Meanwhile on the Roads...

I was caught by a van on the M1 at roughly 260 meters. Must have had a pretty tight focus, as plenty of other cars beside me. I didn't ask for the photo.

Cycling by Stephens Green this morning along the lovely big wide cycle track, the one that leads on to Leeson Street.

Motorbike does what motorbikes always do there and use the cycle track to skip traffic. This really really grinds my gears, so I make sure to take up as much of the cycle lane as I can. (I'll generally be cycling faster than most of the cyclists there so they'll be sitting on the left with me overtaking them on the right)

Biker guy comes up behind me, on the cycle track, revving for me to get out of the way.

I turned back to him, shouting 'are you revving at me on a cycle track??' and he pointed at the ground, saying something through his helmet. Not sure what he said but he seemed to be indicating that I was in the wrong. Then sped off around me. Again, on the cycle track.

I've never been so incensed in my life.

On the off chance he reads this forum, you sir, are a massive ****.

Hah, fairly sure that was me! I'll still use cycle lanes whenever they're available but I think it's what adds to my absolute rage whenever I see a motorbike in one.

The cheek to rev at me though. I actually tried speeding after him in the hopes that he'd get caught by the pedestrian light half way down the road but it went green and continued on his merry way along the cycle track.

Not sure what I was planning on doing, half of me wanted to get off the bike, turn it side ways and block his path but I'm sure that wouldn't have ended well 😅

Yeah I've seen cars do that there too. It's a shame they didn't put some form of barrier between the cycle track and the road.

I'd have zero issue with insurance companies getting their hands on it. The pocket is the only place to change motorist culture, as we see with the short term impacts of the introduction of penalty points (until the collective realised still so little enforcement).

The logisitics of such a system would be challenging, to say the least. For starters, there are somewhere between 2.5 and 3 million vehicles on Irish roads. If you were to install trackers on all of them over, say, three years, that's about 3.5k trackers per working day. Assuming that a tracker can be fitted and tested within 2-3 hours, you have a workforce of over a thousand working on this (plus admin, IT etc etc) - the wage bill including all employer obligations etc is likely to be in the 75-100 million € per annum

The device itself will need to be a considerably more sophisticated device that that used by the insurers - the insurers' "black box" gives an indication based on a number of excursions from "acceptable behaviour" - speeding, hard acceleration or braking etc. It generally won't hang you on a single incident. The "speeding" black-box however is going to be used as the basis of a legal conviction so there will be significant challenges around data management & retention as well as continued accurate measurement of speed over the lifetime of the device.

The correct identification of speed limits also needs to be sorted out. For example, the on-ramp to a 100kmh dual carriageway near me shows up on the sign-recognition system and the background GPS map as 50 kmh. Good luck merging at that speed.

A GPS based tracker does precisely nothing to address the problems of inappropriate speed - doing 75 kmh on a 80 kmh road in thick fog, black ice or flooding isn't going to trigger anything. Oh, and I'd give it a week before some sh!tgibbon in a felt-spec Passat has figured out how to fool the system.

And finally, I suspect that it would be a GDPR / civil liberties minefield.

I think that I'd far prefer the hundreds of millions this would cost to be spent on bolstering the capability of the Garda RPU & increased static cameras, along with shaking some sense into the courts system so that road safety infractions are punished properly.

I love the idea of a black box in cars. And I agree with everything you have said. However, I would approach the problem very differently.

I would leave it to the insurance market to sort out.

Pass legislation to ensure ALL motor insurance providers much offer a significant discount to motorists who opt for a "black box" policy. And does who don't pay a higher premium. None of the speeding info is shared with Gardai. The device only needs to be as accurate as it is now. This is a proven model and it works.

Motorists are not forced to take one of these devices, but over time, if the incentive is there, enough people will have one that it eill have a dramatic effect of reducing speeds on roads.

Unfortunately, I don't believe the insurance industry will act in anyone's interest but themselves. They'll load the premiums to pay for the infrastructure and when enough people have them, stop offering the discount. And they'll probably sell your travel data.

This is exactly why I'd be sceptical of insurance companies doing this. I have a generally low opinion of them in general, and given the regularity they seem to change hands, wouldn't trust them with a raft of personal data as far as I could throw them. The ideal situation is a black box where you own the data, but as others point out, this does come with a raft of complications and wouldn't be practical/economic to retrofit

Was being over taken by some young fella on a narrow blind curve in a country lane way/ road. I knew he was there behind me when suddenly I hear him revving the gears and he rallys up behind me and launches into the overtake. I quickly turn to him with my hand out slightly to gesture 'chill the f__K out' only to notice he was looking directly at me and giving out he passed… barley a second later an oncoming car slams on the brakes as he miraculously avoids it on the end the curve. He was probably only a few centimetres short of a high speed collision and if that car had arrived even half second sooner he'd have been cutting in on top of me, or straight into him, as he was too busy looking at me. He'd the cheek then to beep as he tore off down the road.

So no data about you is ever realised by anyone unless a crime has been committed or an accident occurs,

Geraldine Kennedy, Bruce Arnold and Vincent Browne, among many others would beg to differ.

This, so much, when people get their knickers in a twist about "tracking".