On 2007-07-05, Theo Bekkers (aka Bruce)
was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea:
> TimC wrote:
>
>> Does anyone else find speed limits woefully irrelvant to the bicycle
>> (let alone when racing on a closed road)?
>
> Only in that most cyclists have difficulty maintaining even 40 km/h on a
> level road.
True. But then someone evaluates our speed, then proceeds to walk out
in front of us anyway, yelling at us to "slow down!" when we are doing
50km/h in a 60 zone.
>> I've been on plenty of 100km/h roads where I would feel unsafe at
>> greater than 80kmh/h in the bike. I've been on plenty of 40km/h roads
>> where I feel completely safe at 60km/h. Slow speed limits are not for
>> your own safety -- they are for the safety of other people, so you
>> don't crash into them and kill them. Yet, if you've survived long
>> enough on a bike to be skillful enough to get above 40km/h on a
>> downhill (ie, not have your brakes on all he way down a hill), you're
>> almost by definition, skilled enough to be able to look out for
>> unpredictable obstacles such as other people.
>
> Surely that same reasoning applies to car drivers? Actually very little
> skill is required to achieve 40 km/h in a car. You seem to indicate that
> skill is required to do 40 km/h downhill on a bicycle, (is this because a
> bicycle is _more_ unstable and dangerous than the car,)
No, because anyone who gets that fast does so because they have enough
practice to be able to not feel unduly nervous at such a basic task.
There would be a correlation between those who aren't nervous, and
those who have been cycling long enough and often enough to get over
such nervousness. And then, in turn, a correlation between those who
ride more, and those with more skill.
Not a perfect correlation, I will grant you.
> yet you say that
> cyclist should be allowed to do that but not the car.
No, I'm saying the speed limit is an overly general thing that only
really applies to one specific vehicle class, when it shouldn't be.
Trucks do get a slightly differnet limit than cars on a few roads, but
I wish my bus driver was enforced a different limit again. A general
speed limit can't take into account different vehicles limitations.
For cars, that's corners. For bikes, it's not the ability to brake
really hard. Still, I believe it's a fault of your driving if you
need to brake hard. The local paper had another traffic report this
week (it does most weeks), saying it was unfortunate that a driver hit
a cow. He went around a corner, and there was the cow. He had to
sweve and suddenly brake to miss it, but ended up side swiping it. I
don't believe the driver will be charged. Myself, I prefer to drive
around corners at a speed that means I can stop in time for the
inevitable roo that I can't see hiding in the bushes obscured by the
cliff face.
> I'm having some
> problems with your logic here. Doesn't a car also have better brakes than a
> bicycle and is thus able to stop in a shorter distance?
Part of being a better cyclist is to be able to better anticipate
things. The cyclist will put their brakes on earlier, offsetting such
disadvantages.
> I would think a 60
> km/h car zone should be a 40 km/h bicycle zone. Many cyclists have little
> control at 60 km/h yet even incompetent car drivers manage to safely do that
> every day.
Ha ha. Depends what you mean by safely I guess. I would beg to
differ, anyway.
>> If it weren't for the kangaroos around dusk, the local mountain is
>> completley safe to ride at 80km/h on the bike, when it is speed
>> limited to 40km/h for motorised cars simply because they can't handle
>> the corners without the inevitable idiot ending up in trees, or over
>> the side of the cliff.
>
> Ah, so speed limits are only there for idiots. Sensible people should feel
> free to ignore them? 
Sensible people take into account of the limitations of their vehicle
as well as applicable laws. The laws shouldn't have to take into
account the lowest common demonintator, or if it does, it should do so
consistently. For instance, there are still 40 years cars on the
road. Hence the speed limit should not be more than 80km/h anywhere
on this contininent.
--
TimC
Conclusion to my thesis -- "It is trivial to show that it is
clearly obvious that this is not woofly."
