A lot is made of the fallacy that excess speed is the main cause of accidents. Of course if you do a little research you’ll see this simply isn’t true. In fact, the most dangerous driver I’ve ever experienced was also the slowest.
I used to see a large BMW (surprise surprise), a pretty old 7-series I think, tootling around the Tonbridge area. The geriatric numbskulls inside thought they were being really safe by driving at 20mph everywhere. And I mean everywhere. National speed limit, dual carriageways, 50, 40, 30 zones. Everywhere.
This essentially meant that everywhere they went they had a queue of angry and frustrated drivers tailing them. In turn, this meant that people would attempt to overtake them wherever they could. I haven’t seen them in a while thank God, hopefully their license was revoked or they shuffled off their mortal coil. I just hope they didn’t cause an accident, probably a head-on collision, before they went.
I would far rather have drivers doing a decent speed according to road conditions and the speed limit of the road (assuming it’s not artificially low) than those going too slowly. Even those who insist on 40mph on a national speed limit A-road frustrate, or even better the idiots who do 40 everywhere (even 30 zones).
In fact I think there might be a bit of research there. What’s the bets more accidents are caused by those going too slowly than those going too fast? I often see the effects of that on motorways, where a slow lane hogger decides to pull in to the left lane to pick up their exit without checking their mirrors and ends up sandwiched by a lorry who was going faster than them in the inside lane and couldn’t stop in time.
Well, there you go. According to state and federal studies in the US, drivers that are driving significantly below the average speed are the ones that are most likely to get involved in an accident.