Who wants to be Taoiseach?

oscarBravo

irish1 wrote:

Oscar Bravo I think it is safe to assume the current measures in place aren't enough to stop people speeding.

...or overtaking on blind bends, or tailgating, or pulling out in front of oncoming traffic, or drunk driving, or...

What's your hi-tech solution for these problems?

irish1 wrote:

I believe the system I described is workable,and would save lives.

I don't doubt it. My question is, how many people would it kill? More to the point, how far are you prepared to go to eliminate personal responsibility?

irish1 wrote:

I might settle for a restrictor been put on vehicles that stop they from going above 80 mph but the problem with that is if you were to drive 80 mph on some of our back roads you would certianly be at risk of crashing into someone.

Oh look, a technological solution with a major flaw. What a surprise.

irish1 wrote:

I'm not saying my idea is perfect, but I would like to see it tested.

The first time someone tries to install a computer in my car that thinks it's a better driver than me, I'm getting out my soldering iron.

Don't get me wrong, I've no problem with driver aids that know their limitations. An example is ABS: obviously the car knows better than I do when the wheels are likely to lock up under braking. That's a far cry from knowing what's a safe speed to drive at.

Villain

Can you say any speed above the speed limit is safe??

I agree there is more to dangerous driving than speeding but I think speeding is the main issue. My idea is to limit the speed of every car to the speed limit, I'm not an engineer so I can't say what exactly is the best way to do it, I put forward one idea but I'm sure there is many more ways of doing it.

e.g. a recording system that records the speed of your car and the speed zone your in and sends that information to the Gardai, I think some insurance companies have simalar systems already in use.

dahamsta

irish1 wrote:

Can you say any speed above the speed limit is safe?

Yes, I can. I could drive on a straight empty motorway in my large saloon at speeds in excess of 100mph and I would feel perfectly comfortable doing so, with no risk to myself or (obviously) anyone else. If I had a supercar and the road was suitable, you could probably push that up to 150mph. Other less experienced drivers might not feel as comfortable. I wouldn't feel as comfortable doing it in a small hatchback, or if there was traffic on the road, or if it was foggy, or there were cattle crossing. But the answer remains yes.

In other words: Speed limits are another artificial measure introduced to deal with the lowest common denominator. Like yourself. If you really want to deal with the lowest common denominator, you're not going far enough: You should take cars out of the hands of people altogether, and introduce a public transport system operated entirely by computers. Better yet, have everyone work from home so they don't go outside at all. Oh wait, they can't, because we don't have the communications infrastructure...

adam

Villain

dahamsta wrote:

Yes, I can. I could drive on a straight empty motorway in my large saloon at speeds in excess of 100mph and I would feel perfectly comfortable doing so, with no risk to myself or (obviously) anyone else. If I had a supercar and the road was suitable, you could probably push that up to 150mph. Other less experienced drivers might not feel as comfortable. I wouldn't feel as comfortable doing it in a small hatchback. Sometimes I will drive well below the speed limit because of prevailing circumstances, such as fog, or cattle on the road.

In other words: Speed limits are another artificial measure introduced to deal with the lowest common denominator. Like yourself. If you really want to deal with the lowest common denominator, you're not going far enough: You should take cars out of the hands of people altogether, and introduce a public transport system operated entirely by computers. Better yet, have everyone work from home so they don't go outside at all. Oh wait, they can't, because we don't have the communications infrastructure...

adam

Empty motorway???

I think you'll find it hard to find one of them in Ireland, and what if you got a blow out at 100mph would you feel confident that you could control the car so well that there would be no risk to yourself?

dahamsta

irish1 wrote:

I think you'll find it hard to find one of them in Ireland

Which just goes to show you've never travelled in the middle of the night, and are hardly qualified to comment.

and what if you got a blow out at 100mph would you feel confident that you could control the car so well that their would be no risk to yourself?

It would depend on the circumstances. I could get a blowout at 20mph and lose control of a car. Should the limits on motorways be lowered to 20mph?

adam

Villain

dahamsta wrote:

Which just goes to show you've never travelled in the middle of the night, and are hardly qualified to comment.

Yes I have but I could never say 100% that motorway would be empty, neither could you before you travelled on it, a lot of artics travel at night, and I have been driving on motorways for several years so I think I am more than qualified to comment.

dahamsta wrote:

It would depend on the circumstances. I could get a blowout at 20mph and lose control of a car. Should the limits on motorways be lowered to 20mph?

adam

Thats just a silly comment. I was simply arguing the point you made that you could drive on an emtpy motorway at 100 mph and be at no risk, thats simply not true.

Roisin Dubh

If I became Taoiseach I would draft the following laws:

A: Tax-breaks for private hospitals to help take the pressure off the state-owned hospitals.

B: Open up the insurance market to foreign insurance-companies to bring down the collossal motor-insurance premiums in this country.

C: Legalise gay civil-partnerships/marriages while preventing them being used to get Irish citizenship.

Legalise land-casinos.

E: Deregulate the pub industry to remove the cap on licenses, in the hope of bringing down drink prices.

F: End Bord Gais's monopoly on gas-sector.

oscarBravo

irish1 wrote:

I agree there is more to dangerous driving than speeding but I think speeding is the main issue.

I vehemently disagree with this. Of all the dangerous driving practices I see around me every day, speed is by far the least of my worries.

irish1 wrote:

My idea is to limit the speed of every car to the speed limit

That's the other problem with your idea: the theory that slower is always safer. Have you never, ever been in a situation where it made more sense to accelerate than to brake? How would you feel in such a situation if your car decided it knew better than you?

oscarBravo

irish1 wrote:

what if you got a blow out at 100mph would you feel confident that you could control the car so well that there would be no risk to yourself?

Got a blowout at 70mph on the M4 once. Wasn't a problem.

Villain

Big difference between 70 mph and 100mph.

Yes I have been situations where it made more sense to speed up, but I would say on most those occasions I still didn't exceed the speed limit.

IMO speeding is the main issue, I drive over 700 miles a week and most of the incidents I see are caused by someone speeding, or attemping to speed, i.e. overtaking on a bend because the car in front is driving at the speed limit.

I believe that if every vehicle on the road stayed within the speed limits fatal accidents would decrease by a huge ammount.

oscarBravo

irish1 wrote:

Big difference between 70 mph and 100mph.

30mph, to be exact. At what speed does a blowout become dangerous?

irish1 wrote:

Yes I have been situations where it made more sense to speed up, but I would say on most those occasions I still didn't exceed the speed limit.

And on the rest of those occasions, how would you have felt if your car didn't react the way you needed it to?

irish1 wrote:

IMO speeding is the main issue, I drive over 700 miles a week and most of the incidents I see are caused by someone speeding, or attemping to speed, i.e. overtaking on a bend because the car in front is driving at the speed limit.

That's stupidity, not speeding, and a decent traffic corps (and proper driver testing etc) would do a lot more to deal with it than a modified car.

irish1 wrote:

I believe that if every vehicle on the road stayed within the speed limits fatal accidents would decrease by a huge ammount.

If every vehicle was removed from the road, fatal road accidents would be eliminated. Doesn't make it an appropriate solution.

Capt'n Midnight

Appoint Gerry Ryan as ambassador to pluto.

Phase out VRT over 5 years AND make make it a prisonable offense for car dealers to increase their margins (based on tax reciepts they submitted) above the level for the past 5 years.

Bring back price control on staple foods

Enforce a corkage charge for pubs and restaraunts if they charge more than consumer index prices - so if you feel you are ripped off you can bring your own and hire a glass.

Allow tax breaks on creches eventually planning to fund them on the extra tax from working mothers.

re-centralise the civil service - moving jobs nearer to places with high unemployment - Areas of Dublin and Limerick, creating yellow pack civil servants at lower pay rates

Massive investment in Primary Schools & Facilities,

Remove subsidies for farmers for artifical fertilizers and pestisides and animals reared indoors. bring back the farmers dole instead of the current headage/acerage systems

Provide free basic health care to everyone, to level of basic Bupa/VIH levels, using loads of cuban doctors or whatever to kick start the system, increase numbers of emergeny ward staff to a level where Irish doctors don't mind working there.

buy a second hand AWACS or Balloon with good cold war radar technology, have it stationed above major citie on a randon rota basis. It'll pick up anything over the speed limit and track them, telescopes / UAV's lower down or patrol cars / speed cameras could ID them.

Large fines for having unreadable number plates

Subsidies to Dublin BUS to be paid for by a congestion charge or levey on car parks in the city centre / savings on building roads that act as car parks.

Accept that the IRA are involded in an armed struggle and apply the Geneve Conventions to them, especially the bits about being caught out of uniform..

Stabshauptmann

Sleepy wrote:

True only if you're dealing with a perfectly free market which I'm afraid we don't live in.

Its more correct in a perfect market but holds for most markets, you cant impose a tax on just the producer or consumer unless the price of a good has no bearing on demand - which is rarely the case.

true

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

Accept that the IRA are involded in an armed struggle and apply the Geneve Conventions to them, especially the bits about being caught out of uniform..

You got my vote , Capt'n. It should have been done 35 years ago and it would have saved a lot of lives and property.

Only snag is, it probably would not work now. Too many do-gooders and whiners around.

DeValera executed some IRA in prison in the early forties.

billy the squid

would I be able to put out a fatwa on sophie ellis baxter ?

Villain

oscarBravo wrote:

30mph, to be exact. At what speed does a blowout become dangerous?

Depends on conditions, driver experience etc, but imo if you got a blowout on a motorway at 100 mph you would be at risk. I'm not saying you'll be badly injured or even crash just saying you would be at risk of injurying yourself or others, dahamsta said he could drive on an empty motorway at 100 mph without been at risk, thats just plain nonsense.

oscarBravo wrote:

And on the rest of those occasions, how would you have felt if your car didn't react the way you needed it to?

At risk obviously, I never said my idea was perfect oscarbravo.

oscarBravo wrote:

That's stupidity, not speeding, and a decent traffic corps (and proper driver testing etc) would do a lot more to deal with it than a modified car.

I disagree, IMO prvention is better than cure.

oscarBravo wrote:

If every vehicle was removed from the road, fatal road accidents would be eliminated. Doesn't make it an appropriate solution.

Nope it certianly doesn't, as where idea is workable and would still allow the everyone to travel, be it at legal speeds.

BTW if your unlucky enough to ever be seriously injured and end up in Hospital you will probably find machines making decisions for you, you just won't realise it.

Sleepy

I'd introduce a new tax on living at home once you've completed third level education. This should be equal to the cost of supporting oneself outside of the family home. I believe that many companies are currently getting away with under-paying staff because wage levels are made artificially low by people still sponging off their parents and that this is contributing to our current social inequity problems.

Sleepy

Oh, and a law preventing property developers from sitting on land in urban areas (i.e. develop it or sell it at market value to someone who will develop it inside 6 months)

landser

dahamsta wrote:

You could go on for as long as you like, but until you come up with something realistic, all we'll do is laugh at you.

are you part of the royal family... what's with the royal pronoun?

anyway, for a man who, inter alia, wants to return to 19th century prison conditions, you're not really in a position to criticise

Boggle

Were I the boss...

Introduce massive taxation on 3rd home and above - this will allow you to have a holiday home but weed out investors tying up the housing market(reduce house prices).

Sanitise the public service: get rid of the job for life mentality. Get rid of the dead wod but pay appropriately if standards met.

Deregulate pub closing hours: stop the glut of people falling onto our streets at 2 in the morning.

CCTV for known hotspots of violence if closing times not removed.

Gut the prisons. Make the standard of life in prison equal to the the standard of life of the country's poorest people. Shorter sentences will get the point across this way.

Remove speeding convictions: if you crash because of speed you are off the road for X years. If someone dies then this could be prison. If you are caught driving at a speed far in excess of the conditions then you get done for dangerous driving (not speeding) = off the road.

Remove L-plate system, make every driver take a vigorous training course before getting their licence.

Get a cost-effective contract for the roads and build them straight and wide.

Sleepy

The imposition of a cap on tax free income for artists.

simu

Sleepy wrote:

I'd introduce a new tax on living at home once you've completed third level education. This should be equal to the cost of supporting oneself outside of the family home. I believe that many companies are currently getting away with under-paying staff because wage levels are made artificially low by people still sponging off their parents and that this is contributing to our current social inequity problems.

I find this very strange - you're effectively breaking up families! People won't like that! Living with one's parents isn't necessarily "sponging". Many people who do so give some of their earnings to their parents and help their parents in other, less-measurable ways (company, helping out with younger siblings, etc).

Wouldn't it make more sense to introduce different minimum wages for different types of jobs?

Sleepy

It's certainly one of my stranger ideas simu. It just seems to me that in the Ireland of today, there's a very unbalanced starting point in life for so many people. Different minimum wages for different jobs is an interesting concept though in practice it'd be very, very difficult if not impossible to differentiate between many positions. My own position could be classified as consultancy, user support, system/business analysis, (boards.ie browser ) depending on the role I was working in at any given time.

simu

Sleepy wrote:

It's certainly one of my stranger ideas simu. It just seems to me that in the Ireland of today, there's a very unbalanced starting point in life for so many people.

Well, would you do away with inheritance then as well? (After all, if a young person has inherited a house, life is far easier).

And why did you pick this point (graduation) to start? Why not go for better preschooloing, schooling and counselling services to increase younger people's chances of ever having successful lives in the first place?

Different minimum wages for different jobs is an interesting concept though in practice it'd be very, very difficult if not impossible to differentiate between many positions. My own position could be classified as consultancy, user support, system/business analysis, (boards.ie browser ) depending on the role I was working in at any given time.

I know these job categories would be tricky to define and I also imagine companies would claim their staff was less competent than they really were to get away with giving them "lower" job titles and thus paying them less. Maybe more trouble than it's worth.

Sleepy

Well, I would have thought that the point of graduating 3rd level was the natural point at which one becomes a legal adult in terms of being evaluated for tax purposes on one's own merit. I know that th childrens allowance continues til the age of 21 if the child is still in full-time education. I agree with you that better investment (not necessarily more) in the areas of health and education would be cornerstones in creating an equitable society.

Getting rid of inheritance? I like that actually. Assuming a provision can be made for items of sentimental value (e.g. a reasonable limit to what can be willed to someone to allow family heirlooms such as pieces of jewellry etc be passed down and anything above this value being allowed to be purchased from the state).

simu

Sleepy wrote:

I know that th childrens allowance continues til the age of 21 if the child is still in full-time education.

No, it stops at 18.