“Safety” has become both an excuse as well as an obsession (the two things are related of course). The public has been conditioned to accept – with a servility that would embarrass Stalin’s chicken – that it must obey whenever the magic word is uttered…. and the government knows it can impose almost anything by uttering the magic word.
No matter how ridiculous or obnoxious, if it keeps us saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaafe then it must be a good thing.
You want slow, assholes? I’ll give you freak’n slow.
If you have the patience and time to waste, go 25 or maybe even 20 and create your own conga line. It’s only for moment that you become a clover, but it could be fun.
This country won’t fund enhancement of the motorways themselves, shit, they won’t even maintain the ones we already built. The goal is to fund and facilitate the end of personally owned and individually operated automobiles. They can do this by mandate and threat of violence which costs them very little by comparison.
By undermining the the entire private ownership of motor vehicles the govt. can immobilize and subjugate anyone and everyone it chooses.
Haha – man Eric you think thats bad – wait till you get “smart” motorways and signage. At least in your case, a government worker has to get up off his ass and put up a sign, which means he’s less likely to do so. With smart motorways, they can sit on their desk and while chomping doughnuts and scratching their nuts, with the flick of a switch screw with the speed limit at will. So as you can imagine – they do so at every possible opportunity. Every night….. as soon as the traffic dies down, the speed limits go down, they tell us for road workers. But you drive for miles and miles, not a single worker can be seen. Eventually the speed limit goes up again, and so you speed up, set the cruise control, but minutes later its back down….. and so goes your night time drive…. But now the central planners have noticed that not even the best of clovers can give a shit anymore, so now they are spending our money, having a media campaign telling how important it is to follow reduced speed limits and how they keep (seemingly invisible) road workers safe…. and just to make sure we listen, have started more closely and strictly enforcing the variable speed limits in construction zones with fines and penalty points.
Now as it is – in the UK because people believe that the fast lane is for driving well below the speed limit, people like me who want to avoid cursing too much during long drives plan the drive at night where possible. But thanks to smart motorways, its the end of that…. Sorry for the rant, but just last night went on a night time drive with the hope of flooring it a bit….
Nasir, I don’t remember ever not having a black and white state traffic PSL in Texas. Just to show you how screwed up things were when Tx. finally got rid of 55 they replaced the signs with 70 for cars in daylight and 65 fordark and 60 for trucks in the dark, a magnificent fuckup since they were issuing speeding for all sorts of violations including pulling your boat even though you might be using a car.
So finally 70 mph signs go up on all roads which FM and others remained something slower and they played with not signing some roads so you had no idea. The 70 mph signs hadn’t been up but a few months when with no word from the DOT almost all roads went to 75, no night and day bs, just 75 for everything even though to this day, SOME FM and Ranch Roads are posted 70. I have to use an FM like that to get to my house so when you get on it after running on roads, even FM’s, after 14 hours or more you find yourself doing 5 or 10 over on one of the typical FM roads in much better condition than others of the same ilk you’ve been on all day. A friend recently got a ticket from a deputy for doing 75 on a road this is marked 70…….about 10 miles from where he got on it. He’d never been on it and since there was no signage to denote it wasn’t 75 he was issued a ticket for exactly 75, something you rarely hear of except for armed revenue collectors at the county level.