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EDITORIAL
Page 4
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0 N THE SURFACE. there is no reason why we should not have compulsory fitting of speed limiters to coaches, as announced by Transport Minister Lynda Chalker last week. After all, if the national motorway speed limit is 70 mph nobody has any legal business travelling at more than 70 mph, and the fitting of speed limiters will have no effect on law-abiding drivers and operators — or will it?
Unfortunately. the compulsory fitting of speed limiters has been introduced in the emotional aftermath of a motorway crash involving a coach, especially as there has been no independent evidence introduced to suggest that excessive speed was a factor in that crash. Indeed, although there is a lot of circumstantial evidence to show that some coach drivers drive too fast, there is little factual evidence to support the move which the Department of Transport is now making.
Certainly, there is no evidence available to us to suggest that coaches exceed speed limits more often or more blatantly than do ally other road vehicles. But the reason for picking out coaches for special treatment is obvious, despite whatever spurious arguments are advanced by the DTp. Coach speed limiters seem to have been introduced because a politician thinks there is a groundswell of public opinion in favour of such a move. That is likely to be true, because coach passengers tend to be lower-middle income, young or elderly — the socially vulnerable, mediasympathy sections of society.
Unless the DTp has evidence which others have not seen, there is no reason beyond this emotional one, however, why coaches should have been singled out. Indeed, the argument that there is a lack of evidence against the coach is borne out by the bizarre decision to combine coach speed limiters with a continued permission for coaches to use the overtaking lane on motorways. This journal will never advocate lawbreaking, but we do have to accept that most vehicles travelling in the overtaking lane of a motorway do so at more than the legal speed limit.
Likewise, few vehicles travelling in the middle lane do so at much lower speeds. The coach speed limiter will only reduce the positive speed differential between a coach and the vehicles it is overtaking, and increase the differential between the speeds of coaches arid those other vehicles trying to overtake diem. Bunching is the only logical outcome of that, and safety is certainly not a by-product of buliching.
It is not often that this Government has been right, but this time it is positively wrong. Its response to the major problem of motorway safety for all vehicles bears all the hallmarks of shallow thinking and knee-jerk reaction rather than understanding. It has failed to address the root cause of the problem, which is that a vehicle driven badly at 70mph is much more dangerous than one driven well at 7Imph. The selective fitting of speed limiter to just one class of vehicle will only encourage the reckless clement to drive to the limit at all times in order to counter their disadvantage compared with drivers of other vehicles.
So it is likely that this, the latest example in a string of pieces of had legislation, will do nothing to improve motorway safety. We can only hope it doesn't decrease it too much.