THE MOST OUTSPOKEN MAN IN MOTORCYCLING
KEVIN ASHSpeed cameras are killing people on motorways - fact. But the proof has been swept under the carpetWE ARE relentlessly subjected to propaganda to justify failing road policies. That includes direct lies, distorted statistics, but also the suppression of inconvenient information - as I will demonstrate here.
Paul Smith, who runs the website
www.safespeed.org.uk, has spent thousands of hours trawling through government papers exposing the array of falsehoods used to justify the speed camera agenda. And one of his most shameful discoveries is an attempt to hide the Transport Research Laboratory's TRL Report 595. This was commissioned by the Highways Agency specifically to study the effect of speed cameras on motorways.
What it shows is shocking: that speed cameras actually Increase risk.
The TRL measured the number of personal injury accidents (PIAs) on open motorways and in roadworks, and found conclusively that where conventional speed cameras exist, PIAs increased by 55 %. Yes, increased.
Even on open motorways their effect was to increase PIAs by 31%.
‘Average speed' camera are better, at 4.5% and 6.7% respectively - but they're still worse than no cameras at all.
What works better is the presence of a police patrol car, giving accident reductions of 27% and 10%. Yet these have been systematically reduced in numbers, to save money.
So, speed cameras on motorways cause accidents - information that clearly belongs in the public domain and that should be acted upon urgently, as they are directly responsible for injuring and killing people.
Quote:
“The report is shocking: it shows Cameras increase risk”
So what happened to the report? The Department for Transport decided not to announce its publication, hoping no one would notice it.
If you did, and paid the £40 price tag, the crucial information about the negative effect of cameras is hidden in a table with no commentary. Indeed, as Paul Smith points out, the executive summary of the report deceitfully groups together the positive effect of patrol cars with the negative one of cameras, coming up with an over-all neutral result.
Which if it wasn't so sinister, would be funny - even by cheating, the best they can do in say cameras have little effect!
The summary is written by M Freeman, J Mitchell and GA Coe, so we have the names of three people who are complicit in promoting a policy that their own figures show increased road casualties. You can be certain these three knew exactly what they were doing: makes you wonder exactly what gives them job satisfaction.
Meanwhile, what does this say about other areas of government policy? If they treat the truth with such callous disregard, why should we believe it's ant different elsewhere?
Tell us what you think
www.motorcyclenews.com.
I recently had to travel through the roadworks on the M18, where there is a section with a 40mph limit, without a workman in sight. I tried to stick to this speed limit and for my troubles I was being overrun by HGVs on my rear bumper. It was very difficult to see how this speed limit was making any contribution to road safety, as it was just causing the traffic to bunch up, which was far more likely to result in an accident.
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