Two Objections, Answered

Speed discipline draws two standing objections. Both answer to the same reasoning.

"You're going too slowly." Speed discipline cuts both ways: you're not permitted to crawl far below the reasonable flow without cause, or to brake suddenly without need. The danger of significant under-speed is that it manufactures overtaking — every vehicle behind you becomes a candidate for the most dangerous routine manoeuvre on the road, on your account. The defensive habit: drive at the speed conditions genuinely support, and when that's well below the flow — a fault, a heavy load, weather — make yourself readable with lights and positioning, and let queues past at safe places.

"But the road was empty." The standing objection to every limit, answered with the two-stage model. An empty road improves the braking stage not at all, and the reaction stage only if the emptiness is real. But "empty" describes what you can see — and margin exists for what you can't: the junction mouth, the crest, the shadow behind the parked lorry, the child the survival curve is written about. The limit was set by someone pricing the road's invisible surprise inventory, not its visible one. On a genuinely engineered-empty road — the dual carriageway — the limit already reflects it. That's what 110 is.

Both objections make the same mistake: they judge the speed by the road as it appears right now, when the limit was set for the road as it can suddenly become.