The DfT have an ongoing consultation process, examining the ideas surrounding graduated fixed penalty speeding tickets. You can find the documents (here). The main document is (here) as a PDF file.

This is most urgent. The consultation process closes on Friday 29th October 2004. We have contacted them and they agreed to accept submissions on Monday morning, 1st November 2004.

The text here is available as a template, with covering letter. We urge all visitors to make their own submission urgently. If you agree with our recommendations it will take less than five minutes to add your details to our suggested covering letter endorsing our submission.

Documents

Safe Speed's submission

Template Submission - download, add your details and send by email to mike.fishman@dft.gsi.gov.uk

This consultation process has been triggered by the widely held perception that speeding fines are being applied unfairly. I agree, speeding fines are being applied very unfairly.

However the unfairness does not stem from the level of penalty. Instead it stems from the overzealous and indiscriminate application of a perfectly good law. There is absolutely nothing wrong with our speed limit laws. They have long served us well.

It is of paramount importance that speed limit enforcement practice takes full account of local conditions. The safety of a speed cannot be judged by reference to a speed limit alone, and it is of great importance that the speed limit laws are used against those who cause danger or potential danger through the misuse of speed.

Road safety is utterly dependent on individuals making value and priority judgements continuously. The present application of the speed limit laws, and especially the public perception of the Government's actions is strongly undermining and distorting vital road safety priorities.

These days it is far too common to hear: "it wasn't his fault - he wasn't speeding." when people are discussing a road accident. Yet culpability goes far beyond the pre accident speeds of vehicles. The message being received in the public perception includes:

• If you are not exceeding a speed limit your speed is safe.

 
• Your most important duty to road safety is to observe the speed limits.

The actions of Government are sending a powerful message - more so than the supporting information. But it is a false message. Observing the speed limit does not guarantee safety. Exceeding the speed limit does not automatically imply danger. 

Do you agree with the Government's view that there is a case for fixed penalties for speeding to be more graduated, with higher penalties for more serious categories of speeding, and lower penalties for less serious cases?

Disagree.

The danger of a behaviour cannot ever adequately be defined by reference to the degree of excess speed over the speed limit. The clear implication of these proposals is that the degree of danger should be equated to the degree of excess speed. This sends a message to the motoring public that is actively dangerous and positively misleading.

We already have far too much emphasis on the speed limit. Speed limits should play a small but important part in our overall road safety strategy. We have carelessly elevated them to a "starring role" and in doing so have promoted them far beyond their level of competence.

Any good law intended to deliver road safety improvements must closely relate the seriousness of the offence to the level of danger or risk. To imply that passing school gates at 3:30pm and 3:30am at 37mph is an equal offence is nothing short of absurd. Yet this is precisely the message implied.

If you do not agree with a graduated system, do you support the present structure of penalties, or would you wish to see an alternative approach?

Support the present structure.

The present structure of penalties is capable of being used very well. The necessary elements required for good use include:

• The judgement of a skilled observer at the time of the offence. Usually this will be a police officer. The Observer must take into account all the local conditions and the manner of driving of the offender. In cases where there is no visible or imaginable risk to public safety, no prosecution should be allowed to take place.

• Instructions must be given to police to base their approach to speed enforcement on risk to public safety. The assumption that speed in excess of a speed limit is in itself a risk to public safety is false.

• We have to respect drivers' choice of speed as being safe and appropriate across the vast majority of drivers and the vast majority of the road network. This will normally require speed limits to be set according to 85th percentile principles. Prosecutions should not take place below the 90th percentile in good conditions.

• We have to ensure that prosecutions accurately target riskier drivers. (Presently prosecutions are pretty random - most drivers are at risk of receiving a speeding ticket.)

In special locations where lower speeds are required and useful to safety we should make special provisions. These should primarily be information based, rather than enforcement based.

We have to respect and encourage safe driving - whatever it is. We have millions of examples a day of safe driving that includes exceeding a speed limit. Safe, competent and considerate driving should not attract legal penalties.

The table below illustrates a possible structure for graduated penalties. Ministers would welcome comments on it, without prejudice to statutory consultation on future proposals, and comments which you may wish to submit on that statutory consultation.

I am against a structure of graduated penalties. Nevertheless I recognise that many people support them and I would like to discuss the basis on which a system of graduated penalties might be constructed.

The proposed +6mph component weights the proposed figures against higher speeds on faster roads. Yet in the most general cases the reverse is true. Excess speed is less dangerous on faster roads, and especially so on motorways.

The +2mph component, well known in the ACPO guidelines for prosecution thresholds is necessary to allow for quantization error in both speedometers and in speed measurement equipment and should be maintained across all thresholds.

The lower penalty to standard penalty threshold works reasonably sensibly with +2mph +25% and the standard to higher penalty threshold works reasonably sensibly with +2mph +40%. These figures yield the following table:

It is absolutely vital to remember that fixed penalties are normally issued by automated systems, and that automated systems do not take the circumstances into account. It will always be possible to impose greater penalties in dangerous cases by taking the case to court and describing the danger.

Everyone knows full well that safe drivers are being penalized by present enforcement practice. Any alterations to the fixed penalty system must recognise this fundamental weakness. There is an excellent case for raising prosecution thresholds for automated enforcement and fixed penalty tickets. This would tend to reduce the frequency and degree of injustice.

We should not be afraid of issuing fewer automated speeding tickets. In fact if we "raise the bar" the majority of the prosecutions not made under the revised rule would be unnecessary ones. Accordingly we recommend the following table for automated enforcement and fixed penalty tickets:

This suggestion should not be seen as undermining the message about the dangers of the misuse of speed. Instead it should be seen as an opportunity to admit that automated enforcement is indiscriminate - which of course is exactly the reason for this review. The review, therefore, is best served by raising thresholds across the board for automated enforcement. 

It is also worth considering two lower categories of speeding offence. There is some justification for having a layer of offence that generates no licence points and a layer that generates one licence point.

And then there is the question of what scheme of number of points should be employed. The proposals include a jump from 3 points (standard) to 6 points (higher). It is not clear that there is any justification for this jump. It seems more rational to set 4 points for the higher offence threshold. A 6 point penalty will continue to be available to the courts for more serious offences that are unsuitable for a fixed penalty.

We do not see any credible justification for avoiding the lower penalty threshold in 20mph zones. In fact increasing the importance of speed limit compliance in 20mph is likely to increase dangers because of the high degree of speedo watching required to comply. Modern vehicles will change speed far more rapidly at low speeds and in low gears. There is also the issue of the time taken for a fixed percentage of speed alteration. For example, at 40mph reducing speed by 50% takes about 1 second. At 20mph reducing speed by 50% takes just 0.5 seconds. (Both examples based on emergency braking at 0.9g or 20mph per second) At 20mph both of these effects are large and overcoming them with precision will take a great deal of driver attention away from the road ahead. It is highly unlikely that 20mph zones enforced by camera will be safe and great caution is advised.

In many countries automated speed enforcement does not carry licence points. This is recognition of the arbitrary nature of the speed limits themselves and especially recognition that many offences detected by automated equipment represent technical infringements and not safety violations. I do not consider it reasonable to endorse driving licences for purely technical offences. The endorsement system should only be used when safety violations are proven to have taken place. The popular perception that exceeding the speed limit in itself is a safety violation is not supported by any worthy evidence.

I conclude that the best interim outcome of this review would be to create a structure of fines as shown in table 3, but without licence points for offences detected by camera. This could exist in parallel with the present system that includes licence points, but endorsements would only be issued for offences where a Police officer witnessed the offence and judged that a safety violation had been committed.

It has been suggested that fixed penalties should be higher for repeat speeding offences. Do you have views on this?

If we can repair the link between offence and danger then it would certainly be fair and appropriate to have higher fines for repeated safety violations.

While the vast majority of offences are purely technical, with no safety violation, it would be absurd and unjust to have a higher penalty for a subsequent offence.

In any event, the system of disqualification at 12 points already provides an increasing deterrent effect for subsequent offences.

Should other factors be taken into account, such as the location where the speeding occurred, or other factors?

It is critically important that the law should be applied reasonably accurately to reflect real risk. Road users everywhere recognise that the law is supposed to warn of risk levels. Consequently road users are strongly inclined base their own risk assessments on legal requirements. I believe it is dangerous to apply laws in a way that does not reflect real risk values.

For normal speeding convictions it is vital to consider all the local conditions and especially the manner of driving of the offender. Without this information it is impossible to make a judgement about the risk.

For example:

• Driver A is travelling at 100 mph in a modern well maintained high performance vehicle on a nearly empty motorway. He's observed to anticipate the path of another road user at an early  stage and moves out to pass with ample margin and clear evidence of planning and consideration.

• Driver B is travelling at 80mph on the same motorway at a busy time. He's driving close to other vehicles and changing lane frequently and abruptly. His manner of driving isn't "careless" as such, but it is certainly aggressive and impatient.

I am confident that thoughtful people will agree that driver A was not using speed dangerously, while driver B is using speed dangerously. The challenge is to find a way to use the speed limit laws against driver B, while not risking catching hundreds of driver A types pointlessly. Only a skilled observer can make the required judgement. Cameras cannot.

Other comments are invited on the Government's proposals for more graduated fixed speeding penalties.
 

Unfairness

It is not the penalty that is unfair and caused this consultation process. Instead it is modern indiscriminate automated speed enforcement.
 

Dangerous speed?

It is not speed above the speed limit that is dangerous. Instead it is speed that is inappropriate for the conditions that is dangerous.

We absolutely must get this vital issue into the official message. Road safety entirely depends on driver's appropriate use of speed. If drivers used inappropriate speeds as routinely as they exceed the speed limit we should expect to have hundreds of times the present number of crashes each year. Yet present policy is tending to replace important appropriate speed messages with relatively unimportant "speed limit" messages. The dangers of this should be highly apparent - at any instant a driver must attempt to set his speed in accordance with safety principles and in accordance with legal principles. Where the two methods disagree - as they usually do (and especially as they do in high hazard zones)  - we have to hope and pray that drivers will prefer the speed choice based on safety principles. Present policy is dramatically elevating the apparent importance of setting speed to legal limits. This inevitably means that some drivers will set their speed to the legal limit even though the legal limit is far above the safety limit in the immediate conditions.
 

Effects of enforcement:

Ten years of ever increasing speed limit enforcement have not done much (if anything) to alter drivers' general speeding behaviour. This is extremely important information that is not usually recognised nor put into proper context. Drivers' speeding behaviour is largely a reflection of the simple fact that they have better reasons for choosing a speed than the speed limit. Experienced drivers develop a fine and almost instinctive sense of appropriate speed to the extent that selecting a speed other than that dictated by the immediate conditions actually feels wrong. Speeding is prevalent because setting appropriate speeds is prevalent. This is excellent news for road safety because setting appropriate speeds is vital. It is also an extremely serious warning to legislators - we must not disturb drivers' inclinations to use appropriate speeds. If increasing emphasis on speed limit compliance tends to replace appropriate speed behaviour then we will have a road safety disaster. I am quite certain that this is already happening.
 

Ubiquitous speeding and rare crashes

The fact that speeding is normal practice for a majority of motorists, coupled with the comparative scarcity of injury accidents (let alone injury accidents caused or contributed to by exceeding a speed limit) gives us a very clear signal about the importance of speeding to road safety. The figures prove beyond doubt that exceeding the speed limit is not, in itself, dangerous. For example, we have 32 million licenced drivers and 215,000 injury accidents in a year. A simple division shows us that the average driver goes 148 years between causing injury accidents.

If we further attempt to estimate the frequency of accidents caused or contributed to by an otherwise responsible motorist exceeding a speed limit, we might proceed as follows:

Injury accidents caused by pedestrians: 30,000
Injury accidents caused by lawless drivers: 30,000
Accidents remaining, caused by otherwise responsible drivers: 155,000
Accidents contributed to by "excessive speed" = 12.5%*155,000 = 19,000
Proportion of excessive speed accidents involving speeding = 30% * 19,375 = 5,800

Alternative estimates of the various values in this calculation are possible, however, the conclusion is inescapable: routine speeding by normal responsible motorists is proved to be remarkably safe in practice. How can a behaviour that is present every day distinguish an event that takes place once in 5,500 years?
 

Excessive speed crashes are increasing

Recent data appears to indicate that we are experiencing a growth in the number and the percentage of excessive speed accidents over time. This may seem astonishing to the proponents of speed cameras, but it is completely obvious and predictable to me. It is clearly time to face facts. The widespread use of speed cameras and the high emphasis on speed limit compliance is not tending to reduce excessive speed accidents, and if cameras cannot do that, what can they do? The primary reason for the trend is very simple. As we tend towards convincing drivers that they are expected to drive at standard speeds they become less effective at slowing down in areas of danger and "when necessary". Since most excessive speed accidents actually represent a failure to adjust speed on the approach to a hazard, we believe that the emphasis of speed limit compliance is certain to produce the effect. 
 

Assessing road safety results

Three items of information are vital in order to accurately assess what is happening to our road safety:

1) Accident reductions at camera sites are valueless for two reasons. One is the regression to the mean benefit illusion, and the second is the detrimental effect of speed enforcement policy on the wider road network.

2) The serious injury series is behaving strangely and cannot be considered a reliable indicator of trend.

3) We don't have data to tell us how many road crashes are contributed to by speed in excess of a speed limit, and especially we don't have data to tell us how many of those crashes are amenable to enforcement. (For example: crashes involving stolen cars  or unlicenced drivers are very unlikely to be prevented by a speed camera.) 

Traffic Police and the Police / public relationship

The effects of speed camera policy on the Police / public relationship are extremely serious. It is most urgent that policies are revised before more harm is done.

The total contribution to road safety of skilled traffic Police has been greatly undervalued. Traffic Police strength must be restored and standards must be maintained.
 

Licence points and international trends

It is by no means clear that issuing licence points from automated speed enforcement is in the interests of road safety. If we take examples of four important countries we find:

• The UK issues penalty points that contribute to licence suspension and the long-term beneficial fatality rate trend has been reversed.
• Australia issues speed camera tickets that contribute to licence suspension and the beneficial fatality rate trend has been lost.
• The Netherlands issue a monetary penalty only for the majority of automated speed enforcement tickets, and the former beneficial trend in the fatality rate has been reduced.
• Germany has speed cameras, but they are used in a highly targeted way and autobahn speeds are unlimited. The fatality rate trends are excellent - as good as ours were in the 1980s - before we had speed cameras.

• The best outcome of this consultation for road safety would be to remove licence points from offences detected by speed camera.

• The usual information available in support of the speed camera program ignores vital human and driver quality factors.

• The overall effect of speed cameras on British road safety is strongly negative. i.e.: They make the roads more dangerous.

• Official road safety policy is far too strongly concentrated on numerical vehicle speeds and automated enforcement.

• Safe Speed's extensive analysis has identified factors and mechanisms that relate the well known loss of trend in roads fatalities to official road safety policy.

• I know that the law must be being misapplied because: "The competent and careful actions of a majority of responsible people should obviously be considered legal."

• We have proved that high levels of automated speed enforcement do little or nothing to affect speeding behaviour.

• Speed cameras cause stress. Stress causes crashes.

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