Got done for 46 in a 40, what's your most pathetic?

[DaveCWK]

79 in a 70 on the dual lane part of the A303, on a nice summers day.

Thankfully Waze prevents such things these days.

[LunarOne]

InvisibleSpider said:

People who speed tend to speed the majority of the time I think - so just put your hand up and move on. Consider it as the tax for the one time you got caught in the last 2/5/10 years of speeding...

I think most of us who drive think of fines as "cost of doing business", although I really hate to get a fine. Usually it's because of something I didn't notice rather than something I was deliberately trying to get away with. Last time was maybe 10 years ago, when I was fined for being in a bus lane in Reading. I was doing a friend a favour by dropping her off at the train station, and I was in the right hand lane under a bridge as I wanted to turn right at the next roundabout. I hadn't spotted that a bus lane started for a couple of metres as I was unfamiliar with the area and was looking out for signs telling me where the station was.

But I don't agree at all about speeding. I knowingly drive above the speed limit often, but certainly not most of the time. I take issue with lots of the NSLs around me which have become 40s, and when I feel it's safe I will ignore those limits and drive at a pace which I feel is a reasonable balance between journey times and safety. Obviously the density of brain-dead traffic means that this is impossible much of the time. But if you are mindful and careful about when and where drive above the speed limit rather than doing it habitually, you're much more likely to avoid being caught and therefore penalised. I don't ignore speed limits, but I factor them in to my thoughts about what hazards I might encounter.

This strategy clearly works, because (touch wood) my last speeding ticket was in 1995 which was about 4 years after I began my driving career. It was a very different time though. I used to commute from Virginia Water to Feltham in SW London using the A30 and then A315 for the entire journey. The A30 varied through NSLs and 50s most of the way which was to my mind entirely reasonable. But at the Crooked Billet Roundabout in Staines-upon-innit, it drops to a 40 limit as it runs towards the Clockhouse roundabout, with the traffic lights at Ashford hospital about half way along that span. I, like nearly everyone else on that road, used to drive that section at 55-60mph as it's a wide dual carriageway. It was a busy road, but I'd take it easy on the return journey as police were known to hide in the Crimble of Staines Ford Dealership with a radar gun from time to time. And anyway coming home from work I was never under time pressure. But the other direction was fair game. Until one day I happened to have an unmarked police car behind me, and I got caught doing 58 in a 40. I was just one of many fish in a barrel doing exactly the same thing and I was the unlucky one who got hooked. Nowadays, everyone does 35-38mph on that same road. If you wanted to do faster, you'd have to slalom between lanes. But then nowadays the A30 has been reduced to 40mph everywhere in the area except for the Egham Bypass which is still a 50mph DC and the Staines Bypass which is still an NSL DC.

Nowadays, the chances of being caught speeding by an unmarked car is virtually zero. Same as the chances of being caught by a marked car. When was the last time you saw one of those patrolling? The UK has decided that speed is the number one evil on our roads, as it's relatively cheap and easy to detect. But it ignores the plenty of people whose standard of driving is way below the minimum requirements, and yet who don't necessarily like to speed. So if you're going to get caught, it's either by a fixed camera or it's by a manned police speed check using lasers. Both of these will be signalled on Waze very quickly, although the police have admitted to false reports on Waze to get people to slow down. But still, if you have any sense of awareness, you're careful where and when you speed (as opposed to doing it habitually) and you run Waze, you're probably not going to get caught speeding.

[InvisibleSpider]

LunarOne said:

When was the last time you saw one of those patrolling?

I am poacher turned gamekeeper - I do the patrolling!

But I agree - there's a world of difference between making progress on open stretches of road and doing 45 past a school at 15:00. If you don't speed in anything other than NSL areas, you'll generally be fine as long as you're not going bonkers and drawing attention to yourself.

[LunarOne]

InvisibleSpider said:

LunarOne said:

When was the last time you saw one of those patrolling?

I am poacher turned gamekeeper - I do the patrolling!

But I agree - there's a world of difference between making progress on open stretches of road and doing 45 past a school at 15:00. If you don't speed in anything other than NSL areas, you'll generally be fine as long as you're not going bonkers and drawing attention to yourself.

I do speed in 40s, but only those 40s that used to be 60s and still would be if it were not down to politicians trying to be seen to be "doing something". But yes on the whole I keep my speeds sensible so that if I am caught, the worst I will get is a fine - I never stray into licence-losing territory and always make sure my driving is still safe and not irritating to others even if it's above the speed limit. I won't speed past houses at night even if I'm on an NSL, and I will stay in a higher gear to avoid excessive noise - at high RPMs and under harsh acceleration my sportiest car can scream even with the exhaust in quiet mode. That might sound fantastic to me, but I can well imagine how irritating it would be if I lived by a road on which people wanted to drive fast past my house - maybe I'd be the one campaigning for a lower speed limit!