The Driver's Site for the East Midlands

Welcome to Drivers' Union East Midlands.
Our Mission: Better road safety at lower cost. No unnecessary delay or slowing of road transport. No unnecessary or unjust prosecution of safe drivers.

Motorists & Drivers' Union is at www.driversunion.co


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Wednesday 25 May 2016

Why UK's 35 million drivers should vote leave

In? Or out? What neither side is telling us. 





Voting to leave EU isn't to leave at all

Why?  All a vote to leave will do is to empower and to mandate our UK Parliament to take us out and that's all.

If we vote to leave, there must still be a majority in Parliament to vote for, and support the process, of taking us out of the EU. As it stands, there is not one British party or leadership that supports leaving the EU so we would need a parliamentary party with an outright majority, solely determined to take us from the EU to actually do it. So there is no risk to voting out at all. It doesn't mean that we come out; it would be only a mandate to do so.

So what's the point of voting out then? Well a very big one actually. What we will do is to empower and to authorise all our MPs and our Parliament to take us out of the EU and no matter if we do not leave, the mandate to do so, and the obligation to do so will remain permanently with our elected MPs.

 It will mean that, if the EU want to keep us, and if it is so crucial to the rest of the world, including the USA, that we stay, then they will take the UK, and our demands much more seriously than they do now.

The fact is that we should not be having a referendum at all. If, as according to Cameron, leaving would be utter madness and disaster, then he was elected to govern us for the good not leave such momentous decisions to us mere Proles. 

Let's get this straight. We are only faced with this because Farage and UKIP were already showing how much the UK wanted out and so Cameron thought it a great idea to get on their bandwagon and include it in the Conservative Manifesto for the General Election and by Golly it worked. We could say that, just by having a Conservative Majority Government, they should already be taking us out without passing the buck. We should be asking why a Prime Minister, elected on the basis of a referendum to leave the EU, should then use his office to influence it at all anyway?

But if anyone thinks that, having crawled around Europe with a begging bowl in hand for reasonable concessions and considerations and been given the bum's rush by the EU, they will now treat us better for voting for more of the crap, they need to self admit themselves to The Asylum.  


No. What will happen, as anyone with common sense will understand, is that they will order us to bend over so that they can bum us even more than they have been doing already. That is the scenario that the idiot Cameron has set for us. It's a no brainer.

There's nothing to lose by voting out at all now that The Referendum has been called. What sort of Parliamentarian would not enjoy being empowered by a leave vote? What sort of Briton would be against our Parliament being empowered too? 

So why isn't either side mentioning all of this?

Well the Leave Group fear, wrongly, that being told that 'voting out doesn't mean out' people won't bother to turn out and vote at all.

The Remain Group are so pro EU they wish to frighten us all that, if we vote 'out' on the 23rd June, all of their predictions of doom, the uncertainties of leaving etc all come true on that day. And it isn't true.

The decision on the 23rd June is simple. Do we want to empower our Parliament to achieve much better for us, or do we capitulate for ever to the un-elected EU mandarins on the basis that we are so scared and timid we will accept anything that they do to us?

That's the situation Cameron has placed us in. Of course he was as shocked as anyone to be running a Majority Government. Under a Clegg/Lib.Dem Coalition, he needn't have stuck to his Referendum promise at all. As an independent PM, he's now had to stick by his promise even though he clearly doesn't want it. 

He's even too daft to realise that, if we vote to leave, he can blame the SDP, Labour, Greens, & LibDems for preventing him from seeing it through for us. What a pillock he must be.

Monday 16 May 2016

Treat Drivers as murderers & Gaol them for life.



Here we go again.

And you think you're never dangerous? You never make mistakes? This would never be you facing Gaol? Well think again

'Treat drivers like murderers. Give them Gaol for life.'



See This Daily Express story

It's no surprise that, a the family of a couple killed after making themselves unnecessary human hazards among big essential machinery, are being cited as calling for longer term for drivers either. Is there any wonder that drivers resent these unneeded liabilities being foisted on them by the very same politicians who want drivers incarcerated for bumping into them. It's bound to happen you know.

I have already, at length, dealt with why this treatment of drivers is irrational, inappropriate, totally unfair and ineffective Here & Here & Here & Especially Here I will not revisit it all here but ask that before anyone dismisses this post, they do read all the arguments I have already posted. 





 Michael Gove
Michael Gove
Image result for heidi allen mp
Heidi Allen MP

Dominic Raab MP 




Will Michael Gove,  The Justice Secretary bother to read all this, before listening to emotive people and anti driver groups with no CV in the subject? 



What about Heidi Allen MP?  and   Dominic Raab? What's their CV? Emotionalism? Is that it? 

What is it about people when they become an MP that they think that their basic instincts are good enough for life & death road safety and gaoling people? So will they now study the matter more? Unlikely but we can always hope.

Wednesday 11 May 2016

Here is why we must have rules for speed limits.

The Courier

Here in this Courier story  is encapsulated all the elements of false subjective speed limiting.

The lies to the media. the massive number of perfectly safe drivers being entrapped, the denials that it's about money and so on.

I have written to The Courier as follows:



Hi, re the speeding profiteers.

I am an ex police driving expert working for road safety.

The reason that these prosecutions are not a deterrent is because, most being caught, are not local and  are 1st time offenders. This applies to nearly all the anti driver schemes such as bus lanes, yellow boxes etc.

If a site is generating many offenders, then the site is failing and is probably because the limit is inappropriately set.

If these were accidents and injuries, would the police just pop out with a van to take pictures of it all or get it fixed? So no they are being insincere with you. The Speeding Industry must have speeders to persist and subsist and here is the evidence of it.

We are now using this story to demonstrate why drivers must sign a new petition to reinstate the abandoned, objective 85%tile rule for setting speed limits.  



We must take anti driver ideology and profiteering from speed limits and restore sanity as soon as possible

Sign the petition now: Sign it here 

But we must get 100,000 votes just to get Parliament to even discuss it. There are 35 million drivers affected by this as well as the massive cost of over-slowing UK infrastructure.

Your vote is a great start but sadly isn't just good enough. Tell friends, relatives and associates that they too need to put their name to supporting UK's exploited drivers and opposing dangerous, bogus road safety policy.  



Still not convinced? See the full case  Here

Convinced? Then email associates or FB them or re-Tweet them.  They all depend on drivers.
 Let's aim for a lot more than 100,000 though

Good Luck Drivers.








Sunday 8 May 2016

The 85%tile rule was dropped so that Green anti drivers can screw UK.




So what was the 85%tile rule of setting speed limits?

Well basically we used to set speed limits scientifically and sensibly instead of on a totally arbitrary, Nimbyist, green political, subjective basis that we use now. In those days the strap line 'It's a limit for a reason' did have some merit. Now such claims are totally false. 


Let me say I am able to say this because, unlike virtually everyone else in this green and pleasant land, I have surveyed, at my own time and expense, lots and lots of speed limit orders. Most I have surveyed have not been introduced for any other reason than at the request of some local Councillor to please a dozen local voters. I have not studied one single Speed Limit Order that includes an accident history to justify it, and none where accidents were caused specifically because the speed limit was too high.

Here's the proof.

We used to set limits on a scientific basis, the 85%tile Rule, which had served the country well for many many years. It's main advantage was that in no way was it subjective and open to political abuse, profit creation, and ideology. What we did was to measure the average speed that the majority of drivers, excluding the fastest 15%, were choosing for that section of road. This included the slowest and most pedestrian of drivers, excluded the fastest and the limit was set to the nearest round number, so that at 34 MPH the limit would be 30MPH and so on. And it worked very well.  

Drivers' Union had this to say in a submission to the Enquiry on the Speed Limit Appraisal Tool in 2012:

 'However the 85% tile rule that applied until the speed limit review of 2006, and still being implemented, was the nearest sensible formulae that could be applied in setting limits and was so applied for many years entirely successfully until its abandonment, for spurious economic reasons by a non-expert too. 

Whilst the abandonment of the 85% tile rule saved local time and money, in road safety, the usual constraints on finance should never be applied or considered. 

However, as previously discussed, the cost of arbitrary, unscientific speed limiting at £3,000,000,000 per 1 MPH and the social costs of drivers losing their jobs too don’t seem to have been considered.

speed-limiting-review submission

Of course the 85%tile Rule wouldn't have allowed blanket speed limiting, as in 20 Zones, but 20 limits where drivers were showing they were appropriate and safe. Unfortunately the Green, Anti Driver, Anti Community Lobby, who do not see roads and streets as crucial infrastructure but more like play grounds, could not control our streets against a sensible formula so it has been abandoned.





The result is blanket limits where accidents were not happening, speed limits set for profit, major infrastructure slowed and hampered, and many thousands of perfectly safe drivers prosecuted for profit. They have been aided and abetted in this by no less than the Transport Research Laboratory,  who claim to be independent but who we now have linked to Green anti driver groups. Read it here.
Image result for professor nick reed 
A classic example of an unscientifically set limit

See TrL bogus numbers for 20 Zones here.

I have just come across this article against the 85% tile system because it 'makes it harder to change speed limits' Read it here

Ok so without reading it, the strap-line says what it's about. The 85% tile stops ideology, anti driver green and profiteering policy from imposing bogus speed limits on us and they don't like it. 

Here is some of it:  


  • 'because neither officials nor engineers really set speed limits. Drivers do.' 
  •  'the way we decide how fast people should drive is through something called the 85th Percentile Theory.'
  • 'it assumes drivers are 1) reasonable and prudent, 2) want to avoid a crash and 3) want to get to their destination in the shortest possible time.' 
  • “Why don’t we design our roads for the speed we want people to go?'
  • We get requests to look at speeding in neighborhoods and we take a look at 25 mile an hour streets and thirty mile an hour streets and they generally come out about the same 85th percentile speeds,” Bollich said. “That’s just kind of more evidence that just lowering the speed limit won’t necessarily have a large impact.” 'These kinds of studies can stop a proposed speed limit change right in its tracks.' And so on.
So according to these anti driver academics, drivers actually driving with a view to not having a crash, ruining their car, injuring themselves and others or not wanting to be prosecuted, can't be trusted, but local politicians, vested interested groups, green ideology and profiteers can be trusted. 

So here are the reasons for dropping the 85%tile and in the UK since 2006, the anti driver green profiteers have flourished and UK's crucial infrastructure is being made ever slower, against the interests of the economy and the community.

There is a cheaper alternative though. Involve the top police drivers in verifying a speed limit. All they need to do is drive the route at safe speeds to ascertain what is a fair, reasonable and efficient speed for the road and, as experts, over-rule any inappropriate proposal. That has to be far better than UK speed limits being set politically by non experts, Greens and anti drivers as they are now surely.  

My Petition says: 

'Reinstate the Eighty Five Percentile Rule for setting speed limits.

We used to set speed limits scientifically and sensibly instead of on a totally arbitrary, Nimbyist, green political, subjective basis that we use now. In those days the strap line 'It's a limit for a reason' did have some merit. Now such claims are totally false.

The abandonment of a scientific method has resulted in blanket speed limit areas where accidents are not happening, speed limits set to please minority local interests, the over-slowing of crucial infrastructure, the prosecution of many perfectly safe drivers by virtue of arbitrary speed limits and a profitable Speeding Industry. '

 An arbitrary Speed Limit Order: http://driveeastmidlands.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/and-here-is-basis-of-high-earning.html

Drivers' Union Speed Limit Submission: http://bit.ly/23zqtCC

Sign the petition now to restore scientific speed limits here: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/129756

Still not sure? Read this for more info:  National Motorists Association





Tuesday 3 May 2016

No overtaking these cyclists on a jolly.

A picture paints a 1000 words. There is no overtaking on the approach to the brow of this hill.

So here is a group of cyclists, clearly out on a social jolly, and they quite un-caringly pump up hill in a long line, two abreast. 

We wonder why drivers have no patience with cyclists and indeed why they eventually try to get past them.

Unnecessary hobbyists, worse than caravanners, who at least travel faster and are actually trying to get somewhere. 
Photo published for How Much Do You Know About Riding Uphill?