Speed or Greed

Some days ago there was a lot of talk about raising the national speed limit on motorways to eighty mile per hour.  The reason the Government gave for considering the increase was that the current seventy mile and hour limit is that car and road safety has moved on from when the speed limit was originally set. What I purpose here is to play devils advocate and look at the alternative view of this move and show it is a wholly political move and the only losers are the motorists and the environment while the winners are the government and the petrol companies.

Looking at it from the Governments point of view first. The Government are currently in a financial crisis and they need to find ways of increasing the money going into the treasury to pay for the running of the nation and they are faced with ever increasing bills because of rising unemployment etc. Ideally they would like a means to do this that didn't involve increasing taxes in a way that people will notice, after all raising taxes isn't very popular and it isn't going to get you voted back in after five years in Government. 

Here is the maths bit. The Government have already raised the VAT to twenty percent and in terms of petrol this should have generated nearly nineteen percent more tax on the fuel that we put in our cars compared to the same time last year, however it is not as simple as that and when you allow for inflation this figure is reduced to just over four percent. Still an increase, yes, but there is one other factor to consider. We are't using our cars so much any more because of the high cost of fuel. This has reduced car usage in the last year by fifteen percent. This has has had the effect of turning the four percent increase in revenue in a decrease of twelve percent. 

So basically put at the moment the despite increasing the VAT on petrol they are taking less revenue on fuel than they were a year or so ago.  Now you might ask what does this have to do with the speed limit, well the answer is simple basically the faster a car goes the more fuel it uses per mile to travel at the faster speed. A car travelling at eighty miles per hour can use over ten percent more fuel than a car travelling at seventy miles per hour. By increasing the speed limit you have an effective way of increasing the revenues from petrol without anyone really noticing, and there is also another bonus. It would be popular with the motorist and increase support for the Government making it easier to get reelected in five years time.

As for the petrol companies it is simple to see what they get out of it, the more fuel we use, the more they sell and the bigger their profits. Interesting since these are taxed and they are another source of revenue for the Government.

Now here comes the other side what the Government want to do and how it effects the motorist. In simple terms it allows the people in the car to reduce the travel time by ten minutes or so for every one hundred miles travelled on a motorway at the same time as increasing the cost of the hundred miles by ten percent or so depending on the cars fuel consumption figures. It also increases the likely hood of congestion since you can get less cars per mile a road at eighty miles per hour than you can if the cars are traveling at seventy simply because of the fact that faster moving cars leave bigger gaps because they require longer stopping distances. In effect travelling at higher speeds reduces the capacity of the road in terms of vehicles numbers.

Then there is the safety aspects of it all, at the moment if you come across a Lorry in a car while travelling at seventy miles per hour  the speed difference between the two vehicles  is just fourteen miles per hour, given the Lorry is speed limited to fifty six miles per hour, at eighty miles per hours this speed difference is now twenty four miles per hour requiring the driver of the car to have have faster reaction speed. From this fact alone we can conclude that with the increase in the speed difference will come an increase in the likely hood of someone making a mistake and increasing the chances of an accident. This is just simple logic. 

Another thing to take into account is that not all motorists will want to travel at eighty miles per hour in their cars. Personally I have noticed a decrease in the speed that people are travelling at on the A1 not because of congestion but in order to save fuel. After if it is fact that if you travel faster than seventy you use more fuel then opposite is true if you travel less than seventy and you save fuel. The problem I have noticed is when these slower moving vehicles want to overtake they are forced to increase their speed to at least seventy just to get into the outside lane. If they pull out without changing speed you can see the break lights of all the cars in the faster vehicles in the fast lane going on as they slow down. Increasing the speed limit to eighty will have the effect of making these drivers, that want to travel slower, accelerate to even higher speeds than before if they want to overtake almost against their will. What is worse is the slower drivers that don't increase their speed will create even more sharp breaking from the vehicles in the fast lane as the faster drivers are forced to reduce speed by an even bigger margin which has safety implications.  

So to sum up the points for the motorist, they managed to get places quicker, but tit costs more, their is a higher risk of congestion, safety on the roads is reduced, and some motorists will be forced to travel at speeds they are not comfortable with.

Finally turning to the environment, I wrote to the local Conservative MP, just before te election, about reducing the speed limit on standard dual carriage roads in order to help protect the environment. I gave put the case the lower speed limit in terms of lower fuel consumption, lower emissions, increased road capacity and finally safety. I backed this up with my own research record in transport research back in the mid to late 1990's. Finally I pointed out the green bowie points the scheme would give any Government but warned it might at first be popular until people realised they were actually saving money so it was  best done at the start of any term in office. He was very interested in the idea and wrote back telling it was a good idea and he was going to take it to the shadow transport secretary at the time.  Clearly they came to the conclusion that the environment doesn't matter but being popular does. Basically any thing that uses more fissile fuel is going to damage the environment so any measure to increase the speed limit will have a negative impact on the world we live in.

My opinion is that we really don't need to increase the speed limits on motorway's and it would be to the advantage of the environment if we in fact lowered the standard dual carriage speed limit sixty and save money, however this would reduce the income for taxes on fuel. I believe that the world we live in is worth more than a few saved minutes going from A to B. Another point is we should be saving limited resources rather than using them quicker. We need to think of the future and not just the present. I have given the arguments and my view and I hope this has helped you come up with your own view. At current the speed limit change is up for consultation and you feel strongly about it, it would be a good time to write to your MP.