A fair point Graham but the goal is to control speed without road police being exhausted ? Making people more aware cannot hurt ?
The biggest issue from my point of view is that the more that people demonstrate that they are unable to manage their own use of speed in a sensible way, the more likely it becomes that government will take steps to completely remove that choice from us.
Managed motorways with variable speed limits are the perfect example of this. We know, because there has been an enormous amount of research done on the problem, that when motorways become congested the best way to improve throughput and decrease journey times is to reduce the peak speeds of individual cars and get everyone flowing at a lower average speed. Otherwise you get compression waves running through the traffic leading to those hold-ups with no obvious cause with which we are so familiar.
So the signs are switched on when the bunching is observed, to reduce this and decrease people's journey times - and yet still people moan and do things like speeding up between the gantries, which just makes the problem worse. Next step - average speed monitoring, and so it goes.
We are the authors of our own misfortune.
