Safe Speed Forums

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/ ... 05,00.html

MPs insist crash-free roads still need speed cameras



By Anthony Browne, Chief Political Correspondent

A CROSS-PARTY group of MPs has enraged the motoring lobby by calling for more speed cameras to be installed, even at sites where there have been no accidents.

As part of a wide-ranging review of safety on the roads, the House of Commons transport select committee also called on the Government to consider requiring “alcolocks” to be fitted in cars to immobilise drink-drivers.

Despite a backlash against the increasingly ubiquitous use of speed cameras, the MPs said it was a “disgrace” that existing government guidelines required preventable deaths and injuries to occur in a location before a speed camera could be installed. It called on the Government to ease the rules so that police could install cameras at sites simply because drivers broke the speed limit there.

Gwyneth Dunwoody, the Labour chairman of the committee, said: “Evidence of excessive speed is evidence of danger and there is no need to wait for somebody to die in order to take action intended to slow vehicles.”

Motoring groups have mounted an increasingly vociferous campaign claiming that the cameras have a limited impact on saving lives, and are being used by police just to raise funds. They have accused police forces of trying to hide cameras from view to increase the number of tickets issued and of squandering the money raised.

Paul Smith, founder of the anti-camera Safe Speed road safety campaign, said: “If it wasn’t such a serious road safety issue, it would be amusing that there are calls to place cameras where there have been no crashes. It will destroy what little reputation cameras have left, because if you place them where there have been no crashes, then crashes can only go up. Speed cameras have failed to make roads safer. They have replaced valuable life-saving policies. They must be scrapped.”

The AA Motoring Trust warned that installing cameras where there had not been crashes would undermine public faith in the Government’s road safety policy.

Andrew Howard, the trust’s head of road safety, said: “Cameras are achieving their road safety goals, yet are still not accepted by a substantial minority of drivers. Gaining this acceptance is crucial and we believe that limiting cameras to proven accident sites holds the key.”

Edmund King, executive dir-ector of the RAC Foundation,spoke against too much reliance on cameras. He said: “A camera can clock someone a few miles over the limit but do nothing to deter drink, drugged or other forms of dangerous driving.”

However, the report, Roads Policing and Technology — Getting the Balance Right, insisted that there was unequivocal evidence that cameras saved lives, with 42 per cent fewer people killed or seriously injured at sites with speed cameras. It said that drivers should be penalised for going just over the speed limit, rather than let off as at present.

The study also called for the introduction of more advanced technology, such as time-distance cameras, which measure the average speed of a car between two points rather than just the speed at one instant. Where possible, ‘alcolocks’ should be fitted to the cars of convicted drink-drivers, and then, if effective, they should be fitted to all new cars, it said.

The report also insisted that cameras must not be used to replace traffic police, since cameras cannot tell whether people have been drinking or are driving while illegally making mobile phone calls.

Road deaths have fallen by two thirds over the past 40 years, giving Britain one of the best safety records in Europe. However, Mrs Dunwoody said last year there were more than 32,000 deaths and serious injuries on roads. “Compared to other aspects of daily life, travelling on the roads continues to be an extremely high-risk activity,” she said.

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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

Time to get out the TRL stats on cameras increasing accidents in roadworks again

If they did put cameras where there were no accidents it would actually be a good thing as accidents would then happen, thus hopefully creating a lightbulb moment for the sheep that think cameras are good. It would beg the question: if cameras save lives and reduce accidents why are there now accidents at sites where cameras weren't before?

Dunwoody: “Compared to other aspects of daily life, travelling on the roads continues to be an extremely high-risk activity”

Well how about this - if serious injury means hospital visit, and we just take being a home:

Every year, over 2 million children are taken to a hospital after accidents. Around half of these accidents happen at home. Put another way, one child in five attends an accident and emergency department every year – out of a class of 30 children, on average six will have to go to hospital annually.

This means 1,000,000 child KSI from being at home... compaired with just 32,000 KSI across the entire population from the roads. I see that as making being at home 30+ times more dangerous than being on the road.

Yes I know that this means nothing without sensible base figures, but Dunwoody apparently has no ability to understand basic statistical methods.

If you could work out the KSI from being at school, home & in the car and account for the amount of time spent in each then you'd get a good model of the relative risk between the activities. It would be really funny to say 'kids safer in your car than at home'. Save their lives by taking them out for a drive!

I'm quite interested is the 'stairs' one too. We discovered recently that 1,000 a year die in staircase falls.

If we spend 10 minutes per day on stairs, and 60 minutes per day in cars then the relative risks are:

1,000/10 = 100 deaths annually per national daily minute on stairs

3,200/60 = 53 deaths annually per national daily minute in cars

A minute on the stairs is twice as dangerous as a minute in the car.

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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

How can they get away with repeating this lie? The following statistic, while we know is complete codswallop and almost all down to RTTM, isn't evidence to prove the former statement.

I just had another thought about this statement while driving back from work.

I think we now have our answer as to how they plan to deal with the issue of thresholds for prosecution under the new gradiated points scheme ie. there aren't going to be any!!.

How can a Transport Select Committee get away with saying this drivel? Evidence of people exceeding the speed limit could equally well mean that the limit is too low.

10 minutes is a bit off, I probably climb/descent the stairs five times a day at home and five times at work, possibly cumulative two minutes. Some people might do more (or none) some less. Also I suspect most are caused or exacerbated by age-related problems rather than the stairs themselves.

Gareth

Sure. Hence the bold If. I agree that 10 minutes is likely to be way over. So we're likely to on solid ground if we can poke real figures into the calculation.

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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

Surely this should be attacked vigorously. While it is proably true over the 40 year period, the fact that the toll has basically stalled in the last 10 years means that the huge decrease was over 30 years and all that momentum is lost.

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Ross

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

That's complete garbage. I hope you won't be using that in any rebuttal because you'll get laughed at.

If I stand on the edge of the hard shoulder on a motorway for 6 months waving at cars, and miraculously no-one hit me, would you consider that acceptable and safe behaviour simply because the statistics would show zero KSI?

As you know statistics do not paint the true story. If you've got people driving at inappropriate speeds past their areas/communities, they are going to complain due to the nature of the environment it creates, which is unacceptable, even if there aren't any casualties. If you are creating fear in someone's environment, then it needs to be eradicated. A similar example would be gangs of hooded youths congregating outside your house. If they aren't doing anything, then what's the problem?

Eh? That's not a system-wide risk measure is it? ONE person on the hard shoulder?

Do you have any idea about the statistical behaviour of big systems?

Toss one coin and the outcome is 50/50.

Toss a million coins and it's a racing certainty that you'll get about 500,000 heads.



Oh well, there's no point in trying to get road deaths down then because 'statistics don't paint a true story'.



So let's tell them that the roads are safe, drivers are safe and crashes are rare. That's the truth.

And of course let's have policies that actually save lives, not policies that scare the hell out of non drivers without reducing road deaths.

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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

A lot of people, especially those with "age related" problems avoid using stairs altogether. I would suggest you are a high mileage stair user.

I think that Paul does have something here, but ideally needs to get the correct base figures - somehow I doubt that average minutes on stairs is something that is recorded anywhere. I would say that Paul's 10 minutes per day is generous across the entire population - a significant proportion of the public probably don't use them much at all (East Anglia bungalow owners?), while 20 minutes per day for anybody is a lot.

Most people however are involved with the road network at some point each day if they leave their house - especially as we should include pedestrian road usage in the road accident data (including pavements, as many of the recorded road deaths are on the pavements). 60 minutes would appear to be very generous as it is probably close to the average time vehicle users spend on the road. Paul's proposed values are in fact a very conservative estimate, and the true values would slew the results even more in favour of roads being much safer than stairs - possibly to as much as stairs being 8 times more dangerous than road use.

It is also likely that a similar ratio would be achieved if you include serious injuries, because just like on the roads, the vast majority of slips on the stairs do not result in death.


Stop press - I did a google, and guess what? The Americans do produce these sorts of statistics! Including the per year and lifetime odds of dying from a wide variety of causes.

http://www.nsc.org/lrs/statinfo/odds.htm

From their data (obviously US figures and accident rates), the chances of dying from these particular causes are:

Motor-Vehicle Accidents (all sources combined) - Deaths: 44,757 One Year Odds: 6,498 Lifetime Odds: 84

Fall on and from stairs and steps - Deaths: 1,588, One Year Odds: 183,155, Lifetimes Odds: 2,360

So at first glance we are completely wrong - motor vehicle accidents are 28 times more likely to kill you. But that is the US, where land is in general cheap, and they are lazy, so less stairs and more lifts, and a lot less pedestrian time, but proportionally much more road time (they think nothing of driving an hour each way to a restaurant in the evening). But replace the death figures with the UK equivalents and assume that the US usage profiles are accurate:

As we are talking odds here (i.e. 1/6498 probability of dying on roads in a single year), the maths is twisted a bit:

Roads 1/((3,200 / 44757) * (1 / 6498 )) = 90,885
Stairs 1/((1000 / 1588) * (1 / 183155)) = 290,850

So at a slightly closer second glance we are still miles out (3.2 times) from having a valid argument - unless you want to follow DfT standards of statistics that is.

However, I am not convinced that the US base translates well across to the UK situation, so the only conclusion I have is that the above numbers mean nothing at all, except that UK stairs are much more dangerous than US stairs per head of population.

I have also found the published data from the Home Acident Statistics collected from A&E admissions which used to be a very basic report, but has since been collected into a datawarehouse, and can be queried online or via the reports. Most importantly they do not appear to include death data, just accident incidents (broken down by cause to the Nth degree - 226 accidents involving a lollypop stick!). If anybody feels like wading through it please feel free, I don't have the time:

The lastest published data is http://www.hassandlass.org.uk/query/reports/2002data.pdf, and the online query (which is very poorly designed) is at http://www.hassandlass.org.uk/query/intro2.htm

The very high level summary is:

Home Safety Facts and Figures
More accidents happen at home than anywhere else.
Every year there are approximately 4000 deaths as the result of a home accident. Around 120 of these are below 15 years and 1300 over 75.
During 2002 there were 2.7 million home accidents requiring hospital treatment, of which 477,500 involved children under five.
Children under the age of 5 and people over 65 (particularly those over 75) are most likely to have an accident at home.
Falls are the most common accidents, which can cause serious injury at any time of life. 55% of accidental injuries in the home involve falls.
More women than men over the age of 65 die as the result of an accident in the home.
Approximately 1500 people aged over 75 die annually as the result of a fall.
Every year around 120 children under 14 die as the result of an accident in the home.
Around 25,000 under 5s attend Accident and Emergency Departments each year after being accidentally poisoned.
26,000 under 5s are burnt or scalded in the home every year. A hot drink can still scald a small child up to 15 minutes after it is made.
More accidents happen in the lounge/living room than anywhere else in the home.
Every year over 4,200 children are involved in falls on the stairs and 4,000 children under the age of 15 are injured falling from windows.
Boys have more accidents than girls.
The cost to society of UK home accident injuries has been estimated at £25,000 million annually.

The road data is obviously in a totally different format, and I am sure that Paul has better data anyway.

If you don’t speed, why wouldn’t you want a camera every 200 yards??
5mph over the limit could cost a little girl running for her ball in the road’s life.
I think you’ll find most people who have lost a loved one to a speed related traffic incident want more cameras, not less.

Do you drive a car?

If so, can you honestly say you have *never* exceeded a speed limit?

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"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

because of the detrimental effect they have on all the other road users around me, whether they are speeding or not.

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CSCP Latin for beginners...
Ticketo ergo sum : I scam therefore I am!