Safe Speed Forums

Dear Road Safety Forum of Speed Safe,
I just wanted to introduce you to my ideas on road collisions that I have set out on my website http://www.warwickhughes.com/road/
Where I try to express a sort of "general theory" of road collisons which states that all sorts of minor "collison enhancing behaviour" by drivers, little events any observant person can witness a few times in an hours driving often initiating from carelessness or a thoughtless moment, interact randomly with other road hazards to produce first close shaves and less commonly collisions. There is a graduated scale of collision severity and of course collision frequency decreases as you go up the scale of collision severity. Just as you would expect from any natural system with factors interacting.
My point in expressing this way of viewing road collisions as a continuum from minor events to collisions causing deaths is that to reduce the rate of deaths and injuries we obviously need to be improving driving standards in order to reduce the thousands of instances where the probability of a collision is enhanced. Remember that most Police or traffic patrol cars would not even pull a car over for many of the things I am discussing. So we have a situation where most of these myriad random events that surely enhance collison probability for a brief period are underneath the radar (excuse that please) of any patrol attention.

I would like to see TV road safety adverts aiming at reinforcing good driving messages and pointing out examples of "collision enhancing behaviour" or "collision enhancing situations" that should be avoided.
Like most of you I think the use of speed cameras on safe parts of roads under the guise of safety is blatantly unscientific and simply revenue raising. However there are plenty of web sites dealing with speed camera issues and I have not gone far down that path.
I have enjoyed reading various posts, eg Wind Turbines A13 Dagenham, interested to hear some of you keep incident diaries.
I would be very interested to hear feedback & comments about what I say on my site. At the back of what I am trying to do is a belief that there has to be a more scientific way for road safety authorities to structure their efforts to reduce road collisions. Does anyone know of an Authority or an academic expert that has come up with a scheme anything like I discuss ?
I know I am no great shakes as a writer and I know my web skills are primitive.
Looking forward to any feedback.
Best wishes
Warwick Hughes

Nice to see you here. Welcome.

Ah, yes. You'll like this page:

http://www.safespeed.org.uk/ten.html

In modern heath and safety literature they commonly refer to this pattern as the "Risk Triangle". See this for example:

http://www.electrolab.ca/PDFs/New%20Per ... gement.pdf

But there's something else important - I don't believe you can get the log scale of severity out of any model based on mechanics or physics. Instead we have to use a model based on psychology. This shows me a clear signpost that road safety is psychology and not much to do with physics at all.



Well, what can I say? YES! But we need to look miles outside of road safety literature, and instead examine literature concerning industrial Health and safety and "performance management".

Road safety is stuck in the dark ages. It's up to people like us to illuminate the debate.

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

Hi Perth West Oz. I always enjoy a site that loads fast on a dial up connection Actually found yours first from the late John Daly's site a while ago while surfing for eco-spin info, but was also interested in the Road Toll section and the idea of positive advertising. I posted the Radio NZ part from http://www.warwickhughes.com/road/clayton.htm here as I thought it put some interesting ideas forward. Still, it'll be tough getting any changes to the advertising here. I've mailed the lot in charge to ask if they had any plans to run a campaign on tailgating and the two second rule. Short answer, not really, no.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

Dear Paul and Forum contributors,
Glad to here someone has heard of what else is on;
http://www.warwickhughes.com/
Thanks Paul for your http://www.safespeed.org.uk/ten.html page.
What can I say, better expressed than I could do.
To think I have been gestating these ideas for over a decade, a case of parallel evolution if ever there was one.
Who knows there may be others out there.
I will work on a one page letter to lay the idea before our various Govt road safety orgs, plus the RAC's and the NRMA, maybe a few academics.
The letter will need an eye grabber of a diagram expressing the collision severity pyramid
Thanks again for your comments and I will keep an eye on the Forum and hopefully find time to read more of http://www.safespeed.org.uk/
Best wishes,
Warwick Hughes