What I learned from attending a speed awareness course

Speeding!

Yep! I got caught speeding! On my birthday! A wonderful gift to myself!

Jokes aside, it was a good course, and after it finished, I was buzzing about sharing what I learned from it.

The facilitator encouraged us to share our experience with others, with the hope that it would cause fewer people to speed!

Some tips from the facilitator

The facilitator suggested a few key strategies to ensure that we don’t end up speeding. He was especially keen on helping us discover how easy it is to speed without realising. His tips were:

• Drive slowly
• Keep a check on your emotions
• Be aware of music that affects your emotions
• Keep enough distance between the car that you’re driving and the car in front of you
• Find a way to ensure you’re not distracted by any tech that you have in the car
• If you have Intelligent Speed Assistance in your car, use it to make the drive easier
• If you have a Speed Limiter in your car, use it to set a speed limit to reduce the things that you have to think about

He used the following example to illustrate that we need to apply haste when managing the following emotions:

Hurried: check the route, tell whoever we’re meeting that we will be delayed and then drive calmly

Angry: pull over and take some deep breaths

Stressed: recognise your stress indicators, leave more space between you and the car in front

Tired: stop, drink something with caffeine in it, get some fresh air, reduce the temperature in the car, chew gum, listen to music, which will keep you alert

Excited: try to be calm, ask others in the car to be calm, reduce the volume of any music that’s playing or change the genre

Is it worth it?

The following was found during test conditions:

When they increased the speed of the car from 30 MPH to 35 MPH, they reached the destination 17 seconds earlier than if they had been driving at 30 MPH.

Statitstics

Some scary statistics!

• Every 17 minutes, someone is killed on the roads in the UK
• 63% of all collisions occur on urban roads
• 33% of all collisions happen on rural roads
• The likelihood of an accident causing someone to die is doubled when it’s nighttime
• 158,000 people are killed or injured due to road traffic accidents per year
• If we reduce our speed from 30 MPH to 20 MPH, we’re 5 times less likely to kill a pedestrian

The lessons

Here are some of the things that I learned during the course:

• If there are no street lights and no signs, the national speed limit applies
• If there are street lights and no signs, it means that the limit is 30 MPH in England and 20 MPH in Wales
  • This applies to single and dual carriageways
• On a dual carriageway, the national speed limit is 70 MPH for cars and motorbikes
• On a single carriageway, the national speed limit is 60 MPH for cars and motorbikes
• If the signs are rectangular and blue with white text, it means you’re approaching, or on a motorway, so the speed limit is 70 MPH
• If there is a red circle around the sign showing the speed limit, it means it applies to all lanes
• If there is no red circle around the sign showing the speed limit, it means that the limit is advisory only
• Many people believe that a dual carriageway means there are 2 lanes in each direction, but this isn’t true
  • The number of lanes isn’t relevant
  • It must have something down the middle, i.e. a central reservation, which can be a metal barrier, a concrete wall, a grassy strip, or even just raised kerbs
• If you can see hazard warning lines, it means that something has happened there before!

What are your Ws?

He asked us to think about the following questions, so that we understood what made us speed.

1. When do you speed?
2. Where are you going when you’re speeding?
3. Why do you speed?
4. What can you do to prevent yourself from speeding?