Dengl 15 Some Road Safety Conundra

If and when we creatures from below Hadrian's Pale enter true Lothistan we find a drivescape which is both puzzling, threatening and distracting - puzzling because nowhere (out of towns) does it say what a speed limit may be, in the jurisdiction one has entered (not do locals, upon enquiry, seem to know - or to let on if they do ...), threatening because there seem to be either actual speed cameras at very many points along the way, or the semblance of cameras (boxes with diagonal stripes - though these may carry feed for local zebras ...), and distracting because all the attention thus focused on photo-options takes one's mind away from other aspects of the road scene, let alone the marvellous countryside, AND there is the Chief of the Lothians Police Forces instructing his minions to remove the pencils from behind their ears and write letters to brave people who have ventured north, demanding payment for driving at supposedly illegal speeds (though vehicles protected with little blue signs with a diagonal cross are able, evidently, to go as fast as they please). And, of course, there are many jurisdictions south of the Pale where things are as bad - some even more stringent.

Now, I have come across an article which first of all helps one feel less guilty about driving, or at least wanting to drive sensibly, on whichever side of Hadrian's Pale one inhabits. It may also help change how the roads are run - though don't summon up too much hope - there are entrenched interests, not least those of the makers and installers of speed cameras, and the ways in which central (even Lothian?) government funds trickle into even-more-local administration coffers without being 'ring fenced ...'; then, there are the latter-day Savanarolists who would have us all in brown robes spun out of echt all-bran, with the remains of any body-heat evaporating from our tonsured tops, and nasty metal and electrical machinery abandoned - somewhere - possibly joining the tens of millions of television and radio sets which are due for dumping when the digital age dawns upon us....(these might be stacked up neatly within the giant cubes soon to be redundant, too, at Torness, Orford Ness and similar places)

I am only a learner in this world and am pursuing the website(s) advertised in the articles I attach, for a start.
www.safespeed.org.uk
If you are interested, there is a great deal more via Mr Smith's website .....