Safe Speed Forums

I was thinking of writing to local MP and asking why the local SCP is allowed to keep the money from its fines regardless of whether road deaths go up or down. It's a little like the recent controversey over company directors getting 'bonuses for failure' i.e. multi-million pound bonuses for steering their company share prices downwards.

For example, I don't live in Essex, but I note from the ABD website that they are taking huge sums in fines, but road deaths appear to be climbing at an alarming rate.

I was planning to suggest to my MP that people may be more happy to support SCPs if they were only allowed to keep a proportional amount of fine money depending on how many road deaths come down by. (e.g. a reduction in deaths of 10% would allow them to keep all of the fine money, an increase of 10% would see them 'penalized 25% of their revenue).The targets could be made tighter each year to show that some real progress was being made.

I feel that if we have to live with these partnerships for the long term we could campaign for a 'compromise' policy that would at least start to drive their behaviour in the right direction.

Has anyone here tried suggesting such an idea before and if so, what response did you get?


Dave

That's a brilliant idea, but I believe it has a fatal flaw at present.

The number of deaths in a Police force area in a year is subject to quite a bit of random variation, and no one could sign up to the resultant lottery.

We might use serious injuries (or KSI) as a better indicator, but then we can't trust those stats as a trend indicator at present, and I have no real idea about how we could firm them up. See: http://www.safespeed.org.uk/serious.html

So the challenge is to find a "road safety performance indicator" capable of being applied over year to year variations on a Police force area scale. If we can find one, this idea is solid gold.

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

btw, I moved this topic from "News" to here - it seemed a better place...

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

Perhaps a two or three year rolling average of road deaths?

I think deaths has to be the main indicator, no matter what else is considered. After all, this is THE most important number to get down.

I'm sorry but that's not going to work either. Lots of the smaller counties have under 50 deaths per year. We're looking for an annual reduction of maybe 5% with a very good policy. That would be under 2.5 deaths per year reduction. Even with a pair of three year averages, One coach crash or motorway pile up could take the result from "profit" to "loss".



Agreed. Except I don't think we have a chance of using deaths. So it's find an alternative indicator or abandon the idea. Shame isn't it?

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

Okay, what about breaking the deaths down by location factor and using a weighted average calculation.

For example:

Motorways: increase in deaths has a -1% effect on their revenue retention

A-roads: -5%

B-roads: -10%

Residential: -20%

These could be set as maximum swings with stepped targets for each. For example, if deaths on A roads go up 4%, they lose 2% revenue, a 10% increase or more in A road deaths brings the full 5% penalty.

This would allow such motorway catastrophies over which they have little control to have a minimal effect on their finances, whereas the roads that they should have a major input into making safer would carry larger penalties as they are much less likely to be hit by a 'one-off' event that skews the figures.

It would also give much more focus to those roads that are more likely to have pedestrians on them rather than those lovely profitable motorway bridges.

Complex I know, but workable.