Safe Speed Forums

We have called a public meeting for Thursday 13th May 2004 in Inverness.

The meeting will be held at the Thistle Hotel (formerly Mercury Hotel).

Doors open 7pm.

100 places available. Places allocated on a first come first served basis.

We will invite the Police and the Council.

Paul Smith will present: "Why and how speed cameras cost lives".

There will be plenty of time for questions.

Everyone will be welcome. There will be a voluntary collection to offset expenses.

_________________
Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Any one got any bright, low cost ideas for publicising this meeting?

I'm sure that PR's will get it in the local press. But I'd like to do as much as possible. How about a publicity stunt? Any ideas? Any volunteers?

Posters?

_________________
Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

I've designed a poster and I'm getting a couple of hundred printed up at A3 size tomorrow.

You can download the design:

http://www.safespeed.org.uk/highlands/inverness001.doc

Feel free to print and distribute. Note that the wording includes "this area" they are intended to be placed in the Northern Constabulary Police force area.

_________________
Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Here's an image file of the poster:



If planning to print, please use the Word Document in the message above.

_________________
Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

The meeting was very poorly attended. We've seen quite a bit of this - this time about a dozen people turned up. No one came from the Police. No one came from the Council.

Perhaps we should have done more in the way of publicity - although various local papers carried info about the meeting and we had posters distributed here and there.

We did get a couple of journalists furiously taking notes, one from the "Press and Journal" and one freelance. The P&J Journalist also had a photographer.

The meeting was filmed in full broadcast quality by a semi retired cameraman friend of mine. We will find a way to make the video available.

I spoke for a little over an hour, and as is usual, received unanimous support from the small audience.

We then had some questions - but nothing taxing or challenging because the audience was clearly already in complete agreement.

A short group discussion followed and various people agreed to write letters to various officials.

I don't know what we would have to do next time to get good attendance. perhaps the average person is just too apathetic.

_________________
Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

This, in a nutshell sums up the entire problem. Nearly everyone I meet is anti speed cameras "instinctively", and those that aren't tend to change their minds when the full facts are explained objectively to them.

But people tend to complain to each other (the old "shouting at the TV news" response LOL) or not at all. This unfortunately plays right into the hands of the Camera Partnerships who can (rightly) claim that only a minority of people oppose them. In truth I believe nearly everyone opposes them, but only a tiny percentage do so actively. People believe they can't alter anything so they don't bother trying, which is of course the ultimate self-fulfilling prophesy! Look at the turnout at the last election, which says it all really.

It seems that many people were anti-Blair but many didn't bother voting because they thought there was a massive undefeatable majority. And because they didn't bother voting there was!

From what happened just shows that the council and police think that this is nothing of interest to them and that they are right and everybody is wrong; why don't they listen? They only have themselves to blame when things go wrong because they are so narrow-minded. At lest some people were there, which is the start of the ball rolling.

I would have attended if I wasn't studying for exams.

Andrew