Affiliated to The Institute of Advanced Motorists

A DATE FOR YOUR DIARY!!

Group Meeting at Blunsdon House Hotel on Wednesday November 4^th at 7.30pm

I have managed to obtain the services of Chris Gilbert, (Roadcraft/Hendon), as our Speaker for the above meeting. As most of you know, Chris is a very prolific and entertaining speaker who, from my experience, encourages enthusiasm. Chris played a very big part many years ago in helping me determine how far I wanted to be involved with Advanced Driving and he was indeed a great mentor for me and I will always be grateful for that!

His talk will be for about 2 hours with a break half way through and will cover as much as possible about his Driving History, Roadcraft and the principles within it and also some information about “Response Driving”.

His”Ultimate Driving Craft” DVD will be available at a reduced price for the night so it will be worth coming along to take advantage of that offer.

Obviously Chris has a fair way to travel to speak to us and we need to cover the costs involved in obtaining speakers like Chris so please, do yourselves a great favour and come along to take advantage of his talk and go away enlightened with the fact that you will possess more knowledge than you came in with.

I have been to a considerable number of Chris’s talks and I have learned from each of them. I have never been bored and I could easily have sat there until the dawn. Each talk has something different!

So please make the effort to back up your Committee and fellow members. I would like to ask you to try to obtain any support you can from anyone who may be interested in coming along.

Make a note of those questions you always wanted to ask!!!!

Looking forward to your attendance and support.

Chris Gleed. MAIRSO.

(Senior Observer- Swindon & District Group of Advanced Motorists)

They are being offered on a first come first served basis.
We are therefore extending our invitation to Wiltshire RoADAR
members, and would be glad if you would circulate this message. The details
are: -

Venue:

St John’s Ambulance,
Ashville Business Park,
Cheltenham Road East,
Staverton,
Glos, GL2 9QJ
Date:  Saturday, 10 October 2009
Time: Start 9am/Finish 4pm – Half hour for lunch (free coffee available am
and pm)
Refreshments: Bring your own sandwiches, although there are vending
machines providing chocolate and crisps
Course Content: Saving lives on the road. Looking at crash helmet removal,
head injuries, CPR, Unconscious Casualties, Bleeding, Shock.

If you are interested please let Monica know by 29th September 2009 at the latest

This is open to those who are aged 26 years or less and hold a full driver’s licence, and are not already HPC members. The aims of the day are to:

• Promote awareness of driving skills at advanced levels
• Encourage the participants to develop their own skills
• Have fun

If you wish to attend, go to the HPC website, and register here

The High Performance Club exists:

• To further skill, interest and enjoyment in road driving and its relationship to reducing accidents on the road
• To provide members with the opportunity to widen their knowledge of various driving techniques
• To provide social activities of various kinds for the membership

You can read much more on the HPC website.

Justice Blair’s Theory

FEET PER SECOND

The following is a talk by Mr. Justice Blair, recorded in “The Listener” and copied from “The Journal of Criminal Law”, No.5 January, 1988.

The basic cause of road accidents is widespread ignorance of ground speed, not only on the part of pedestrians but also on the part of virtually every driver of a motor car, and I add that if this widespread ignorance on the part of the road users be cured and it is curable, then there will follow a great reduction in the toll of road accidents. A speedometer does not tell anyone his ground speed. It does nothing of the kind, and it is because every motorist deludes himself into believing that a speedometer tells him how fast he is covering the ground that the danger or road accidents is increased. A speedometer gives you your speed in miles an hour. Have you any mental picture of the length of any hour or the length of a mile? No one has. How then, can anyone possibly get a mental picture of his ground speed when he is asked to put two unreliable factors together and obtain a result?

I have tried very many running down cases. Judges are conscientious when trying cases and I always felt that in order to understand any motor case it was necessary that I work out a respective speed of each vehicle in a measure that would tell me their respective ground speeds. The only measure that would give me any mental picture of the speed at which a vehicle covered the ground was the measure of feet per second. That involved me in a lot of Arithmetic. Sixty miles per hour works out at 87.9 recurring feet per second and every time I converted miles per hour into fee per second I got a result in recurring decimals. So then I had to look for a simple formula, and this is how I got it.

Instead of calling 60 mph 87 odd feet per second I called it 90 feet per second and that gave me the simple formula of adding half to my miles per hour to obtain speed in feet per second correct within 2%. Ever since then, I have driven cars and tried running down cases in feet per second. Now what I say to all motorists is that they try doing what I do, that is always to drive and think in speed in feet per second instead of in miles per hour and you will at once become a 100% better and safer driver. All you have to do is to add one half to the figure of your speed in mph and you will get your speed in feet per second.

Any child can do that. The other aspect of road safety touches what is called kinetic energy, which means the moving force possessed by a vehicle in motion. I cant give you a more detailed explanation, but another way to put it is to refer to kinetic energy as the kick possessed by a moving vehicle. A small motor car weighing about a ton and moving at a speed of 40 miles per hour strikes the same blow as eighteen ten ton steam rollers travelling at their highest speed, which is 3 mph. That is the force you are handling when you speed up a light car to 40 mph 60 feet per second. If you are driving a big seven seater 2 ton car at 60 mph (90 feet per second) its kinetic energy is more than that of 100 ten ton steam rollers moving at 3 mph.

Excellent advice, and as citizens we wish that every driver of a motor car would bear Mr. Justice Blair’s words of wisdom in mind.

Unhappily, human nature is such that when travelling from one place to another we are all inspired with the same desire, to get to our destination as soon as possible. So we all travel as fast as possible, the controls comprised by the words “possible” being (1) regard for your safety, (2) road sense, (3) consideration for others, (4) the law.

“Feet per second” and “Kinetic Energy” do not occur to most of us, until after the accident.

The book is available from Amazon, price £14.72.

The review is attached here Review of The Psychology of Driving by Dr Graham Hole

Overall, it shows we’re doing mainly what the membership wants. A few more activities wouldn’t go amiss, but no serious flaws. If you didn’t get a questionnaire, or you have comments to make, please add a comment below, or talk to a committee member.

a) Put on your sunglasses b) Check tyre pressures.

c) Change to a lower gear d) Tune your radio to the local channel

Passing your test could depend on choosing the correct answer which is;- Tune your radio to the local channel.  A reader from the telegraph was puzzled . The Highway Code warns against such distractions and even if you know the local radio frequency you cannot receive the signal in a tunnel. The correspondence from the DSA failed to produce an explanation, although the following was received from the policy department.

I apologise for your difficulty in getting this question answered. The requirement for this Theory Test question comes from an EU directive. The DSA was asked to do this after the St Gothard and Mont Blanc tunnel fires in the late 1990’s in which a number of people lost their lives. After this radio transmitters were placed in the road traffic tunnel. If a driver were to tune to the correct frequency, they would be warned of any fires or other dangerous occurrence in the tunnels. This is because drivers may not be able to get out of the tunnel if not forewarned! The contradiction between the Highway Code and this question is because we have few, if any road traffic tunnels in the UK, and it is more a Continental concern.

So now we know know. Thank goodness the DSA is working hard to improve British driving standards. Perhaps we should also install speed camera’s at Britain’s “few if any” tunnel’s and fine anyone who exceeds the limit while fiddling with their radio in search of Smashey and (white noise to fade).
This came from the Telegraph Motoring December 1st, 2007

A high number of motorists have no idea that the rules regarding the positioning and colour of speed cameras changed in April this year.

Speed, or “safety” cameras, as the Government calls them, no longer have to be painted yellow, or be visible from 60m (200ft), and no longer have to be sited only where there is a history of road accidents. The regulations were relaxed in April after the Government had announced in December that camera partnerships would no longer be able to keep the money generated by speeding fines to pay for more cameras; instead, they’ll get grants from a yearly, central road-safety fund of £110million.

As part of the new autonomy for the local partnerships, the Department for Transport handed over the regulation of the cameras, saying “the Department does not want to be prescriptive about the conditions to be met for the use of safety cameras.” It now merely issues guidelines as to how the cameras should be operated. The guidelines still state that cameras should be painted yellow or covered with “retro-reflective” sheeting, and that they should be visible at up to 60m where the speed limit is 40mph or below, and 100m at all other speed limits. They also still recommend siting the cameras where at least three people were killed or seriously injured in the 36 months prior to the camera proposal being submitted, although the guidelines now state: “While the primary objective for camera deployment is to reduce KSIs [collisions where the person was killed or seriously injured] at known collision locations, cameras can also be beneficial where there is community concern – ie the local community requests enforcement at a particular site because traffic speed is causing concern for road safety, or where there are engineering factors that cannot be implemented in the short term and enforcement is being used as an interim measure.”

But all the DfT stipulations are guidelines only, and some local partnerships have already said that they find the DfT regulations too restrictive. Meredydd Hughes, head of Roads Policing for the Association of Chief Police Officers (who appeared in court this week after being flashed by a speed camera doing 90mph in a 60mph zone), told a national newspaper in June that covert speed cameras would help cut road casualties, and when the proposal to deregulate speed cameras was first aired, Lee Murphy, speed camera manager for Cheshire, said: “If the rules weren’t compulsory, we could use cameras to tackle emerging trends rather than waiting for the minimum number of collisions.” Road safety charities, including Brake, also welcomed the possibility of more covert enforcement.

The DfT meanwhile says that if local partnerships are found to be abusing their autonomy, it will consider bringing back enforced regulation.

From Telegraph Motoring 3/12/2007

January 21st 2007

Q ” I’ve heard a lot about “winter Tyres” but cannot see why I would need them in the UK.” What would I gain and would I need to switch tyres for summer and winter driving?” Also will winter tyres wear out more quickly when driven in hotter weather?

——-

A. Most people think that winter tyres, more accurately perhaps cold-weather tyres, are needed only in Scandinavian countries, where snow and ice are prevelant for months at a time. Not so, At temperatures below 7C from(from roughly the end of October – to end of March in Scotland and northern England, for example) “summer tyres” will harden, giving them less grip.

Cold weather tyres are designed for use below this temperature and have more rubber in the compound to prevent hardening, along with the tread pattern better able to cope with slippery winter roads. This will bring shorter stopping distances on both dry and wet roads in low temperatures.

Stastitics from Continental Tyres (0845 6000801 www.conti-online.co.uk) suggest that for a car on cold-weather tyres below 7C, stopping distances at 31mph will be reduced by 36ft compared with summer tyres on dry roads, by 26ft in snow and 16ft on wet roads.

Winter tyres don’t wear out more quickly than summer tyres and experts say it is more advisable to drive all year on winter tyres than on summer ones. However swapping from one to the other every spring and autumn is still the safest option. All leading tyre manufacturers list cold-weather tyres on their wen sites, along with dealer lists and /or centeral call centres.