Safe Speed Forums

People, has anyone else spotted the link between the Govt letting out this information on the same day as the right to silence case in Strasbourg. Methinks they know they have lost the case and this is a way of slithering out of this whole disgusting lie.

No. The publication date for this data was known to me in 2004. RCGB ALWAYS comes out on the last Thursday in September.

The dirty tricks are elsewhere.

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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

Hmm it also seems to show that disobeying a traffic signal isn't as dangerous as people think either. 2% of all accidents.
Which is less than disobeying a give way/stop sign. (why are these lumped in together? They are very different!)

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Andrew.

I haven't been on for a while but leapt to the computer to congratulate Paul Smith on getting the kind of publicity he so richly deserves. Front page lead in the Daily Telegraph and coverage in several other national dailes - it rarely gets that good.

Paul, I salute you. You have worked tirelessly for this cause and at last a few chickens are coming in to roost. Unfortunately many of them will remain hard to catch as there is a very high barrier between them and the coop. Collectively it is known as the government, safety camera partnerships, the police, and armies of self-interested quangos and pressure groups. Add a good dollop of greed, stupidity, hysteria and illogicality, and you have a mountain to climb.

I experienced this recently when, using SafeSpeed principles, I tried to persuade my local parish council that extending speed limits by at least a mile beyond the village boundary (on roads where 50-55mph is perfectly OK in normal conditions) might not be such a good idea as it will encourage drivers to take bigger overtaking risks on what little derestricted road remains, therefore causing worse accidents further out. Do they care? No. Someone else's back yard, you see.

But keep at it, Paul.

Hopefully the 2005 Road Accidents GB raw datasets will contain this data when they are released - could be any day now, 2004's was on 21st Sept 2005.

more likely that not many people do it. I see plenty of people going through reds but how often do you see someone (other than some dickhead on a bike) running a light really late and at speed?

Indeed!
You have to be several seconds into a red before running it risks an actuall collision.

In the "Real" world this is actually a very long time! My Bowels twich if the light changes to red as I cross the line! How people can willfully go through on a red that has already been lit for over a second or two I really dont know

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"The road to a police state is paved with public safety legislation"

Amen to that ! Very well done, Paul - we always knew we were right, but it needed a man with the guts and persistence you have shown to bring us all together and challenge the anti-motoring lobby and its dodgy statistics. PaulAH is right, though - no doubt Transport 1595, Fiends of the Earth, Broke! and others will employ more spin on these figures than even Shane Warne could. It will be interesting to see what they come up with.

In the meantime - Bravissimo!! :clap::clap:

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Save a cow - eat a vegetarian

I think that this is very largely dependent upon visibility and observation factors.
In other words, if you can SEE that it is safe (note safe, not necessarily compliant) then of couse no collision is likely to occur.
Obviously if a driver is going too fast to see other road users approaching the junction from all directions, then this situation is by definition not safe.

I am a great fan of the "amber flashing light" systems, where all traffic lights at a junction change to flashing amber (usually late at night in the Netherlands), warning all users to proceed with caution... but they don't have to wait for a "green" light.

A couple of bits which jumped out at me.

Failed to look properly comes up again and again and again. SMIDSY anyone?

And, despite the supposed plague of people using mobiles while driving (and it is fairly common). Driver using mobile phone scores zero across the board. Perhaps we are only using them when we can spare the attention? Maybe drivers aren't so stupid afterall?

On the whole the figures shouldn't suprise anyone, anyone who has ever been on a road that is.

keep dreaming.

We've been very focused on the 'speed' aspects of the report, and with good reason. But I have just realised that every single contributory factor is recorded with a 'confidence factor' (After some changes and discussion, I think it ended up as 'probable' or 'definite' - I'll have to check.)

But where's the confidence factor information? Why isn't it published and what does it tell us?

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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

Does it imply - "Confidence Trick" ?

Oooh hush my mouth

I've finally found the time to study the report.



I bet there's a 'pretty big' overlap between those special codes and the 5% 'speeding'. 50%? 70%? So maybe we're down to 2.5% 'normal motorists' speeding in crashes.

Of course DfT aren't saying - but I bet they know. Pretty serious that.

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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

Table 5 is interesting. By excluding 'speeding' as a contributory factor, it enables us to say (accurately):

Speeding was not in the top ten contributory factors for any road type.

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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

Seems a pretty big coincidence that the same percentage are classed as speeding as illegal driving. I'd bet the correlation is much closer and it is highly unlikely any normal otherwise legal driver would have excess speed as a contributory factor. Inappropriate speed possibly but not excess speed. It may of course be an artifact of recording in that illegal drivers are much more likely to be recorded as speeding as legal ones depending on whether they were spoken to after the incident. Driving too fast for no reason at all isn't usual behaviour.

There's a rather baffling 'other' category at the bottom of Table 2 that needs looking into. Most of the 'special codes' appear to fall into the 'other' category.

I thought I should look it up... and here it is:

SPECIAL CODES Codes 901 - 903 apply to vehicles being driven in special circumstances, which contributed to the accident, whilst code 904 covers one specific scenario. Code 999 should only be used where no other code adequately summarises a factor which contributed to the accident.

INDIVIDUAL CODES

901 Stolen vehicle The vehicle identified in the "Which participant" box must be the stolen vehicle. Use this code only where the fact that the vehicle was stolen influenced the driver/rider's behaviour and contributed to the accident. Do not use this code simply to record the presence of a stolen vehicle.

902 Vehicle in course of crime Use this code to record a vehicle which was being in driven/ridden in the course of a crime and where this influenced the driver/rider's behaviour and contributed to the accident. Use this code also where the vehicle was being pursued by the police in response to a suspected crime.

903 Emergency vehicle on a call Use this code to record all emergency vehicles which were responding to emergency calls and which caused or contributed to the accident. Emergency vehicle should be displaying flashing blue light. Emergency vehicles include ambulances, fire engines (and other fire service vehicles), police, mountain rescue and coastguard vehicles. Also includes unmarked vehicles displaying flashing blue light. Do not include emergency vehicles not displaying flashing blue light (eg. police cars on routine patrol, ambulances conveying patients to day centres or routine hospital appointments or fire engines returning from a call).

904 Vehicle door opened or closed negligently Driver or passenger opened a vehicle door causing a collision with another vehicle (eg. pedal cycle or motor cycle) or caused a passing vehicle to swerve which then contributed to an accident. Also applies to buses in which passengers are injured by opening or closing doors. Includes drivers who close vehicle door, trapping an alighted passenger's clothing, and then driving off.

999 Other - please specify below To be used only when no contributory factor is available to describe a particular circumstance which contributed to the accident. Includes all cases where a passenger caused or contributed to their own injury (eg. jumping from vehicle, "stealing a ride" and falling from vehicle, or being drunk and falling in bus). Code will also include all vehicle defects not listed in codes 201 - 206 (eg. Wheel became detached from vehicle, engine fire or engine seized).

From: http://www.dft.gov.uk/stellent/groups/d ... 032188.pdf

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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

So the major focus of automated enforcement is on Red Light and Speed Cameras and yet speeding and running red lights contribute to less than 5% of crashes and much less when the stolen / in the course of a crime are subtracted.

Although this report is obviously specific to the UK I am sure that the figures whould not be far from the same in Australia.

I would also be interested in the exceeding the alcohol limit figures, haven't read the report... sorry, as about 99.9% of the focus of Road Safety in Australia is on Speed, Red Lights and Drinking. I'm sure alcohol contributes to the stats but it seems that the vast majority of crashes are caused by other factors.

If and when you finally manage to convice enough people to abandon these horrid cameras I can only hope that the ripple effect will hit Australia.

Thanks again for all your hard work Paul....

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Ross

Yes I'm a hoon, but only on the track!!!!

indeed it is. In my youth I was a reader of Wheels magazine. They got hold of the data from the RTA about 20 years ago and it showed exactly the same thing - that the people they were fining for speeding were not the ones crashing. Pretty obvious really when most of the speed traps are on highways.

Well done, Paul, for your efforts over the years but I think that the battle has been won but not the war.

Now that it has been proved beyond reasonable doubt that poor driving skills not exceeding the speed limit is the real problem, I predict that the vested interests in the "speed kills" lobby will now start shouting that the statistics demonstrate that speed limits are too high because a significant proportion of drivers involved in collisions are travelling too fast for the conditions. So watch out for a proposal to reduce the National Speed Limit to 50 mph and guess what? this will have "green" credentials in reducing emissions of carbon dioxide to boot.