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
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).
Those not indicating are bad drivers. However, I'm not sure if this is what you mean but when changing lanes on a British Motorway you only need to indicate when pulling out not when pulling in.
Sometimes it can be helpful to do so when pulling in too but it's not a legal requirement since undertaking (except in slow moving traffic) is also ilegal.
"changing lanes on a British Motorway you only need to indicate when pulling out not when pulling in."
I've heard multiple people say this in the past, including driving instructors(!!!!!) and it's just not true.
Highway Code article 133 clearly says:
"Lane discipline
133
If you need to change lane, first use your mirrors and if necessary take a quick sideways glance to make sure you will not force another road user to change course or speed. When it is safe to do so, signal to indicate your intentions to other road users and when clear, move over".
You always have to indicate when changing lanes. There is no distinction made between pulling in or out by the highway code, I honestly think people made it up in their heads and they keep to it - maybe because you don't need to indicate back when overtaking on a single lane road, but that doesn't apply on multi-lane carriageways. However the point seems to be mostly academic as in my experience most people don't bother indicating at all on a motorway, whether pulling in or out.
"since undertaking (except in slow moving traffic) is also ilegal."
Highway code doesn't mention anything about slow moving traffic, just "similar speeds" - so it's perfectly legal to undertake a vehicle going 68mph when you're going 70mph, if the traffic is heavy:
"Rule 268
Do not overtake on the left or move to a lane on your left to overtake. In congested conditions, where adjacent lanes of traffic are moving at similar speeds, traffic in left-hand lanes may sometimes be moving faster than traffic to the right. In these conditions you may keep up with the traffic in your lane even if this means passing traffic in the lane to your right. Do not weave in and out of lanes to overtake."
What are you talking about - the Wales experiment as you called it has clearly shown it's a good idea - I wish it was implemented everywhere now and the numbers clearly support it. It's only being raised back up to 30 in areas where
1) the data suggests no improvement(which was always the intention of the change)
2) the issue became political and the limits are raised no matter what the data says
Overall for Wales the improvement in safety has been undeniable though and it's hard to disagree with it.
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.]
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.
Just back from a 8500+km road trip (car, wife, and two kids 6 and 1) around Europe where we visited 9 countries (UK, Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Slovenia, Croatia, Greece). For us as a family, France and UK had the safest and more relaxing roads. Italy was OK compared to the usual standard, Slovenia and Croatia had highways with too many slopes but people drive carefully. The ones where we struggled and developed high anxiety were (surprisingly!) Germany and Switzerland. In both latter countries we seriously struggled to relax as driving in any lane becomes a stressful experience. We have decided NOT to cross those countries anymore in our next trips sadly.
By death per km France, Italy, Slovenia and Croatia are more dangerous then Germany or Switzerland. German Autobahn is crazy and non-pleasant if you drive slow, but in Switzerland everyone follows the speed limit so it is quite relaxing. Also, you seem to struggle with mountainous roads, which depends on the topography and not the country.
Agree, though an intensive one (8500km in 6 weeks) that is just subjective experience, which is why I caveated it mentioning that it was our own family personal experience.
I lived in a mountainous area of Italy (very narrow roads, full of ups and downs) so I am a fairly confident driver (probably why I was not too stressed driving in Italy) and drove in countries like India and Iran in the past (so very familiar and happy with slow, but very crowded and unpredictable traffic).
To clarify, the anxiety we had on Autobahn and Swiss' highways was not a reflection on the quality of the roads, and more a reflection on the driving 'style' combined with the speed that those roads allow. The style was quite aggressive, very fast in every lane, loads of overtakes (car constantly zig-zagging), people coming from the back _FAST_ and staying there, people switching lanes immediately after signalling rather than giving some time for people to notice. Overall, that combination made for a very stressful experience which we have agreed (as family) not to repeat in the future.
Not complaining about not having yet another car on the roads here, but your conclusion goes directly against experience of literally every single person living here in Europe for their whole lives that I know. Especially Switzerland, apart from italian-speaking part of Ticino (which is more Italy than Switzerland), people drive well and way above Europe's average. Also Switzerland has 120kmh speed limit, making roads quite a bit safer also due to very frequent stationary radar placements.
But then again we have 0.1% of information to make a good picture of your situation, driving skills and habits, vehicle you moved around and so on. But there is for sure a good reason for such discrepancy, ie driving caravan super slow or similar tiny little detail.
Also you magically skipped few (pretty horrible to drive) countries if you had a road trip that covered Greece.
Have agreed in previous comments that this was subjective (as a family but also as a driver) experience.
Maybe one thing that amplified the effect was the high expectations we had for those highways, and maybe that's what made it more shocking for us.
Again, I consider myself a 'decently skilled' driver, having driven in many countries over the course of the years, and easily adapting to driving styles (US/Italy/France/Iran/UK/India/etc). Some of these styles are indeed chaotic, but they (generally) operate at slower speed, which allow for corrections and precautions. The thing that threw us off is the combination I have mentioned before:
> [...] the speed that those roads allow. The style was quite aggressive, very fast in every lane, loads of overtakes (car constantly zig-zagging), people coming from the back _FAST_ and staying there, people switching lanes immediately after signalling rather than giving some time for people to notice. Overall, that combination made for a very stressful experience which we have agreed (as family) not to repeat in the future.
>German Autobahn is crazy and non-pleasant if you drive slow, but in Switzerland everyone follows the speed limit so it is quite relaxing
The German situation seems vastly superior on the basis that whoever is the "odd one out" or violating the norms should be the one having a bad time. Basically incentivizing homogenous and/or predictable traffic flow, which is safer.
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".
The hazard perception test was a great addition in my opinion.
(Basically a video plays and you have to press a button when something dangerous has happened).
I passed my driving test 30+ years ago and then took the HPT as part of a motorcycle test 15 years later.
Paying attention (to the kid bouncing a ball at the side of the road, to the cyclist when it's windy weather etc) is a key part of road craft and I hope this made it much clearer with some (contrived) examples. TBH I just wish they let you click earlier (for _potential_ threats - i.e. before they step into the road, not just afterwards).
Actually this is wrong, it's what everyone thinks, but when you take the hazard perception test, if you press a button when you perceive a hazard, you will fail. What actually happens is there are 5 points available per hazard. You have to press the button five times, evenly spaced throughout the due of the hazard, but not starting earlier than the test setters deem appropriate, or you will drop points. It's one of the most bizarrely implemented tests, and needs serious practice to get its arbitrary rules right.
Roundabouts are great… except when you install them in places people don’t understand how to traverse them. A list of the most dangerous intersections in Michigan is published every year, and the roundabouts near me pretty consistently make the top 5 to top 10.
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.
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
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.
> 50-60 is fine on that road, indeed given the traffic and sight lines it’s far better than the majority of roads,
Well, given its current speed limit is 60mi/h and its current situation, both in terms of road safety and use by vulnerable road users, is abysmal, I think it's safe to safe you're incorrect.
A competent driver should be able to navigate that road at 60 or 80 km/h if it was a closed or private road, but we now have ample research that road speed limits affect motor vehicle speed, and motor vehicle speed is the number one factor in:
* road traffic accidents,
* road traffic deaths,
* road traffic injuries,
* deaths and injuries of vulnerable road users,
* and road use by vulnerable road users,
* overtaking speed.
So 60 km/h is a safe speed only if you close the road to non-motor traffic (and even then that will encourage speeding, leading to more accidents and deaths).
> far safer than 20 in a typical town.
This just shows that you are unable to adequately gauge risk.
> That you think 15mph is appropiate tells me you need to hand back your license.
This also shows that you are unable to adequately gauge risk.
In addition, it tells you that I don't think that cars should be prioritised at the cost of other road users. Personally, I'd set the limit at 30 km/h with Dutch style road markings and watch the number of road users explode while the number of motor vehicles plummets.
This is again a problem of familiarity, or perhaps of naïveté. Roads can have hard to spot potholes, particularly slightly rough roads like that, and people might not be comfortable zipping along them without the knowledge of that.
Far fewer potholes on that than on a typical two lane 60mph road. Not that it’s hard to spot potholes at 60mph.
Familiarity shouldn’t come into it, you should be able to see the road is clear. That road has brilliant sight lines, you can see anything larger than a rabbit from 20 seconds away, far safer Doug 69 along there than 40 along many country roads which aren’t single track, let alone doing 30 in towns.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Large roundabouts are pretty safe, if you've gone through the learning process we have in the UK. I did about 30-40h of practical lessons with an instructor, over half of which would have included multi-lane roundabouts.
The lights control the flow, so no need to worry about giving way. You pick your lane in the lead up using the signs and road markings. Then you follow your painted lane, the markings of which guide you all the way through. The markings and lights do all the work for you, unless you're in the wrong lane at the start. All your awareness is focused on looking for hazards of people who are in the wrong lane because your route is dictated by the road markings.
I will admit, they look complicated - especially if you've never driven one before. My first time around one was a bit nerve-wracking, but they quickly become second nature.
> 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
I have one too! 3 out of 6 plugs stopped working! I have 2 plugs outside of mini kitchen area and I have laptop, phone charger, camera charger, 2 ikea lamps, .......
there are no uk plugs here so I'm not complaining:)
if keeping everything plugged works for you, awesome!
>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.
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)
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.
I think universal vehicle inspections alone would massively cut down on a significant amount of accidents, especially in Michigan. The number of people I see driving in 6” of snow with bald tires, grinding brakes, and blown out suspension is really concerning.
It would just lead to people driving unlicensed vehicles.
People driving around in dangerous vehicles aren't doing it for fun, they are doing it to get to work, go shopping and otherwise live their lives with limited resources.
I think one of the things not mention, is to simply have less driving. That helps a lot. Move more people onto buses, trains, bikes and walking.
In shared spaces, the more alternatives you have the more the car has to adjust to that reality and that tends to slow down cars.
And even more importantly, politically measures like 'slowing down cars' is much easier to pass if people have alternatives.
Here in Switzerland we are just fighting against the Right Wing Transport Minister who wants to make 50km mandatory in every city (but they are anti-regulation of course).
Secondly, I think these numbers only really look good, in light of them having been so horrible bad before. So much more could be done. There are 100s of streets that should simply be pedestrianized, both for economic reason and for safety reasons.
There is lots of good research going on in Netherlands, Finland, Norway and so on. In Oslo for example, they have reduced the cars in the city to a point where I was often simply walking on the street (sadly partly by moving cars underground). Sweden in Stockholm implemented congestion pricing.
Another thing not addressed here, is to keep cars light. The chance of death is much less with a smaller lower profile car. Charge higher registration and road fees to larger cars. Create maximum sizes for all public parking spots and harsh fines is somebody parks their dumb F-150 there. More can be done along those lines as well.
Narrow roads and use safer configuration. For example, never have a 4-lane road. A 3 lane where the middle is a turning lane, has the same threw-put and is safer. In general, preventing any kind of overtaking improves flow and safety.
There are so many more things that can be done. The goal has to be not just less people killed, but also less property damage and other kinds of negative effect. Zero is the acceptable number.
I moved from Germany (Cologne) to London recently and I am surprised to read that UK has safer roads than Germany. I have not yet driven in London - but I have driven in Germany and I have bicycled in both countries. London is hands down terrifying to me. Certain kinds of drivers (eg: vans) seem deliberately hostile to cyclists, and plenty of people park in a cycling lane. Never seen that happen in Germany with such frequency. Also, roads are bumpier - what’s with that?!
Now, cyclists in London are a driver’s nightmare. I’ve seen people barrel down a junction at full speed and jump a red light. This lack of desire for self-preservation is startingly common.
Between the hostile vans and the daredevil red-light-jumping cyclists, I am baffled at this report. Perhaps mortality rates are low, but injury rates are much higher than say, Germany?
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.
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.
"UK tax revenue was 33.5% of gross domestic product
(GDP
) in 2021 – the most recent year for which there are internationally comparable data. This is slightly below the average for both the G7
(36.3%) and the OECD
(34.1%). While UK taxes are higher than in most other English-speaking developed economies (such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland and the United States), they are considerably lower than in most other western European countries (average tax revenue amongst the EU14
was 39.9% of GDP
).
Under current government plans, UK tax revenue is forecast to increase to 37.7% of GDP
by 2027–28. This would take the UK above both the current OECD
and G7
averages. It should be noted, however, that other governments may also increase their levels of taxation by then."
If it's just Germany we're comparing to, then there are still multiple percentage differences. Germany is close to the average of 39.5% of GDP and the UK is 33.5% raising to 37.7%. Nearly 2% difference, which is a lot. It doesn't matter how the tax is raised, it's the total investment that matters. We have been a low tax economy for a long time (compared to similar European nations), that was my entire point: if we want better services then we are unlikely to get them in a low tax economy. Recent changes to the tax levels doesn't change how we got to this position in the first place.
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.
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.
I live in the US in a town with particularly bad drivers. I know I know, everyone's area has the worst drivers. But I've lived in dozen cities across the US so have some frame of reference. The sad thing is, it's a small town with what -should- be little traffic.
It's one of those places there will only be 2 other cars in sight, but they're driving side by side and 10 under the speed limit. And for some reason, everyone seems to just hold down their brake pedal at all times so you can never tell when they're actually slowing. I presume they're driving an automatic with two feet and keep just enough pressure to trigger the brakelights. And everyone, even the Kia Rios, drives in the opposite lane before turning so they can swing wide like a semi. I could go on and on but I digress.
Anyways, it had been an enigma to me for the last few years since I moved here, until one day I was asked to take a lady to her driving test. Sure, why not.
The entirety of the 5 minute road test was turning out right onto a sparsely populated 2 lane highway, driving anxiously at 35 in a 55 for a mile or so, then turning around and coming back. Passed. Suddenly, everything made more sense to me.
And I'm sure this isn't probably even the easiest test nationally, just one I became familiar with recently.
So yeah, we have absolutely no driving standards.
Wow - if it's a driving test that lets you drive anywhere in the States, then you'd think it'd be a national standard with set manoeuvres and situations to cover.
Can confirm that 6 right turns from getting into the car, comprising a single trip around the block was the full extent of my San Jose, CA driving test.
I left the DMV office significantly more scared of my fellow drivers than I had arrived…
> 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!
Makes sense that Finland has such things though, when the roads are covered in snow and ice for a lot of the year.
Though this year we did good in our capital: "Helsinki has not recorded a single traffic fatality in the past 12 months, city and police officials confirmed this week."
Well done Helsinki! Unless there's a massive problem with police recording practices.
Seems like we were either side of a threshold - I took mine ~35 years ago and the only "theory" test was the examiner asking me three basic questions after the practical test, like "what can lead to skidding" to which the answer was "rapid acceleration, steering or braking". The theory side of things hardly existed essentially.
Same in Norway. Skid pans and also motorway driving. The course also includes a piece where the instructor picks a place an hour's drive away and tells the student to get there and demonstrate that they can not only drive under instruction but also plan their own route and react properly to challenges along the way.
Interestingly, I saw data from a road safety programme for young people that showed skid pan training actually made young men less safe not more, because they became even more overconfident about their ability to “react quickly” if bad things happened. Turns out that a bit of humility and slowing down are the main skills needed to avoid accidents!
That's true, on the other hand it made young women safer. This happened in Norway when the skid pan was made a compulsory part of the course a couple of decades ago and the insurance companies soon noticed an increase in reckless driving among young men but the opposite in young women.
I’d imagine that differs from county to country. For example the risks of skidding might be higher in Finland due to the colder climate.
Whereas in the UK, black ice isn’t as common so days when it’s icy, the best advice is just to take it slow and stick to salted routes.
> having spoken with US colleagues, much higher than state-side (although I imagine that varies from state to state).
You know, it does vary but relative to any other developed country it's pitiful in every state. The reality is we just hand out driver's licenses to whomever.
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.
The regulation I want for motorbikes is less noise. Its absolutely absurd what is allowed in most places. And if you modify the bike to make more noise you should never be allowed to drive again.
getting a full motorbike license is also expensive. there's a chicken and egg problem, which is that for an unrestricted license you must do the Mod1 and Mod2 on a 600cc bike or greater, which ofcourse you're not allowed to ride if you're on a CBT.
so you have to pay a school, and itll cost in total probably £1k or a bit more. when i did it, the guys also told me, there's basically only one company now that provides insurance for instructors/riding schools.
motorbiking i think is becoming less of a guy thing and more like skiing - an expensive, occasional thrill, but very much an upmarket upper-middle-class type of activity. there were more girls than guys at my lessons too, which was pretty surprising at first, but not really once you consider the prior.
which was very much at odds with the instructors, who were all guys' guys - when they got into it at 16, motorbiking was much cheaper than a car, and had a real economic argument to make (it was much cheaper all-round) - today, if you add up the insurance, protective gear, bike, and school money, you will be on-par with a car, which is far more practical.
It's the Deliveroo, Just Eat etc crowd too. CBT and off you go. No incentive for further training.
Yep. They should re-think allowing people to work with just a CBT, but I guess they don't want to stop people from having a job.
driving instructors told me they get indians straight up offering to buy CBTs with cash lol.
I did my CBT a few months ago after driving for 30 years. It was harder than I assumed it would be. But what scared me the most was the 18 year old who did his at the same time, never driven on the road before. The phrase organ donor seemed appropriate, as mcarbre as it sounds.
It's Compulsory Basic Training. Of course he hadn't been on the road before.
This is probably a huge factor for sure. Both the UK theory and practical tests are somewhat tricky, at least compared to those in places like the US. Many people will fail them the first time around, and a fair few will fail them multiple times.
The official statistics have a rate of about 40-60% for these tests:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/driving-...
Though it definitely varies by area:
https://www.gocompare.com/motoring/reports-statistics/drivin...
It's closer to a school exam in terms of difficulty, rather than the quick drive around a parking lot that it seems a lot of places have.
So people seem a lot more prepared than in many other places, since they actually have to be able to spot hazards and do driving maneuvers to get their license in the first place.
In New York state, virtually EVERYONE fails their first driving test. Rare exceptions. Second test pass is standard.
I kind of assumed every state does this.
“now includes”
It has done for nearly 25 years at this point ;)
I haven't driven in other countries but from my experience I'm not sure this is translating to good driving on the road.
It covers some, lets say non-beginner situations that are pretty real and can make a difference between OK situation and multiple fatalities crash. A junior driver can still kill people as easily as anybody else, standards should be high.
And you should certainly drive in other countries, namely much worse and much better than yours (presumably US), they are both out there.
UK, FYI
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.
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".
the US used to have unrestricted speeds outside town. The speed limit would be "reasonable and prudent". I think 1975 the 55mph national speed limit put an end to all of that.
https://www.nps.gov/features/yell/slidefile/gatewaycommuniti...
> You're not supposed to drive 60mph on those tiny roads.
You are supposed to drive 60mph where appropriate, e.g. on straight stretches with good visibility and no junctions. It's very possible to fail your driving test for not going fast enough on a single carriageway.
It’s equally possibly to fail for going too fast while still under the speed limit.
What you’re supposed to do is drive at a speed that gives you chance to react to dangers given your visibility and road surface conditions.
For country roads, they’re typically winding rather than straight. So more often than not, that means you shouldn’t be travelling much past 30mph.
But you are right that straight stretches do exist. They’re just not as common on such roads.
> What you’re supposed to do is drive at a speed that gives you chance to react to dangers given your visibility and road surface conditions.
Indeed, I always think of my instructor's words "can you stop within the distance you can see". As that distance decreases, you should be slowing down; potentially there's a cyclist or horse right around the corner.
There’s an old guy that walks round the small country lanes at rush hour where I live. He wears a hi vis jacket but that doesn’t do much when you have trees and hedges blocking visibility.
I’m constantly amazed that some idiot hasn’t hit him.
Not sure why you are being downvoted, you are completely correct. Have an upvote.
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.
I did a speed awareness course as I got caught speeding and was told if there are lamp posts the speed limit is 30mph unless stated otherwise.
Sort of. That used to be the case, and it's still what they teach on those courses. However there are now "20mph zones". These are signed on entry, but do not have the repeated small 20 signs of a normal 20mph limit. This means that you can no longer tell whether you are in a 30 or a 20. I have once seen something marked as a "40mph zone" but I suspect that this was a local aberration and did not have a similar rule.
More specifically, “built-up areas” where the lower limits apply are those with streetlights at least every 200 yards - definitionally.
The difference is that in the US the defaults are jokes nobody abides by whereas in the UK they are, in some cases, numbers the "perhaps not lowest but normal person on a normal day" denominator will not find themselves wanting to exceed in basically every location where they apply.
Having just come back from visiting the in-laws in Gloucestershire (American raised on American roads), it took me a minute to comprehend the national speed limit rule. Nonetheless, I don’t think the rule matters much.
What matters more is the far stricter driver licensing and “Scarlet L” (my words) that the learners have to display.
That and the fact that it is bloody impossible to conduct 2 way traffic down country roads thanks to all the hedgerows and so everyone is extra careful and courteous (usually).
aka "it's a speed limit, not a target"
Begs the question why the symbol for a limit is in the (literal) shape of a target.
Circular signs with a red outline are prohibition signs (ie you _must_ not do this).
Triangular signs with a red outline are warning signs.
Circular blue signs are orders (i.e. you must do this).
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.
On paper that's perfectly fine.
In practice there seems to be a ton of correlation between people who say things like that and people who think their Fiat 500 stops like a garbage truck.
Funniest thing I've heard a kid say all month. My colleague's 7 year old daughter to him:
D: "Dad why does everyone honk at mom when she drive's us to school?"
F: "Because she drives too slow sometimes."
D: "Why doesn't she speed up?"
F: "I don't know. She's always been like that."
D: "I tried saying people are waiting for us to go [referring to a pretty benign yield right-on-red near their house]."
F: "How'd that go?"
D: "She didn't listen!"
I don't know why but it was absolutely hysterical to me. Kids are precious.
That's the speed you're supposed to drive at.
Yep. I remember being driven around roads like this with a friend with a high performance car who knew what he was doing, so could go what seemed like a terrifyingly high speed to me, but was perfectly safe for him. Then we hit some other cars going slower and he just followed at the same speed, infinitely patient for someone with a thirst for speed. Just completely happy to adjust to the appropriate speed for the situation.
People who know those roads drive fast, indeed, but it is not safe.
Visibility is poor and you cannot safely go through a bend at 50+ mph when you cannot see what's beyond it. There might be a stationary vehicle, a horse, a cyclists, even a pedestrian and you wouldn't know or be able to stop in time. This is how lethal collisions happen in those roads.
Exactly. All these people saying ‘well I know the road’.
Yeah you know THE ROAD not what might be in it this morning.
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.
I think the concept of a “speed limit” is part of the problem. On controlled-access roads, I think it would be better for the posted speed to be advisory and, instead, train drivers to think of driving too slow for your lane as being just as dangerous as speeding because, in a moving group of cars, you want to be as close to 0mph relative to the other cars as is feasible.
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.
That’s great just so long as your county roads doesn’t have any dog walkers or wildlife like deer.
The best case scenario then, is that you write off your car with a deer shaped hole in the front. The worst case scenario is you have a death on your conscience for the rest of your life.
If you're walking in the middle of the street in the middle of the night, in the middle of the woods, with no reflective clothing, and I hit you, it's your fault. I know how fast I'm driving. I can live with that.
I hit a pheasant on such a road once, not driving at silly speed but it was pitch black. My fog light was never seen again, nor the pheasant.
>lights from other vehicles showed up alerting you to any possible danger.
When I started driving I preferred the dark for these roads because the lights let you 'see' hazard around a corner.
Headlights were worse then - and I hadn't seen a crash into a deer.
I went to a wedding in Devon recently, friend of my wife’s whose family are all farmers and her brother was joking that it’d be fine to drive back drunk because the car would just bounce off the hedgerows…
Safety first. More hedgerows!
A more enlightening chart:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
Thanks. This is from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
Browsing through this I found:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Accident...
What is up with poisoning in the early 40s?
The page for this graph links to the source of the data, which is at: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/deaths-by-demograph...
As I suspected, poisoning most likely includes drug overdose. They have this comment about the 2023 data:
> #1: Poisoning: 100,304 deaths
> Largely due to the opioid epidemic affecting millions of people in the United States
You can see more recent data than 2004 in their interactive charts. It is interesting to see that deaths from road accidents has much reduced for teenagers and young adults, compared to the rest of the population.
Ah, that makes sense, thanks.
per capita is a bit weird, maybe people in the UK don't drive as much.
Less than in the US, but I imagine similar to the other European countries.
One thing that is not being discussed is that cars have become a lot wafer - for both people in the car and for pedestrians they might hit.
For the pedestrians they might hit the opposite has happened in the US as cars have been replaces with giant trucks and SUVs with extremely poor visibility.
The US is a mobility and automobile obsessed society. Walking and cycling are usually associated with exercise or inability to drive due to lack of resources.
Combine that with an obsession to make cars available to anyone, even if they are known dangerous. Look up videos on YouTube of police pursuits in Florida, Georgia, Arkansas, Michigan. Those aren't exceptions, they are glimpses into a mass pathology. I believe Madison, Wisconsin was tracking multiple police pursuits per day in recent years. The subjects there frequently and deliberately drive on the wrong side of roads to compel the police to terminate the pursuits.
What the hell is going on in Russia?
Poor + lots of car usage.
Odd to use per capita here, to make a useful comparison it should be per mile driven.
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.
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.
Not sure I completely agree (if the definition of vehicles is cars). That disregards miles travelled by cyclists and pedestrians etc. If 10% of the population switched from driving to cycling to work but the death numbers stayed the same, that metric would go up but really nothing would have changed, either mortality wise or in terms of number of people using the roads.
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%.
I prefer the death per people metric as I am more interested in how likely I am to receive some bad news than some metric based on distance.
Both measures have bias, the "per people" metric doesn't take into account when people are actually driving while the "per kilometer" metric puts too much emphasis on long distance driving, which is usually done on motorways where it is the safest. Maybe the best metric would be "per time spent on the road, including as a pedestrian on the sidewalk", but I guess it is harder to estimate.
Anyways the UK is doing well on both metrics.
Possibly even per trip? I'm confident my bicycle trips to the supermarket in the Netherlands is safer than a trip to Walmart in the US by car, but I spend way fewer kilometres doing the same job. That only makes it even safer, but I think is discounted in per-KM statistics?
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.
Nope. It's top-10 for most dangerous [1].
[1] https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...
No actually on that metric Montana is one of the most dangerous and Massachusetts is one of the safest.
>Maybe local police are very, very strict about drink/driving, thus reducing the number of deaths.
The Karen Read trial was illustrative about how seriously Massachusetts law enforcement takes DUI.
How is the Read trial relevant here? Karen Read was accused of intentionally running John O'Keefe over because she was angry at him.
>How is the Read trial relevant here?
The conduct of the law enforcement professionals and people they associate with leading up to the events relevant to the trail is relevant to a discussion of how seriously they take DUI.
OK, how about this: how would someone who knows nothing about you other than your 2 comments here determine whether you think MA police take DUI seriously enough or whether you think they go too easy on DUI?
Read did drive under the influence and police and prosecutors laid harsh charges against her, but they could've laid those harsh charges (first- and second-degree murder IIRC) against her even if she had been stone sober that night, so it seems to me that the Read case says nothing about how harshly police and prosecutors treat ordinary DUIs.
Clearly the cops themselves have no problem with themselves and people in their social circles casually drinking and driving.
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.
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.
The visibility is great and the side impact survivability is roughly equal to that of a claymore mine operated by an expert. Who knows you cheated on his sister.
The IIHS didn’t even start side impact ratings until 2003, which is a lot more recent than I would have ever guessed.
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.
I’m confused. I read (see below) that these very tall fronts are significantly more deadly to pedestrians. Which is true?
https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/vehicles-with-higher-more-v...
Not to mention how much bigger the blind spot is now:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna52109
You are correct, they are more dangerous. But the way the EuroNCAP test is constructed doesn't capture that danger. Leading to perverse, bogus results where SUVs are rated more safe for pedestrian collisions than small cars due to the artificial standard being applied.
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.
Does the Euro NCAP test for the likelihood of a collision occurring or only what happens if we assume a collision will occur? It's important, because if a class of vehicles is safer under the assumption of a collision but the collisions happen more frequently versus another class of vehicles, then it's pretty easy to imagine numbers such that the second class of vehicle is actually much safer for pedestrians in spite of a worse safety rating.
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.
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
Unfortunately the EU is caving apparently. I worry these monster trucks will kill thousands of Europeans. https://www.transportenvironment.org/articles/eu-cave-in-on-...
One small bit of good news is the Netherlands FINALLY closed the tax exception for these things. Until this year you’d pay no import tax if it was for “business” (NL has a huge number of self employed people who just lie about what the truck is for). It made a dodge ram ridiculously cheap. Notice they all have V plates signifying a business vehicle.
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
Probably mitigated by the fact that the most popular SUVs in the UK are effectively just tall hatchbacks. People think Range Rovers but the bestsellers are like Kia Sportage and Ford Puma.
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.
A camera is no substitute for actual visibility, at best it’s a mediocre workaround to the problem. There is no evidence at all that I’ve seen that there are fewer pedestrian collisions in modern large vehicles - I would be interested if you have any such data.
Regardless, all of these “extreme measures” could be applied to a smaller car (or even just one with a smaller wall at the front) for the best of both worlds. And collisions will happen regardless, sensors and cameras are not a magic solution.
I mean, the risk was already socially acceptable, and it has further been reduced as far as practicable.
>A camera is no substitute for actual visibility
I dont even know what point you are trying to make here. Seeing things a different way is not seeing things? Make it make sense.
> I mean, the risk was already socially acceptable
What society considers acceptable changes over time. Just because it was socially acceptable, doesn’t mean we continue to accept it forever. Don’t forget slavery, the idea of women as chattel, kings as having a god given right to rule etc etc were all “socially accepted” once upon a time. I doubt you would advocate for a return to medieval times on the basis that it was “socially accepted”.
> it has further been reduced as far as practicable.
This is obviously untrue. Car safety for drivers and pedestrians has continued to improve year-over-year (except in the U.S., where pedestrian safety has got worse). There’s no reason to believe the trend toward increased safety is suddenly going to halt now.
> I dont even know what point you are trying to make here. Seeing things a different way is not seeing things? Make it make sense.
Obviously, last I checked I spent my time looking out of the windscreen of my car when driving, not staring at a screen in the centre console. Being able to see everything by looking an out of a single window is always going to be better than having to swap between looking out the window, and looking down at a screen.
Is the rise in SUVs about (displaying/increasing) social status? I am curious why people in the UK "need" SUVs. In many areas of the US, having a huge car is about social status.
Poor driving skills rather than social status. But who of those brilliant folks would admit that even to themselves. Also suvs are not some expensive car category, you can find dirt cheap (and crappy as suvs in general anyway are) ones.
There is a compensating rise in small EV also so hopefully that will cancel things out
The issue is bad drivers and, sometimes, reckless pedestrians.
Obviously, in an UK town pedestrians and cars should never come in contact, there are pavements, pedestrian crossings, etc.
You don't need to wonder, the reversal is already well under way.
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.
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.
The one thing we should take from US driving is put above-lane signs in a lot more places. Writing the sign on the road is useless in traffic.
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.
As usual the UK is much more flexible, but perhaps also more pragmatic than France: there is no requirement to take any lessons to take the driving test. They don't care. What they care about is your driving.
Now, in practice this means you probably need more than 20 hours with an instructor plus practicing with family to pass the 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.
Your CA adults requirements do not match what I experienced in 2005, aside from passing the knowledge test. Maybe that's changed a lot in 20 years.
It also doesn't match what I experienced in 2015, though having a foreign driver's license may have skipped some of the requirements (though they never actually asked for for it when getting my provisional license, they might have just assumed?), the actual testing felt like a joke compared to the equivalent in the UK.
I've had a CA license for going on three decades and they largely match what I had to do. And, yes, paperwork was checked as far as driver's ed. and whatnot. Regardless. The current requirements are all spelled out fairly clearly:
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/driver-licenses-identification...
I can't find anywhere on that site that lists the 6 month waiting period or 50 hour requirements for adults, only for minors.
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.
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
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).
Those not indicating are bad drivers. However, I'm not sure if this is what you mean but when changing lanes on a British Motorway you only need to indicate when pulling out not when pulling in.
Sometimes it can be helpful to do so when pulling in too but it's not a legal requirement since undertaking (except in slow moving traffic) is also ilegal.
"changing lanes on a British Motorway you only need to indicate when pulling out not when pulling in."
I've heard multiple people say this in the past, including driving instructors(!!!!!) and it's just not true.
Highway Code article 133 clearly says:
"Lane discipline 133 If you need to change lane, first use your mirrors and if necessary take a quick sideways glance to make sure you will not force another road user to change course or speed. When it is safe to do so, signal to indicate your intentions to other road users and when clear, move over".
You always have to indicate when changing lanes. There is no distinction made between pulling in or out by the highway code, I honestly think people made it up in their heads and they keep to it - maybe because you don't need to indicate back when overtaking on a single lane road, but that doesn't apply on multi-lane carriageways. However the point seems to be mostly academic as in my experience most people don't bother indicating at all on a motorway, whether pulling in or out.
"since undertaking (except in slow moving traffic) is also ilegal."
Highway code doesn't mention anything about slow moving traffic, just "similar speeds" - so it's perfectly legal to undertake a vehicle going 68mph when you're going 70mph, if the traffic is heavy:
"Rule 268 Do not overtake on the left or move to a lane on your left to overtake. In congested conditions, where adjacent lanes of traffic are moving at similar speeds, traffic in left-hand lanes may sometimes be moving faster than traffic to the right. In these conditions you may keep up with the traffic in your lane even if this means passing traffic in the lane to your right. Do not weave in and out of lanes to overtake."
30mph is an unsafe speed for towns or anywhere where cars coexist with pedestrians or bikes.
The "experiment" in Wales has proven what a disaster reducing this speed was.
Urban area limits are now being raised back to 30 mph.
What are you talking about - the Wales experiment as you called it has clearly shown it's a good idea - I wish it was implemented everywhere now and the numbers clearly support it. It's only being raised back up to 30 in areas where
1) the data suggests no improvement(which was always the intention of the change)
2) the issue became political and the limits are raised no matter what the data says
Overall for Wales the improvement in safety has been undeniable though and it's hard to disagree with it.
100% agreed.
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.]
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)
Just back from a 8500+km road trip (car, wife, and two kids 6 and 1) around Europe where we visited 9 countries (UK, Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Slovenia, Croatia, Greece). For us as a family, France and UK had the safest and more relaxing roads. Italy was OK compared to the usual standard, Slovenia and Croatia had highways with too many slopes but people drive carefully. The ones where we struggled and developed high anxiety were (surprisingly!) Germany and Switzerland. In both latter countries we seriously struggled to relax as driving in any lane becomes a stressful experience. We have decided NOT to cross those countries anymore in our next trips sadly.
By death per km France, Italy, Slovenia and Croatia are more dangerous then Germany or Switzerland. German Autobahn is crazy and non-pleasant if you drive slow, but in Switzerland everyone follows the speed limit so it is quite relaxing. Also, you seem to struggle with mountainous roads, which depends on the topography and not the country.
Agree, though an intensive one (8500km in 6 weeks) that is just subjective experience, which is why I caveated it mentioning that it was our own family personal experience.
I lived in a mountainous area of Italy (very narrow roads, full of ups and downs) so I am a fairly confident driver (probably why I was not too stressed driving in Italy) and drove in countries like India and Iran in the past (so very familiar and happy with slow, but very crowded and unpredictable traffic).
To clarify, the anxiety we had on Autobahn and Swiss' highways was not a reflection on the quality of the roads, and more a reflection on the driving 'style' combined with the speed that those roads allow. The style was quite aggressive, very fast in every lane, loads of overtakes (car constantly zig-zagging), people coming from the back _FAST_ and staying there, people switching lanes immediately after signalling rather than giving some time for people to notice. Overall, that combination made for a very stressful experience which we have agreed (as family) not to repeat in the future.
Not complaining about not having yet another car on the roads here, but your conclusion goes directly against experience of literally every single person living here in Europe for their whole lives that I know. Especially Switzerland, apart from italian-speaking part of Ticino (which is more Italy than Switzerland), people drive well and way above Europe's average. Also Switzerland has 120kmh speed limit, making roads quite a bit safer also due to very frequent stationary radar placements.
But then again we have 0.1% of information to make a good picture of your situation, driving skills and habits, vehicle you moved around and so on. But there is for sure a good reason for such discrepancy, ie driving caravan super slow or similar tiny little detail.
Also you magically skipped few (pretty horrible to drive) countries if you had a road trip that covered Greece.
Have agreed in previous comments that this was subjective (as a family but also as a driver) experience.
Maybe one thing that amplified the effect was the high expectations we had for those highways, and maybe that's what made it more shocking for us.
Again, I consider myself a 'decently skilled' driver, having driven in many countries over the course of the years, and easily adapting to driving styles (US/Italy/France/Iran/UK/India/etc). Some of these styles are indeed chaotic, but they (generally) operate at slower speed, which allow for corrections and precautions. The thing that threw us off is the combination I have mentioned before:
> [...] the speed that those roads allow. The style was quite aggressive, very fast in every lane, loads of overtakes (car constantly zig-zagging), people coming from the back _FAST_ and staying there, people switching lanes immediately after signalling rather than giving some time for people to notice. Overall, that combination made for a very stressful experience which we have agreed (as family) not to repeat in the future.
>German Autobahn is crazy and non-pleasant if you drive slow, but in Switzerland everyone follows the speed limit so it is quite relaxing
The German situation seems vastly superior on the basis that whoever is the "odd one out" or violating the norms should be the one having a bad time. Basically incentivizing homogenous and/or predictable traffic flow, which is safer.
Well overtaking with 135 one drive 130 should not lead to people driving 2m in your back, which is quite often the case when I am on the autobahn.
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.
The hazard perception test was a great addition in my opinion. (Basically a video plays and you have to press a button when something dangerous has happened).
I passed my driving test 30+ years ago and then took the HPT as part of a motorcycle test 15 years later.
Paying attention (to the kid bouncing a ball at the side of the road, to the cyclist when it's windy weather etc) is a key part of road craft and I hope this made it much clearer with some (contrived) examples. TBH I just wish they let you click earlier (for _potential_ threats - i.e. before they step into the road, not just afterwards).
Actually this is wrong, it's what everyone thinks, but when you take the hazard perception test, if you press a button when you perceive a hazard, you will fail. What actually happens is there are 5 points available per hazard. You have to press the button five times, evenly spaced throughout the due of the hazard, but not starting earlier than the test setters deem appropriate, or you will drop points. It's one of the most bizarrely implemented tests, and needs serious practice to get its arbitrary rules right.
Roundabouts are great… except when you install them in places people don’t understand how to traverse them. A list of the most dangerous intersections in Michigan is published every year, and the roundabouts near me pretty consistently make the top 5 to top 10.
https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/local/2024/07/03/these-a...
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.
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
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.
50-60 is fine on that road, indeed given the traffic and sight lines it’s far better than the majority of roads, far safer than 20 in a typical town.
That you think 15mph is appropiate tells me you need to hand back your license.
> 50-60 is fine on that road, indeed given the traffic and sight lines it’s far better than the majority of roads,
Well, given its current speed limit is 60mi/h and its current situation, both in terms of road safety and use by vulnerable road users, is abysmal, I think it's safe to safe you're incorrect.
A competent driver should be able to navigate that road at 60 or 80 km/h if it was a closed or private road, but we now have ample research that road speed limits affect motor vehicle speed, and motor vehicle speed is the number one factor in:
* road traffic accidents,
* road traffic deaths,
* road traffic injuries,
* deaths and injuries of vulnerable road users,
* and road use by vulnerable road users,
* overtaking speed.
So 60 km/h is a safe speed only if you close the road to non-motor traffic (and even then that will encourage speeding, leading to more accidents and deaths).
> far safer than 20 in a typical town.
This just shows that you are unable to adequately gauge risk.
> That you think 15mph is appropiate tells me you need to hand back your license.
This also shows that you are unable to adequately gauge risk.
In addition, it tells you that I don't think that cars should be prioritised at the cost of other road users. Personally, I'd set the limit at 30 km/h with Dutch style road markings and watch the number of road users explode while the number of motor vehicles plummets.
Total nonsense, the problem int got road is people speeding. Ie doing 80, 90, 100, and people doing g 69 when the limits do decrease.
You should stick to trains and buses. You do 20mph along there and quite rightly the police would have your license.
No, it's fact-based. But it doesn't conform to your preferences, so you'll not be convinced without more life experience.
This is again a problem of familiarity, or perhaps of naïveté. Roads can have hard to spot potholes, particularly slightly rough roads like that, and people might not be comfortable zipping along them without the knowledge of that.
Far fewer potholes on that than on a typical two lane 60mph road. Not that it’s hard to spot potholes at 60mph.
Familiarity shouldn’t come into it, you should be able to see the road is clear. That road has brilliant sight lines, you can see anything larger than a rabbit from 20 seconds away, far safer Doug 69 along there than 40 along many country roads which aren’t single track, let alone doing 30 in towns.
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.
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 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...
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'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.
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.
Large roundabouts are pretty safe, if you've gone through the learning process we have in the UK. I did about 30-40h of practical lessons with an instructor, over half of which would have included multi-lane roundabouts.
The lights control the flow, so no need to worry about giving way. You pick your lane in the lead up using the signs and road markings. Then you follow your painted lane, the markings of which guide you all the way through. The markings and lights do all the work for you, unless you're in the wrong lane at the start. All your awareness is focused on looking for hazards of people who are in the wrong lane because your route is dictated by the road markings.
I will admit, they look complicated - especially if you've never driven one before. My first time around one was a bit nerve-wracking, but they quickly become second nature.
Ireland has followed the same trend, slightly behind the UK.
Because they don't have the same road use culture.
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
That’s a nice reminder that they should be respected. Not left lying around.
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/
I have one too! 3 out of 6 plugs stopped working! I have 2 plugs outside of mini kitchen area and I have laptop, phone charger, camera charger, 2 ikea lamps, .......
there are no uk plugs here so I'm not complaining:)
if keeping everything plugged works for you, awesome!
You're leaving lengths of strong flexible wire lying around places where you walk and are worried you might get hurt? Uh, yeah!
I don't worry about it:) I'm not in UK
>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 big danger from outlets and plugs is fire rather than electric shock, which is what you'd need to compare.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
If you want to have a laugh:
"I will not accept that it's a highly dangerous road" https://youtu.be/7Qir4EEpawE
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.
I think universal vehicle inspections alone would massively cut down on a significant amount of accidents, especially in Michigan. The number of people I see driving in 6” of snow with bald tires, grinding brakes, and blown out suspension is really concerning.
It would just lead to people driving unlicensed vehicles.
People driving around in dangerous vehicles aren't doing it for fun, they are doing it to get to work, go shopping and otherwise live their lives with limited resources.
This is amazing to me since anywhere in the country you have high speed driving around blind corners.
I think one of the things not mention, is to simply have less driving. That helps a lot. Move more people onto buses, trains, bikes and walking.
In shared spaces, the more alternatives you have the more the car has to adjust to that reality and that tends to slow down cars.
And even more importantly, politically measures like 'slowing down cars' is much easier to pass if people have alternatives.
Here in Switzerland we are just fighting against the Right Wing Transport Minister who wants to make 50km mandatory in every city (but they are anti-regulation of course).
Secondly, I think these numbers only really look good, in light of them having been so horrible bad before. So much more could be done. There are 100s of streets that should simply be pedestrianized, both for economic reason and for safety reasons.
There is lots of good research going on in Netherlands, Finland, Norway and so on. In Oslo for example, they have reduced the cars in the city to a point where I was often simply walking on the street (sadly partly by moving cars underground). Sweden in Stockholm implemented congestion pricing.
Another thing not addressed here, is to keep cars light. The chance of death is much less with a smaller lower profile car. Charge higher registration and road fees to larger cars. Create maximum sizes for all public parking spots and harsh fines is somebody parks their dumb F-150 there. More can be done along those lines as well.
Narrow roads and use safer configuration. For example, never have a 4-lane road. A 3 lane where the middle is a turning lane, has the same threw-put and is safer. In general, preventing any kind of overtaking improves flow and safety.
There are so many more things that can be done. The goal has to be not just less people killed, but also less property damage and other kinds of negative effect. Zero is the acceptable number.
I moved from Germany (Cologne) to London recently and I am surprised to read that UK has safer roads than Germany. I have not yet driven in London - but I have driven in Germany and I have bicycled in both countries. London is hands down terrifying to me. Certain kinds of drivers (eg: vans) seem deliberately hostile to cyclists, and plenty of people park in a cycling lane. Never seen that happen in Germany with such frequency. Also, roads are bumpier - what’s with that?!
Now, cyclists in London are a driver’s nightmare. I’ve seen people barrel down a junction at full speed and jump a red light. This lack of desire for self-preservation is startingly common.
Between the hostile vans and the daredevil red-light-jumping cyclists, I am baffled at this report. Perhaps mortality rates are low, but injury rates are much higher than say, Germany?
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...
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.
From the IFS [1]:
"UK tax revenue was 33.5% of gross domestic product (GDP ) in 2021 – the most recent year for which there are internationally comparable data. This is slightly below the average for both the G7 (36.3%) and the OECD (34.1%). While UK taxes are higher than in most other English-speaking developed economies (such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland and the United States), they are considerably lower than in most other western European countries (average tax revenue amongst the EU14 was 39.9% of GDP ).
Under current government plans, UK tax revenue is forecast to increase to 37.7% of GDP by 2027–28. This would take the UK above both the current OECD and G7 averages. It should be noted, however, that other governments may also increase their levels of taxation by then."
If it's just Germany we're comparing to, then there are still multiple percentage differences. Germany is close to the average of 39.5% of GDP and the UK is 33.5% raising to 37.7%. Nearly 2% difference, which is a lot. It doesn't matter how the tax is raised, it's the total investment that matters. We have been a low tax economy for a long time (compared to similar European nations), that was my entire point: if we want better services then we are unlikely to get them in a low tax economy. Recent changes to the tax levels doesn't change how we got to this position in the first place.
[1] https://ifs.org.uk/taxlab/taxlab-key-questions/how-do-uk-tax...
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.