Safe Speed Forums

There are KSI Collisions
There are KSI Casualties

Casualties refer to the human cost in a collision and are what road safety organisations are measured upon.

You can have an increase in collisions and a reduction in casualties; this is common on roads that become congested. Loads of slow speed collisions with little or no casualties at all.

Increase the speed and free flowing traffic on single carriageway 2-way roads and casualties will increase greatly for a relatively small increase in collisions. The reason is pretty obvious.

You and your friends keep mentioning the 5% collision figure that have speed as a contributory factor and say it is a relatively low percentage to be bothering with yet that low percentage of collisions contribute greatly to the number of casualties in those collisions.

It is for that reason that speed management is worthwhile and the reduction in speed at impact for whatever the cause of that impact will have a massive mitigating effect on the casualty outcome...just for you...it will decrease.

You seem to be concentrating on me responding to your insignificant points when they are of no consequence to what I have been trying to explain, rather pointlessly it would seem, why repeating the 5% collision sound-byte is misuse of the figures. It may not be deliberate misuse as it would seem you "know not what you do!"

Now read what I posted above very slowly and think very carefully and you may, just may, follow what is being said.

...and equally take away speed as a contributory factor leaving in the rest and the accident may not have happened.

That make no sense if KSI - KILLED?SERIOUSLY INJURED.


Logically the KSI in the collision would be the KSI casualty from that collision.


It almost sound like you count twice here?




They do not figure in the stats as they are not counted. (I have a Swiss article which comment on this at a tight bend - notorious for accidents I summarised in English. Do not Google translate it .. it waffle on about cockroaches at one point )


Slow speed collisions with no injuries cannot be called KSI collisions



Plenty of roads have not one accident und no cams. Und NSL limit I recall Kevin Delaney (Once Cop ,, then AA spokeman .. now IAM spokesman) commenting on a Radio 4 show that a speed cam on the A40 was erected after 4 died ar scene. Stolen car. All young. No accident before .. none since. It does not then follow that cars will drive into each other at 40 -60 mph by default. There are still - believe it or not - plenty of these roads still in UK with no history of tragedy nor any mobile or other speed trap.




You could argue that 4 in that lad's car und the 5 injured in the stolen Merc (which killed two other innocent women in Bradford this week per BBC) are huge casualties in this 5% figure. Stolen car. Unlicenced. These "thug-riders" injure themselves und others - but their accidents are nearly always in this 5% figure. They are almost always crowding in for the "lark of riding in a stolen car" - thus you can argue that a high number die .. in this 5%. But they are not the type who would respect a speed cam anymore than they respect the police in the police cars who try - een put themselves at great risk to reign in these young fools

So .. HOW do you educate und reach these kids who feature predominantly in this 5% figure? Alll very well to waffle on about the casualties but we need to examine why the speed only kill und why so many. MOST of these are kids on red mist who TWOCCED the car.




Now I suggest you read carefully Steve. Those figures in the 5% are more than likely to be the kids who crowd into a car und die in cloud of red mist as evidenced by Kevin Delaney in BBC interview which we did record at the time as we are "right geeks at times!"

I find it hard to believe we are at this point after all of these years.

KSI means Killed or Seriously Injured

You can have a collision in which people are Killed or Seriously Injured - This is a KSI COLLISION

The people in the KSI COLLISION are CASUALTIES

One KSI COLLISION can have 1 or 100 CASUALTIES.

are you still following? ....then I will continue.

Slow speed collisions that have no KSI casualties are called Slight Injury Collisions with Slight casualties or Damage Only Collisions and they too are counted in police records and hence in the records held by DfT.

Now if you have been in forum discourse for 6 years and you have still to appreciate the very basics of road traffic collision and casualty terminology the safespeed campaign is in a pretty poor state and it is a tragedy that the UK media are turning to its officials and moderators for comments. It is very evident even in this one thread that the level of knowledge is less than elementary and is no better than pub talk. Perhaps the media should be made aware of this. After Thursday's rejection on the breakfast show I do believe they are already well aware of the tired old sound-bytes you keep repeating.

It is beginning to get frustrating explaining the difference time-and-again.

You and your friends keep mentioning the 5% collision figure that have speed as a contributory factor and say it is a relatively low percentage to be bothering with yet that low percentage of collisions contribute greatly to the number of casualties in those collisions.

...

Now read what I posted above very slowly and think very carefully and you may, just may, follow what is being said.

How on earth can you reconcile that with:

Now, the key word here is "attributed", not 'caused', not by 'severity', but attributed; this is an umbrella term regardless of causation and severity.

Speed [...] is responsible for almost 50% of the fatal casualties and a similar figure for the serious casualties.

Casualties refer to the human cost in a collision and are what road safety organisations are measured upon.

Increase the speed and free flowing traffic on single carriageway 2-way roads and casualties will increase greatly for a relatively small increase in collisions. The reason is pretty obvious.

Hi Steve.

Although I try my best to stick to the speed limit for the road that I'm using, i find that sometimes i'm going over by a couple of miles not intentionally but because the car just pick up speed along the way and i can't constantly check what speed i'm doing. So does that make me a bad driver?

Which one?

Although I try my best to stick to the speed limit for the road that I'm using, i find that sometimes i'm going over by a couple of miles not intentionally but because the car just pick up speed along the way and i can't constantly check what speed i'm doing. So does that make me a bad driver?

We're primarily talking about people who purposefully speed, knowingly above the limit.

Although I try my best to stick to the speed limit for the road that I'm using, i find that sometimes i'm going over by a couple of miles not intentionally but because the car just pick up speed along the way and i can't constantly check what speed i'm doing. So does that make me a bad driver?

As I understand it that 5% is crashes CAUSED by excessive speed, i.e. the driver loses control due to excessive speed and nothing else. Have you got the figures that show had the participant been going at or below the limit the crash would not have happened?

Have you got the figures that show had the participant been going at or below the limit the crash would not have happened?

...The 5% is "only 5% of crashes involve any speeding vehicle". This includes all those over the posted limited and those exceeding a speed suitable for the conditions, they have been clubbed together.
Now take away the joyriders, TWOC (taken without consent), thefts, drunks, drugged, and this figure drops to around 2% of drivers that have excessive speed crashes...

Many incidents have no way of proving just prior to the accident do there is no way of officially recording a figure that can be accurate or meaningful. Road Accident Engineers can tell the speed of the car in many cases prior to a crash from evidence left but not what or why the driver behaved and missed the information earlier to tell them of the impending hazard and why no reaction took place to avoid the impending collision.
Because people are often in shock and fail to recall prior incident memories that accurately it is very difficult to reply on data that is forthcoming.

US DOT Report Confirms Speed Not Major Accident Cause
US Department of Transportation study finds only five percent of crashes caused by excessive speed.

As lawmakers around the country continue to consider speed limit enforcement as the primary traffic safety measure, the most comprehensive examination of accident causation in thirty years suggests this focus on speed may be misplaced.

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) investigated 5,471 injury crashes that took place across the country between July 3, 2005 and December 31, 2007. Unlike previous studies automatically generated from computerized data found in police reports, researchers in this effort were dispatched to accident scenes before they were cleared. This allowed a first-hand comparison of physical evidence with direct interviews of witnesses and others involved in the incident. NHTSA evaluated the data to determine the factors most responsible for the collision.

"The critical reason is determined by a thorough evaluation of all the potential problems related to errors attributable to the driver, the condition of the vehicle, failure of vehicle systems, adverse environmental conditions, and roadway design," the report explained. "The critical pre-crash event refers to the action or the event that puts a vehicle on the course that makes the collision unavoidable, given reasonable driving skills and vehicle handling of the driver."

Overall, vehicles "traveling too fast for conditions" accounted for only five percent of the critical pre-crash events (page 23). More significant factors included 22 percent driving off the edge of a road, or 11 percent who drifted over the center dividing line.

When driver error was the primary cause of a crash, researchers went further to identify the "critical reason" behind that error. Distraction and not paying attention to the road accounted for 41 percent of the errors. Ten percent of errors were attributed to drivers lacking proper driving skills and either freezing up or overcompensating behind the wheel. Eight percent were asleep, having a heart attack or otherwise incapacitated. A similar eight percent of errors were attributed to driving too fast for conditions and five percent driving too fast for a curve (page 25).

The NHTSA findings are mirrored in accident statistics provided by the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles. The agency's most recent report lists "speed too fast" as the driver error that caused 2.9 percent of crashes in 2007 (view chart, see page 19). More accidents -- 3.8 percent -- were caused in Virginia by drivers falling asleep or becoming ill behind the wheel. Another 14.6 percent were caused by bad weather such as fog, rain and snow. "Speed too fast" was a more significant factor -- 13.7 percent -- in fatal accidents, as compared to 18 percent of fatal accidents involving alcohol and 9.6 percent caused by sleepiness and fatigue ( view full Virginia report in 1.9mb PDF format).

In the NHTSA and Virginia reports, "too fast for conditions" does not mean exceeding the posted speed limit. A vehicle driving 10 MPH on an iced-over road with a 45 MPH limit would be traveling too fast for the conditions if it lost control, but it would not have exceeded the speed limit. The UK Department for Transport isolated cases where only the posted limit was exceeded and found that, "Exceeding speed limit was attributed to 3 percent of cars involved in accidents" (view UK report).

"Four of the six most frequently reported contributory factors involved driver or rider error or reaction," the Road Casualties Great Britain 2007 report stated. "For fatal accidents the most frequently reported contributory factor was loss of control, which was involved in 35 per cent of fatal accidents."

A full copy of the NHTSA report is available in a 400k PDF file at the source link below.

Source: National Motor Vehicle Crash Causation Survey (U.S. Department of Transportation, 7/15/2008)

They can but they don't so again you are misrepresenting the facts and are displaying how little of the practical you actually know.

Road accident engineers, who are they then? Does the team flood out of the council office when there is a bump? That would be good. It doesn't happen.

Any evidence will be analysed by police accident investigators in a fatal collision with council and highways agency engineers left to analyse the numbers and locations only; they do not get the opportunity to routinely examine evidence.

The most reliable evidence is from crash survivors so the outcome from your reasoning above is reversed on the streets of the UK; what world are you living in?

I may seem a little harsh here but the impression given out by this site is that it is knowledgeable in the subject when it clearly is not. The practitioners laugh at you while the media play you like puppets; you need to get yourselves educated in the practical aspects and start again.