[Mgs] Speed kills

[Rick Lindsay]

Paulie, you hit the nail squarely on the head! The issue is worsening driving skills, especially here in south Texas! And automakers are contributing to that trend! Any person who NEEDS a car that automatically brakes or parallel parks itself shouldn't have a driver's license!

Driving skills are demonstrably worsening. Not using turn indicators, changing lanes in intersections, rolling or running stop signs and lights, and TXTing while driving, are commonplace here in Texas! And back on the modern car dodads theme, fiddling with sat-nav or mp3 connections is about as distracting as reading a txt.

So what is the carmakers' response to this? 17 airbags, irritating buzzers, lane change warning systems, automatic braking, automated crash indication radio transmissions to OnStar or worse, driving style tattle tails to insurance companies, and...wait for it...automated parallel parking.

Why not just learn to drive responsibly or loose the right to drive?! Driving on public streets and roads is a privilege,  not a right. Violation of that privilege should have consequences. But somehow, it doesn't. Drunk drivers get right back in their cars. Millennials rear-end the guy in front while sending 'selfies'. And lunch-timers roll the stop signs rushing to get back to work on time. Those guys scare me much more than the enthusiast motoring at 10-over on the highway.

And finally, here are the two opposing models under which my wife and I drive:

I assume the road is full of irresponsible crazies so I drive a nimble car, remain alert and always consider escape routes to avoid incidents.

My wife assumes the incident is unavoidable and therefore drives a tank! Yes, she drives carefully and has never been in a wreck, but our assumptions are different. My goal is to avoid the incident. Her goal is to survive it.

Man, I really need to get back in the garage, twist a few spanners, and forget this philosophical stuff.:-P Happy Sunday! 

-rick



<div>-------- Original message --------</div><div>From: PaulHunt73 via Mgs <mgs at autox.team.net> </div><div>Date:01/18/2015  3:38 AM  (GMT-06:00) </div><div>To: Allan Thompson <Allan.Thompson at ntlworld.com>, Mgs at autox.team.net </div><div>Subject: Re: [Mgs] Speed kills </div><div>
</div>Except that the roads with the highest speeds and the greatest volume of traffic i.e. motorways have the lowest collision (no such thing as 'accidents') and death rates.  After decades of falling death rates despite rapidly growing vehicle miles, numbers of deaths are now going up in the UK, because the quality of driving is falling faster than safety features can be introduced.  Roll-on autonomous cars - except for me of course.  Oh, I momentarily forgot, they only work in California, not when it's raining.

PaulH.
  ----- Original Message ----- 


  The slogan 'Speed kills' comes from a road safety campaign in the UK.
  Scrutiny of accident statistics shows that on public roads, when speeds rise, more people die in accidents than in low speed accidents.
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