Safe Speed Forums

Anyone care to comment on my letter soon to be sent to Surrey CC about the following web page: http://www.surreycc.gov.uk/sccwebsite/s ... endocument

Accuracy and Misleading Information

I write to notify you of a web page on the Surrey County Council website that features inaccurate and misleading information. I’m not aware of Surrey’s Policy regarding this however I would have assumed it would be broadly in-line with internet good practice guidelines - pages corrected or removed within 30 days of notification.

I’d be grateful if you would investigate these allegations and amend the pages as soon as possible. It is of great concern to me that these statements are made on a government website without properly researching the sources and case studies. All too often road safety messages are oversimplified in order to get a message across (e.g. speed kills), which leave the public convinced for example that as long as they drive slowly they are safe. This could not be further from the truth.

Safer Speeds – What’s Wrong with Speed - Page Owner David J Brown

Claim: The higher the speed the more likely it is that a driver is involved in a crash and that any injuries will be more serious.

Misleading: It is true to say that speed much above or below the 85th percentile of traffic speed will increase the risk of an accident. Your claim simply implies however that the faster we drive the more likely we are to crash. This cannot be backed up by statistical data. In Britain many more crashes occur in 20 - 40 mph limits than 50 – 70 mph limits (over 14 times more from analysis of 2003 casualty data).

I suggest you reword this to say: Driving too fast or too slowly for the road and conditions increases the risk of an accident. The faster our impact speed the higher the severity of injury (or similar)

Claim: For each 1 mph reduction in average speed, there is a 5% reduction in crashes.

Misleading: Fundamentally this implies that crashes could be eliminated completely by reducing speeds from 60 or 70mph to 50 or 40mph. Given the number of roads in Surrey’s that continue to experience accidents (sometimes in greater numbers) after having a speed limit cut from 60 to 40 or 70, 50 suggests the claim is flawed.

I suggest the item is removed unless specific analysis relevant to Surrey can prove the link.

Claim: At 40 mph the risk of serous injury to someone wearing a seat belt in the front seat of a car is five times greater than at 20 mph; At 30 mph the risk of serious injury to someone wearing a seat belt in the front seat of a car is three times greater than at 20 mph;

Misleading: This implies the risk of injury is linked to pre-accident speed and not impact speed. The claim implies that if we drive at 20 or 30 mph instead of 40mph our risk of injury is lower. This is incorrect. The risk relates to impact speed not pre-accident speed.

I suggest it is updated to say with an impact speed of … (rather than at …)
Claim: 85% of pedestrians die in crashes where drivers are travelling up to 40 mph, 45% of pedestrians die in crashes where drivers are travelling up to 30 mph, Only 5% of pedestrians die where speeds are up to 20 mph
Inaccurate & Misleading: The claim implies that a driver who drives at 40mph is approximately twice as likely to kill a pedestrian as one at 30mph. This is not true. I’m assuming these claims are based on interpretation of data in the Ashton Mackay and Pasanen studies (disproved 2002 by Minnesota Road Research Board). Even if we ignore the Minnesota study for a moment, the original claim relates to impact speed not pre-impact speed.
For the implied claim of your page to be true and we had 100% speed limit compliance nationally we’d have between 15,000 and 30,000 pedestrian deaths per year. In 2003 we had 172.
I suggest you reword it to clearly state impact speed and then review the claims in-line with the more up to date studies.
A child hit by a driver doing 20 mph has every chance of surviving but this reduces the higher the speed.
In line with the above replace ‘doing’ with ‘at’

Great stuff. Well done.



That's the figure for all children killed. (not just peds)

All peds was 774.

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

Reply received:

Thank you for your comments, which have been passed to me as the owner of the web page 'Safer Speeds - What's wrong with speed?'.

This is just a quick note to inform you that your email is receiving
attention, and that we will reply to you in more detail once the contents
have been properly investigated.

I suspect I'll be fobbed off howerver.

Furthe reply:


I do hope that you received my e-mail of 8th February, acknowledging your concerns about our web page titled 'Safer Speeds ? What's Wrong with speed?'

The aim of a local authority's road safety web site is to provide
information in a form that is easily accessible to a wide range of users,
and is based both on national research and local analysis. However, there
is inevitably a trade off between the need to get succinct messages across
and providing in depth information, and we would normally opt to keep the
wording concise ? by the use of bullet points in this case.

I except that in electing for brevity, some of our interpretation of the
information may be poorly expressed and that the context is sometimes not explained. So I will be reviewing this page within the next 2 weeks, and hope to clarify some of the statements made, and to add caveats as
appropriate.

Once again thanks for your interest and comments.

regards


So some progress, at least they may addopt some of my suggestions