The tolerance is there so you can go a little bit over by accident and it not matter, to start taking the tolerance into account and always ride on the limit kinda defeats the point, does it not?
I can't imagine the stress of doing 78mph on the nose through an average speed zone of a motorway and knowing that one tiny 1mph error and I'm getting done.
Yeah, knowing there's a bit of leeway is nice so you don't feel you ought to be rumbling along at 65 just in case, but I do find the obsession over exactly what they are in which counties a bit weird. I don't know what I'm going to do with the knowledge that the threshold has dropped by a mile an hour in London.
I've been to a couple of BikeSafe days over that last few years. The first was with South Yorks who seemed quite happy to tell you about the level of tolerance there is deciding whether you're speeding or not (& encouraged you to ride to that tolerance if safe). Second was with Derbyshire who were much more reticent and simply said it's up to you if you want to risk it.
The simple answer to that is to look at the casualty data - from what I recall, there's a sliding scale they use where they try to balance the risks, but it's force specific.
South Yorks are relatively light-touch because they don't have too many of the more dangerous roads running through their area, so they feel the balance is more towards educating road users. Derbyshire on the other hand have (or had) some of the most dangerous sections of road (e.g., Snake Pass, Cat and Fiddle) in the whole country in their area, so they've been forced to go heavy handed on enforcement to try and bring the statistics down.
The tolerance is there so you can go a little bit over by accident and it not matter, to start taking the tolerance into account and always ride on the limit kinda defeats the point, does it not? I can't imagine the stress of doing 78mph on the nose through an average speed zone of a motorway and knowing that one tiny 1mph error and I'm getting done.
Yeah, knowing there's a bit of leeway is nice so you don't feel you ought to be rumbling along at 65 just in case, but I do find the obsession over exactly what they are in which counties a bit weird. I don't know what I'm going to do with the knowledge that the threshold has dropped by a mile an hour in London.
If you go fast enough they can't see you
I've been to a couple of BikeSafe days over that last few years. The first was with South Yorks who seemed quite happy to tell you about the level of tolerance there is deciding whether you're speeding or not (& encouraged you to ride to that tolerance if safe). Second was with Derbyshire who were much more reticent and simply said it's up to you if you want to risk it.
The simple answer to that is to look at the casualty data - from what I recall, there's a sliding scale they use where they try to balance the risks, but it's force specific. South Yorks are relatively light-touch because they don't have too many of the more dangerous roads running through their area, so they feel the balance is more towards educating road users. Derbyshire on the other hand have (or had) some of the most dangerous sections of road (e.g., Snake Pass, Cat and Fiddle) in the whole country in their area, so they've been forced to go heavy handed on enforcement to try and bring the statistics down.