This is really a Safe Speed PR hit from 8th January. Shame we didn't get a mention. I found it while looking for something else.
http://motors.scotsman.com/features.cfm?id=31122006
Car control freaks fog truth over speed risks
ERIC DYMOCK
THE Department of Transport acknowledges, in its report on speed camera hypothecation, that the benefits expected of cameras were wildly exaggerated. It admits that the effects might have been overstated by a factor of five, raising questions about the motives and competence of the original submission.
I am always suspicious of claims that 500 lives would be saved by this measure or that, and now it is quite plain that such predictions are largely guesswork. They are a ploy by spin doctors. They are introduced because opposing a measure that is going to save 500 lives looks obstructive or unreasonable.
Yet here is a government department making either a substantial miscalculation or indulging in a publicist's subterfuge. One thinks of the failure of intelligence leading up to the Iraq war and the "sexing up" of a dossier to obtain results the government wanted.
The admission that speed cameras had at best a negligible effect on road safety, and at worst might be downright dangerous, was tucked away at the back of the Department's report. It merely confirmed what many people thought all along, namely that speed cameras were a dangerous distraction imposed by political dogma. Like capital punishment they curry favour with voters looking for quick fixes.
Blaming so many accidents on speed is a delusion. It is a simplistic conclusion of control freaks who believe in state management. Regulation, planning, directive, rule, command, curb, ban and control are their bywords.
Their logic is as tortured as John Prescott's - who was worried, you might remember, about making a school too good in case everybody wanted to go to it.
Like Prescott, they seem to believe passing a law fixes everything. It does not. Dog poo still litters Scotland's streets, drivers use their handheld mobile phones more than ever, yet despite extracting millions of pounds in speeding tickets, most drivers are still sensible enough to choose safe speeds.
Cameras have crept into our culture. The other week, following a spate of fatal accidents on one road, a local worthy interviewed on television was calling for a speed camera to trap wicked drivers. It was perfectly plain that such a concentration of accidents suggested there might be something wrong with the road. Yet here he was campaigning for more fines, bigger penalties, fighting the old class war against the rich who own cars.
Statistical bias by departments of transport, of course, is nothing new. It was turned into governmental decree in Britain when the 70mph limit was invoked as a four-month experiment on December 22, 1965. Tom Fraser, minister of transport and himself something of a four-month experiment, was trying desperately to look as though he was doing something to deal with bad motorway accidents in fog.
The logic of blanket limits - 60mph on ordinary roads, 70mph on dual carriageways and motorways - 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, to deal with a problem that occurred only in bad visibility was dismissed.
Spin doctors are not new. Fraser and his fellow social engineers thoroughly disapproved of speed. They had been lobbying for limits for years. The Road Research Laboratory was instructed to monitor the experiment, but it knew what was expected of it, and the conclusion was foregone.
A proposal for imposing a speed limit on one carriageway of the M1, and comparing the accidents with the opposite one, was turned down flat. It would have been a perfectly valid comparison but it risked not providing the right answer. Barbara Castle took over from Fraser within days and unsurprisingly made the limit permanent.
Fraser's reaction was that of a politician faced with critical headlines. Now, unfortunately, there is not much question of removing the 70mph limit entirely. Not only have generations of drivers grown up with it, but no government will ever brace itself to risk a tabloid blizzard following one bad accident. Yet international comparisons demonstrate no correlation between accidents and motorway speed limits. Death rates are falling on unrestricted German autobahns, which is more than can be said for American freeways, which often have lower limits than those in the UK.
There is plenty of evidence that, as with speed cameras, the expected benefits of the 70mph limit were grossly overstated. It was imposed to satisfy administrative dirigistes, and still creates bunching of vehicles, still causes loss of concentration, and certainly never made any difference to motorway accidents in fog.
Once Britain goes fully metric, 70mph (112.37kph) will need to be rounded up to 120kph (74.75mph), so raising it, as in most of Europe, to 130kph (80.98mph) would seem logical. The Association of British Drivers' research suggests that average traffic speeds would go up by only 3mph, but "Speed Kills" is too trite a slogan for politicians to overlook.
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