You are currently browsing the daily archive for May 16th, 2008.
The speed limit on thousands of residential roads will be reduced to 20mph under government moves designed to cut road deaths by a third over the next decade…
…Cameras that detect a vehicle’s average speed will be used instead of road humps to enforce the limit in some of the new 20mph zones…
…The Government is preparing a road safety strategy for the next decade and will publish proposals in a consultation document this year. Unlike previous strategies, it is expected to include a specific target to reduce road deaths and a series of tough measures…
If one wants to reduce road deaths of pedestrians drastically, why 20? Why not 15? Or, for that matter, 5?
Have those who’ve suggested this latest policy brilliance ever tried themselves to drive 20 MPH or slightly less over any distance? Earlier today, we engaged in an informal experiment of doing precisely that. For a few moments, with no one behind us in what is a 30 zone, but could well become 20, we tried to maintain exactly 20.
Leaving aside the perhaps important but naturally unaddressed issue of a driver needing to spend an inordinate amount of time watching the speedometer rather than the road ahead, 20 feels not unlike riding a bicycle so slowly one is about to lose one’s balance. And if 20 is the limit according to “average speed” that’s the highest average. To make up for possibly slipping to “21″ or “22″ briefly, one must then do less.
Yes, 20 does work right outside of a school . . . for half a block or so. (Many school zones already are.) However, if one wants to reduce the limit in towns overall, 25 MPH is a base limit that is far more sensible and realistic. One can actually drive at that speed.
But, then again, little to nothing this Government ever suggests is sensible and/or realistic.
Green: The New Color of Catastrophe
Some might call it a “catastrophe”, true. But only those lacking in real perspective. After all, the green left would probably prefer to term this, as reported in the World’s Greatest Newspaper Express, “problem solved”:
…a new documentary Life After People explores how our world would change if human life was obliterated…
Unfortunately, though, obviously they too on the green left wouldn’t be around to enjoy it.
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It is normal for we humans to criticize ourselves. And we then modify behavior based upon reason; that, unlike, say, household pets. In contrast, how long do we think there would be much life on this planet if, for instance, to decide their turf disputes orangutans suddenly could use nuclear weapons? Would they pause and think about the morality and excessiveness of what they are doing, while annihilating each other?
So a major inconsistency invariably rears its head whenever the “humans are just like any other animal” school of thought appears, as was shared with us by one metaphysically interested Express commenter, “…The “GOD” we invented to pump up our egos and explain our position as king of the beasties…” Do the likes of orangutans also ask themselves “Why?” and “wonder”? Maybe they do and we just don’t know it; yet given their civilizational accomplishments to date (do they know of “dates”? or civilization?), it appears decidedly not.
However, we humans have never failed to ponder our place, our mortality and and our morality. But if even doing that doesn’t set us apart to any degree and therefore doesn’t count for anything in terms of “difference”, if we are indeed just another “beastie” answerable to nothing and no one other than a full stomach and survival of the fittest, why then should any of us give a false idol blessed damn about anything? And why do we even think we should?
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