Factors in the prevention of collisions at sea

In recent years, the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea have been the subject of lengthy and sometimes heated public discussion. Many suggestions, at various levels of practicality, have been made for amending the regulations both by individuals and by committees. Two features make an assessment of the discussion difficult. Firstly, the sheer mass of verbiage, often in the form of complex arguments, makes it difficult and time consuming to isolate the essential and important principles from opinionated and sometimes irrelevant comment. Secondly, the self-styled "practical" contributions to the discussion have almost always been based on assumptions, beliefs, opinions and similar subjective and uncertain foundations relating to the experiences of the individual commentators. Inevitably, people with different backgrounds have disagreed. This thesis is intended to improve the situation in respect of both features. Chapters II and III present a summary and critique of what the author considers to have been the most significant contributions to the development of the Rules for Preventing Collisions at Sea. Chapters IV and V describe an attempt to establish some objective evidence on which a more rational discussion may be based. This attempt is necessarily of an exploratory nature. The collection of Rules in the appendices provides a historical foundation for further study of the collision avoidance problem. As far as is known, such a collection has not previously been published