Speed Limiting in Cars

As part one of my campaign to introduce the concept of actually thinking to UK media, pundits and government, I’m covering the nasty little idea of automatic speed limiters being introduced to cars – so that people can, basically, stop thinking about the speed they drive at. That’ll work…

This subject has been rolling along for some years now.  Basically the technology now exists to be able to instruct a car what speed it should travel at.

Now, if you’re a control freak, this is like a gift from heaven.  If you’re a control freak in power (yes, that includes you Jacqui Smith) then it’s even more wonderful, because it hands you a whole ton of power.

Like everything, of course, it’s not all bad.  There are plenty of good reasons for speed limiting cars, trucks and even fire engines.  That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good idea.

How The Pro Speed Limiters Present Their Argument

Slow, yet also lethal
Slow, yet also lethal - public domain image with thanks to Wikipedia

There are currently a lot of fears in society, especially Western society.  We’re scared of global warming, the economy, terrorism, and dying in a fiery ball of fire when some chav in a misguidedly tuned Vauxhall Nova comes careering head-on towards you as a result of massive overconfidence and a lack of skill.  Throw those arguments into the air and you have some pretty strong arguments as to why we should introduce speed limiters.

Here’s a quick list of their key points:

  • Safety – you’ll hear this a lot.  And it’s true.  Go slower and if all else is equal safety will go up.
  • Economy – by being forced to go slower, you’ll drive more economically and be able to save the world from Global Warming at the same time.
  • Reduced need for thirsty, fast cars – true to a degree because what’s the point in a big V8 if you hit speed-limited wall at 70mph?
  • Reduced load on drivers – no need to think about speed, or worry about speed cameras.
  • It’s optional, there’s no need to fit a speed limiter if you don’t want it.
  • If you do have it, there’s an override button for those rare occasions you may need to go faster than strictly legal.
  • If only a minority of cars have this limiter, the effect will be to slow down others without it.
  • Lot’s of people are killed or injured daily, and anyone arguing against speed controls must be in favour of those deaths.

The arguments are mostly presented by different types of organisation.  You have the emotionally irritating Brake, and the more calm but government funded (don’t forget this fact, they may sound independent but they aren’t) Motoring Forum, the UK Commission for Integrated Transport, and various other safety campaigners.

I can’t find a quote from Jacqui Smith on this subject, but I’m sure she’ll be along soon.

And The Argument Against

Well there has to be some rational argument against this, but unfortunately we’ve only got Safe Speed getting all the media attention on the other side.  Holy Fucking Shit.  I mean, really.  Have you seen them?  You wouldn’t trust these people to decorate your house, so why would you trust them with setting the agenda on speed limits and motoring policy?

Instead, why not get a psychologist who’s studied driving onto your show?  Or, at a stretch, someone from the Institute of Advanced Motorists?  But no, instead you get to listen to a  muppet from Brake arguing with a muppet from Safe Speed.  I suppose there’s only so many pundits to go round and the radio and TV stations pick the easiest ones they can find.

Sheesh.

But here we go – this is other people’s arguments, don’t forget.  Mine come later.

  • It’ll encourage zombie behaviour, which is almost certainly true – in the US where freeways were once limited to the mind-numbingly dull speed of 55mph, you get to see a lot of this.
  • It’s a symptom of control-freakery – yep, almost certainly.
  • Speed doesn’t kill, it’s inattentive driving, which kind of cycles back to the first point.
  • It’s the thin end of a wedge which will end with all cars having compulsory speed limiters.
  • It probably won’t affect KSI (Kills and Serious Injuries) rates in the positive manner the pro side would like to see.
  • Slowing down can cause more accidents.

Thankfully, spokefolk from the RAC, AA and the likes are occassionally wheeled out to discuss such issues and they tend to be a bit more rational and thought out.  But they’ve become rather dysfunctional resellers of insurance and recovery services these days, rather than the clubs and associations that they originally started out as.  Consequently they have to toe a fine line between keeping customers (many of whom are the unthinking fools I worry about) and not upsetting the government (filled with the misguidedly thinking fools I also worry about) into adding more restrictions to both their customers and their businesses.  So they tend towards making statements rather than take the risk of getting involved on radio or TV.

Of course, avoiding radio or TV is a sensible move for many.  I’ve listened to myself on Radio and I’m clearly a rambling buffoon who doesn’t know when to shut up and who talks over others.  Heaven knows what would happen if I found myself on TV.  Of course, it’s not totally bad to be a buffoon – look how well Boris Johnson’s done out of it.

The best argument against this, so far, comes from the easy to respect Derek Charters, from the Motor Industry Research Association, who believes limiting speed automatically could cause accidents.

“The last thing you need is one car to be overtaking and then pull back in, in front of the cars in front, because that braking event will then cause everybody to start to slow down, which will then compress the traffic, which then causes an incident.”

The Dave’s Attempt to Think on this Subject

  • Oh Jesus, do we need the government controlling us just a bit more?
  • Would government controlled GPS units eventually be used to track our cars’ every movement?
  • A world full of cars doing identical speeds is so horrifically soporific that I suspect we’d be having massive pile-ups in no time.
  • The unthinking are the worst people to get this technology – they’ll just turn into motoring zombies.
  • Going faster is fun.  Sometimes it’s good to be able to have a bit of fun, you know, even if it does make the world ever so slightly less safe.
  • All speeds are dangerous – being crushed to death by a 2mph Audi Q7 isn’t much fun either – stop people from realising how dangerous cars are and boom! more dead people.
  • It’ll probably mean the end of the fantastic Top Gear show.
  • It’ll make moving to South America far more appealing.

The key arguments for or against this idea are really just noise.  The question we should be asking is at what point should drivers give up responsibility for the movements of their cars?  Lane sensing technology has matured enough that you could conceivably place your Honda at the beginning of the M6 and drive all the way to Scotland without touching the wheel, brakes or throttle again, coming to a stop when the traffic in front does so, and accelerating to a set speed when it’s possible to do so.  I remain to be convinced that all this is a good idea, but at least it’s entirely within the control of the driver – he can choose what is and is not switched on, and where.

GPS technology is constantly improving, as are sensors.  It’s only a matter of time before we can simply climb into our cars, shout “take me to work, autocar!” and climb into the back for a nap.  Sounds like a wonderful idea to me and I wouldn’t care what speed the car travelled at so long as it woke me up on arrival and neatly parked itself while I go for a pee.

Partial implementation, on a wide scale, of speed limiters or even smart cruise control could be lethal.  Each car would end up driving at ever so slightly different speeds.  Overtaking moves could be measured in miles, and it wouldn’t matter if you didn’t have a speed limiter – you’d be stuck behind those with them fitted.  And those who choose to have them fitted would be sitting in a smug pool of self-superiority, knowing they’re driving at the maximum safe speed.  They’d be wrong, of course.  70mph is safe when it’s clear and dry.  It’s safe even when it’s wet.  But in a deluge it’s lethal.  But having given up the act of thinking about speed they would just keep their foot mashed down on the carpet.  Until they eventually plough into the back of the car in front that they couldn’t see.

And that’s why this topic has made it into the Campaign for Thinking.  Full automation is a good thing, it means you can go and think about something else.  But a world full of drivers who believe thinking about speed is only for the government… God preserve us!

Now, could the government get on with thinking about things they could help us with?  Infrastructure, international security, the economy, tax… that kind of stuff?  The big, hard problems that they have the power to do something about?  3,000 people a year die on the roads.  60,000 people a year die from murders in South Africa.  And providing assistance to unstable or impoverished countries could save the lives of millions.  Unfortunately it’s hard to get elected on the promise of saving the lives of AIDS stricken Tanzanians, but you could save or dramatically improve the lives of more than 3,000 of them with the millions spent on speed limiter studies.  Yes, I know it’s a straw man argument, but a little sense of perspective on the point of all this would be useful.

Linkage

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7803997.stm

http://www.cfit.gov.uk/mf/index.htm

http://www.mira.co.uk/

http://www.safespeed.org.uk/

http://www.cfit.gov.uk/

http://www.dft.gov.uk/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_in_Africa

About the Campaign for Thinking

Introducing my personal, one man mini-crusade – the Campaign for Thinking. It’s going to be a scattered stream of consciousness thing. It might be good therapy for me. Who knows?

This is where my campaign to encourage people to Use Their Frickin’ Brains is starting.  It’s a personal crusade, but now that 2008 has come to an end I’ve come to the conclusion that far too many people are choosing to abrogate their personal responsibilities.  Possibly because the world is too confusing and complex for them, but more likely because they’re just too damn lazy to actually think for a while.

The Inspiration

Where on Earth do I start?  But the item that got me the most, recently, was a story about think-tanks encouraging the use of speed limiting devices in cars.  I’m not going to go into detail about it all, as that’s for a post in this section, but it’s a completely bat-shit insane idea.  I can see the logic behind it, but what we have here are people who have looked at the small picture and either deliberately or inadvertantly missed the big picture.  And I see it All. The. Time.

It’s driving me insane.  If I see one more group of parents protesting against Wi-Fi being installed in the schools of their mobile phone toting progeny I’ll be tempted to just mow them down with my Bluetooth device.  Clearly, for their safety, I need to find a release.  And this is it.

The Agenda

I can’t possibly hope to pin-point every possible case of not thinking.  I mean, that would need all the thinking people to devote their entire lives to the job.  No, I’m going to highlight items and people in the media and political spheres who are cheerfully spreading or pormoting misinformation, rumour and displaying the primary symptoms of non-thinking.

Basically, I’m going to target the following:

  • People who protest
  • Over-zealous non-thinkers who adopt any idea like it’s a religion
  • Religion
  • Authoritarians
  • Libertarians
  • Jacqui Smith
  • Actually, any sod who can’t be bothered to think
  • Even if it was just a momentary slip

Obviously it’s all going to depend on the time I have available, but hey, I need the release.

Some articles are going to be carefully thought out, illustrated and cited.  Others will be the incoherent ramblings of a guy who should probably think more too.  If you don’t like what I say, tell me in the comments sections after each post.

Wardrobe For Sale

Yes really – feel the excitement of this slimline, 200x100x40 wardrobe. Oooh!

img_9525-large

I’m selling off a wardrobe. Yes, I know, not a terribly exciting blog post, but it’s my site :-)

Anyway, it’s an Ikea jobbie, in I believe a Birch effect veneer. Slimline at less than 40cm deep, 200cm tall and 99cm wide. There’s a couple of shelves, a shoe rack, and these nifty extending hangers which are what allow it to be a slimline unit. Handy for smaller rooms.

If you’re interested, it’s for sale on eBay.

Data Visualisation – and Me

I’ve always loved charts.

Yes. I know.

But well drawn charts are always fascinating. Now, combine a chart with what is sometimes my favourite subject, me, and maybe I could do something?

I’ve always loved charts.

Yes.  I know.

But well drawn charts are always fascinating.  Now, combine a chart with what is sometimes my favourite subject, me, and maybe I could do something?

I’m often asked what I did, when.  And to be quite frank, I struggle.  Stuff’s based on various hazy memories such as “well I was wearing those pixie boots back then, so must have been 1985.”

I wondered if there was a really really simple way of visualising the key things I did in each year.  I reckon recent years are more important than those long ago.  And to signify my general decline a spiral is probably the best metaphor for my life.  SO…!  Here it is, what I did in my career, in it’s most primary elements.

I’d be really interested to know if this works for you, or if you think I’m just nobbing about.  Comments, please!

PS. I know that the resizing’s gorn and made it a bit soft, but life’s too short to fix that – it’s just an experiment.  Sorry.

Barcamp Liverpool 2008

I attended Barcamp Liverpool 2008 to join fellow geeks in a spot of technology appreciation at this ‘unconference’ at the CUC. Great venue, and great to be able to give an ad-hoc presentation on WordPress for News Sites in the Café

So… I’ve always meant to be a bit more active within the geek community.  I tried a spell in the late eighties/early nineties with the British Computer Society, CompuServe and CIX but sometimes found it all a bit tiresome.  There were too many who’d earned their stripes in the seventies on heavy iron and, I felt, even at that time were being left behind.  Of course, I must say that that doesn’t apply to all or even a majority of the people back then.  But there wasn’t much of a sense of fun.  It was all a bit… serious.

Barcamp Liverpool 2008 Official Logo
Barcamp Liverpool 2008 Official Logo

But you know, technology is cool.  Especially today when almost everyone seems to be a geek these days.  So after a successful trip to Birmingham for the first WordCamp UK I thought it was time to get geeking up in my home town!  Barcamp Liverpool beckoned…

And it was worthwhile.  Sadly I’d been up at 3am in the morning in order to take Romana to the airport, so I was a bit out of it.  But that didn’t prevent me doing a few things anyway…

WordPress for News Sites

I was asked if I wanted to do a presentation on WordPress by one guy.  And I thought… why the heck not.  Now, I know a lot of people at Barcamp know WordPress, so I felt the best approach was to be a little more specific.  So… I decided to talk casually in the Café about how WordPress can be used for the purpose of building a news site.  I covered the basics before showing off the Caribou demo.  To be honest, it wasn’t a perfect talk – I’d had half an hour to prepare and most of that was spent getting the latest WP Trunk installed on my laptop, with everything configured and ready to roll, plus a quick list of key points.  If I hadn’t had a client meeting for half the morning I might have done better.  But still, at one point there seemed to be about 20 people paying good attention.  Frankly I was surprised – I rambled and soon realised that the best approach was to get folk asking questions.  I think people enjoyed it!

Video Interviews

I ended up giving a couple.  I rambled.  I was tired.  Lack of sleep doesn’t help me.  I kept my glasses on so as to disguise the bags under my eyes.

1 Minute Pitch

Instead of pitching something we’re doing I decided to pitch a new concept we’ve been floating around the office.  I was nervous, shakey and tired.  I can’t even remember much about it all to be honest.  The other guys did better.  They had stuff like preparation – I’d had about thirty seconds to think about mine!  But it’s good to practice public speaking, so why not?  It was a good crowd.

But Hey…

I had a good time.  But overslept dramatically as I recovered from Saturday, so didn’t make the Sunday.  I hope everyone had a great time!

Now That’s Clever… The Riddle on an Oscilloscope

Ok – so I admit – I’m not only impressed by animation, I’m impressed by tech toys. And oscilloscopes have always been a source of fascination to geeks. Throw in a bit of nostalgia and look what I find…

Ok – so I admit – I’m not only impressed by animation, I’m impressed by tech toys.  And oscilloscopes have always been a source of fascination to geeks.  Expensive, complex and covered in switches, buttons and knobs.  If there weren’t so many other toys fighting for quality time, and that time in such short supply, I’d buy one.

And being someone who did his growing up in the eighties, The Riddle is one of those songs that brings back huge and happy memories.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ac1G_5N73g

And the original:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=lrtA69G15zk

Spectacu.la, the New Design, and Why I’ve Been So Quiet…

Some of you may have noticed that this blog hasn’t been updated properly of late. Not much fresh content, no motorsport reports… in fact, not much at all. Here’s why…

My site's not been quite as desolate this site in Sofia, Bulgaria, but...  (Image by niv, who at 2008-12-01 released it as CC Share Alike @ Flickr)
My site isn't so desolate (nor beautiful) as this one in Sofia, Bulgaria - by niv at Flickr - credit and link at the bottom of this article

Some of you may have noticed that this blog hasn’t been updated properly of late.  Not much fresh content, no motorsport reports… in fact, not much at all.

Well, there are reasons!  First off, work.  And more work.  Basically, early on this year I realised that we simply weren’t making enough to get by, let alone to prosper.  So it became time to actually knuckle down.  I stepped up my networking efforts – getting out there and meeting people, letting them know who we were.  In the end a chance meeting with Matt Wardle, formerly of Black & Ginger, led to us doing several pieces of work.  In a way, that was the start of a path where we learned how marketing and building a small business actually works.

And so it started.  In Spring I built the back-end to an activities site by B&G called Liverpool Active City.  I don’t feel it’s as busy a site as it should be, given the budgets behind it, but our side of it works reliably, so I’m happy.  That was followed by a frantic summer with Politics & The CityJames (my colleague) coding late into the night, and me swearing and cussing over the SUN server that we got lumbered with.  Not being a SUN OS expert I found there were plenty of traps waiting for me.  We went live with hours to spare, and I even managed to arrive at the launch party.  Late and bedraggled, of course, but hey….

We then deliberately avoided taking on large works in order to implement a new WordPress Themes Club.  This club, known as Spectacu.la and with that as its domain name, was a massive project for us and involved lots of tricky work to build a secure, reliable and easy to use platform.  The themes for it needed to be built too.  That was James occupied, basically, from August to the end of November.  In the meantime I did the smaller works (I’m not a web coder by nature – it drives me nuts) and that’s established a rather nice platform for us to hopefully monetise our WordPress skills in a non-consultancy, and therefore highly scalable, way.

And that’s led to us winning a contract with a FTSE250 corporate to replace one of their leading websites with a WordPress based site.  This is a relatively large job for us – but it signifies the scale of interest in the WordPress platform we chose to specialise in.  And you know… it’s going to be brilliant.  We have James, who as a WP coder just rocks, and Mike Little is now working with us too.

And of course, there’s the re-design of this site.  Over the years it’s accumulated a lot of content and I felt it was time to use a theme suited to this – breaking things up into sections and providing easier navigation options.

So, that’s a big part of why I’ve been quiet.  Motorsport has taken a back seat, as have most of my other interests.  The business is now on a far stronger foundation, however, with a good, regular income stream and finally a little bit of money in the bank.  And while travel has taken a real back seat this year, in spring we’re planning a trip to Mexico.  Watch this space!

[Photo credit:  Niv]