Intelligent Speed Adaption is the misnomer the government has given to its plan to control the speed of road vehicles remotely by satelitte. It means the driver will no longer be able to decide what speed to drive at. A computer controlled by the government will decide.
Hence the ABD has re-christened it Ignorant Speed Adaption, for all intelligent decision making will be taken out of the process.
You will do what the state says.
The state is always right.
Your opinion is irrelevant.
Welcome then, to Soviet Britain.
Drivers, fed up of the stupidly slow speeds they are forced to drive at, will simply keep their foot to the floor. They will stop paying attention to the road conditions and intelligently adapting their speed to suit changing road conditions such as fog, rain, ice, snow, bends, junctions, hedges, trees, hills, cyclists, pedestrians, children, horses, digs, rabbits, ducks, pheasants, debris on the road, diesel spills.
In order to keep their average speed up, drivers will start taking risks on bends, at roundabouts, junctions, anywhere where they can avoid slowing down in order to save time. They will stop slowing down when passing horses and cyclists, all courtesy will go out of the window.
Accidents caused by inattention (and that's most accidents) will go through the roof, because ISA discourages drivers from paying attention to the road.
It is a recipe for disaster backed by a control-freak government that has totally lost the plot about road safety.
How the dim-witted government think it will work
- Radio signals from multiple Galileo satelites will be used by a computer in the car to calculate it's position.
- This will be compared with a map of the country which will include the speed limit for every road.
- The computer will limit the vehicles speed to what it has been told the speed limit is on that road.
In Sweden they have tested the idea of allowing 'coasting', so that if you enter an area with a limit lower than the speed you are travelling, the car won't brake, but you won't be able to accelerate. The potential conflict between vehicles entering the zone, and vehicles in the zone who can't accelerate is obvious. The stupidy of this idea beggars belief.
They also plan to have speed limits transmitted by roadside boxes. No prizes for guessing how long those will last.
Why it won't work
- Satellite navigation isn't accurate enough to distinguish between a 30mph service road alongside a 70mph dual carriageway. Nor one road passing over another on a bridge. The potential for accidents caused by erroneous automated braking is enormous.
- Cars can't be designed to stop if they loose the satellite signal because this will happen in tunnels and urban canyons. So you could just cover up the antenna with a few pence of metallic foil to bypass the multi billion pound system altogether.
- The official maps will be out of date as soon as they are published. Expect the government to charge you a fortune for updates. Another stealth tax.
- Somebody will sell pirated maps with different speed limits.
- Somebody else will sell electronic gadgets to bypass the computer completely.
- With 25 million potential customers, enterprising individuals will come up with countless other counter-measures.
- If 25 million motorists all used a mirror to reflect the sun's rays to the appropriate point in the sky at the appropriate time, they could probably fry a satellite. Real people power.
Supporters
These are the people and organizations backing Ignorant Speed Adaptation:
- Oliver Carsten
Carsten is an 'acadenic' who works at Leeds University.
He's been working on Ignorant Speed Adaption for years, and despite his own research highlighting the dangers, he continues blindly onwards because he likes the money the government are paying him.
The ISA Project is funded by the Department for Transport, and backed by Leeds University and MIRA.
- MIRA
The Motor Industry Research Association claim to be an independent provider of servicew to the car industry. Amazingly they can't see that their participation in the anti-car ISA project threatens to destroy the very market on which their customers depend.
Rather than telling the government where to shove its looney ideas, they are actively participating in trials.
MIRA
- RoSPA
RoSPA are supposedly the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, which sounds positive doesn't it?
Until you look into their policies and discover they are more like the provisional wing of the nanny state. They simple regurtiate the discredited propaganda of central government, including the lie than ‘one third of accidents are caused by speeding’, and the utter claptrap that claims ‘a 1mph redution in speed reduces accidents by 5%’.
They have no credibility as they simply support all of the government's anti-car policies.
- Galileo
Galileo is the name given to the EU's version of the US GPS system.
This system will be used by in-car units to figure out where they are.
Resistance
Nein Danke
In 2001, the German government rejected ISA on three counts:
- The principles of ISA are in contradiction with those of the Road Traffic Regulations contained in the 1968 Vienna Convention, which clearly stipulates as one of its fundamental principles, that the control of the vehicle can not be taken from its driver.
* Text of the relevant articles in the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic of 8/11/1968
- Article 8, ß5: "Every driver shall at all times be able to control his vehicle and to guide it".
- Article 13: "Every driver of a vehicle shall in all circumstances have his vehicle under control so as to be able to exercise due and proper care and to be at all times in a position to perform all manoeuvres required of him. He shall, when adjusting the speed of his vehicle, pay constant regard to the circumstances, in particular the lie of the land, the state of the road, the condition and load of his vehicle, the weather conditions and the density of traffic, so as to be able to stop his vehicle within his range of forward vision and short of any foreseeable obstruction."
- They refute the common argument that ISA and speed limiters, such as fitted to heavy goods vehicles, are similar technologies.
Speed limiters are regulated to a specific final speed value but still give the possibility to the driver to adapt his way of driving, while the ISA system reduces the speed in accordance with local speed limits by allowing external control of the vehicle.
- ISA can put traffic safety at risk, by making impossible for the driver to accelerate out of trouble.
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