fast is faster than slow AND kills

In response to the spasm of weirdos demanding removal of traffic speed controls. And Jeremy Clarkson.

fast is faster than slow AND kills rob k - 11th post - 14 Jun 2004 20:51
A bullet travelling at 15 mph will not kill you.
One travelling at 300 mph will.
End of argument. No studies, no surveys, no comparable control mechanisms debated over endlessly while children are being killed by car drivers who can't break soon enough. Speed kills.
If you don't believe this ordinary common sense, try this little experiment:
Hit yourself slowly in the face. Done that?
Now hit yourself REALLY hard. In the face.
Get the picture?
The laws of physics are fairly universal, as far as I know. So why not try another experiment. Get a kitchen chair, take it into the garden, and jump off it. Easy. Now take the same chair, take it to the top of Canary Wharf, and jump off it. Notice the difference?

re: fast is faster than slow AND kills george nelson - 82nd post - 15 Jun 2004 13:08 I guess you could say there is a need for both fast and slow sometimes travel fast sometimes travel slow.
The trick has got to be knowing which is best at the right time.
But lets not get to hung up about speed, as a dose of common sense usually makes much more of an impact, or should I say avoidance of an impact.
But that is the real problem isn’t it to many academics not enough people that actually know what they are talking about.
Oh well such is life, suppose I better go test out that theory relating to canary wharf.
Or maybe not at least not with out a parachute anyway.

re: fast is faster than slow AND kills rob k - 14th post - 15 Jun 2004 21:17 Drivers have parachutes. Only they're called airbags. They also have a steel box to protect them. The pedestrian has nothing.
And unless you have an apartheid system, where traffic and pedestrians never mix, you will always get collisions.
The free-range driver theory is OK for deserts and offroading, but not for London Streets where there is life happening all around. An unpredictable, chaotic traffic situation where anything can happen at anytime.
Essentially, the demand of the Clarkson Tendency is for self-regulation, where in this case, every driver is allowed to go as fast as he likes and pedestrians depend on driver 'concentration' for their safety.
And how would they make drivers 'concentrate' on their speed limits? I can see it now, The Driver Concentration Act 2004. Incorporating the In-car Brain-Monitoring Act 2004... IT CAN'T BE DONE.
Anyway, have you ever met a driver who admits to being careless or not 'concentrating'? No, thought not.
So what other laws would they like to dispose of? The same people, or their forefathers, hated the idea of compulsory seatbelts and breathalysers. The Gerald Nabbarros and Cyril Smiths and other neurotics. I remember when the breathalyser was introduced, and the angry letters in the right-wing press about 'loss of liberty' and 'betraying the principles our forefathers fought for' - you wouldn't have believed.
It's always the same. The tendency is to deflect the train of thought away from the reality, which is people being killed by cars, and off onto some bogus debate about illusory freedoms which at the end of the day, amount to no more than the freedom to get slaughtered down the golf club and feel the buzz of that last, alcohol-fuelled drive home. 'Living on the edge' I believe it's called?
Like members of the James Dean fan club. Free Spirits all. The problem for the Free Spirits in their Vauxhall Sinatras is that this isn't Texas, and they can never understand this.
At bottom it reveals a trivial attitude to human life, and deserves all the insults it gets. But the point is that Free Spirits aren't effected by insults. They laugh in the face of insults and don't care what people think of them. That's what I always thought anyway.
But then, I always thought we lived in a rational culture which at least acknowledged the laws of physics. I see now I was wrong.

re: fast is faster than slow AND kills The Air Is Blue Again - 2nd post - 29 Jun 2004 16:00
A car travelling at 15 mph that doesn't stop has just as much chance can kill you as easily as one that travells at 300 mph and doesn't stop.

re: fast is faster than slow AND kills rob k - 17th post - 7 Jul 2004 15:25
We all sort of assumed that most drivers WOULD stop after hitting someone.
Again, goes to show what sort of people are out there in charge of lethal weapons.