"Educating" those danged Winnipesaukee boaters

[Mee-n-Mac]

Originally Posted by Dave R

To follow your logic, it's safest to sit perfectly still and do nothing. That seems pretty illogical. Why 45 and 25? Why not 53.2 and 24? or 0 and 0? The numbers seem rather arbitrary. {snip}

The above is my main problem with HB-162. I know of no analysis that says these #s are really what's needed and not excessively restrictive. When you look at auto accident data you generally find that up to a certain speed the accident rate is a constant. Accidents happen at all speeds in a more or less random fashion (because speed isn't the prime causitive factor, other things are). Beyond that speed the rate rises rapidly and in a non-linear fashion. You have gone beyond a limit of some sort (perhaps the road curves sharply or you can't see far enough ahead to avoid a fixed hazard or ??). I believe that speed on the lake follows the same pattern. While JDeere wants to claim slower is safer, and that may be true in some theoretical sense, I claim that the additional safety factor difference between 35 - 45 - 55 - XX is so small as to be meaningless in the practical world where we operate our boats. Below the critical speed, speed ceases to be a factor in whether there's an accident or not. As can be seen from Rep Pilliod's comments the above thinking wasn't part of the decision process. It was simply an arbitrary limit that he thought was "fast enough".