A new challenge to Brake. Safe Speed issued the following PR at: 10:50 this morning:
PR374: Road safety in conflict and a challenge.
news: for immediate release
Amusingly, in today's Observer, Mary Williams of Brake is quoted as saying:
"... Brake maintains [speed cameras] can reduce casualties by around 42 per
cent on routes where they are sited."
The Safe Speed road safety campaign would very much like to hear Mary Williams
explain how it is possible for speed cameras to reduce crashes by 'around 42%'
when recent figures only associate 5% of crashes with speeding. Surely, even
with 100% compliance at speed cameras sites, there could never be more than a
5% reduction in crashes? And with 100% compliance, no fines would be issued.
We now know (as a society) that many modern road safety claims are bunk simply
because they DO NOT FIT with other claims and known data.
* They say crashes down by 42% at speed camera sites, yet only 5% of crashes
involve a speeding vehicle.
* They say 'It's 30 for a reason' because 20% of child pedestrians die in 30mph
impacts, but only 0.43% are dying in built up areas with 30 and 40mph speed
limits.
Paul Smith, founder of the Safe Speed road safety campaign
(
www.safespeed.org.uk) said: "I challenge Mary Williams (or any representative
of her choosing) to debate the issues of speed and safety in any print or
broadcast medium."
"The problem really is that very few people have looked deeply enough into the
road safety data to tell us what it really means. Society is latched onto gross
oversimplifications, false assumptions and dodgy data."
"Around four hours before the release of Government data on the proportion of
crashes caused by speeding, Safe Speed issued a PR warning editors and
journalists what to expect. We were exactly correct. We'd had no leak of the
data. It is just that the Safe Speed campaign has taken the trouble to
understand the road safety information in enough detail to understand what's
REALLY going on."
<ends>
Notes for editors
=================
See the contributory factors report, published Thursday at 10am:
http://www.dft.gov.uk/stellent/groups/d ... 612594.pdf
Observer article:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/ ... 05,00.html
Extract from Safe Speed PR364, issued at about 6am on Thursday:
"The real news will be released at about 10am this morning. It will be the
first time since 1959 that we will have seen national road crash contributory
factor data. It is expected to show that around 95% of road crashes have
absolutely nothing to do with speeding."
link:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SafeSpeedPR/message/218
=========================
The permanent link to the challenge PR is:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SafeSpeedPR/message/229