Speed limit difference hazard
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• I hold an HGV Class 1 and also national and international CPCs. At present I do not drive for a living, but I hope to remedy this soon. However, I am a shop steward and a health and safety rep at my current job.
As health and safety rep it is my job to look for and report dangerous and hazardous situations before someone gets hurt, .. or worse.
I have never been in favour of different speed limits for different vehicles on the same road. This practice causes all kinds of problems. In my view it is dangerous, causes accidents, and in many cases costs people their lives.
Transport Secretary Malcolm Rifkind has ordered speed limiters to be fitted to HGVs to help cut road deaths by curbing a few HGVs. Limiters are pointless because they maintain a two-speed limit road. They are also an extra expense which the hard-pressed road transport operator can well do without.
If speed limiters cause bunching on motorways they may cause accidents, but we will never know because it will be written off to some other cause. Having different speed limits for different vehicles is probably a greater cause of death than speeding HGVs on motorways. The maximum speed for a car on a single carriageway is 60mph; for coaches and cars with caravans, 50mph; and for HGVs, 40mph.
Why do we need three different speed limits? Surely it would be safer to have vehicles all doing the same speed on motorways. By allowing the three different speeds the Government is putting thousands of lives at risk. Mr Rifkind would be better off looking at this problem rather than having limiters fitted to HGVs.
I think that limiters are going to be fitted just to keep Mr Rifkind's name in the newspapers and to win votes for his party on the pretence that they might save a few lives.
S Kelly Huddersfield, West Yorks.