Safe Speed Forums

As the objective of road safety is to save lives, the objective of a business is to turn a profit.

Speed controls are to road safety what cost controls are to business.

If we concentrate too much on cost controls we'll become unprofitable - it's happened thousands of times. One classic mistake to to decide you can't afford your sales team. Half of them get the axe. Then you find you have cut sales too and profits are plummeting.

Or maybe board level resources are concentrated too much on costs and major opportunities are missed.

Or maybe we do brilliantly on cost controls, and while we're busy congratulating ourselves a competitor has run off with our customers. Profits crash.

Business and road safety are only as strong as the weakest link. If we put resources into a link that wasn't weak we'll miss out on strengthening the real weak link...

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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

Thats a great analogy,

our business is currently trying to cut cost rather than build value. Its coarse and may do more harm than good.

Rigid speed enforcement is a similar (although I can't quite say why) situation.

And two of the first things that get cut when a business goes into "cost-cutting" are staff development/training and R & D. Ring any bells for road-safety?

Bump.

I wanted to dig a little deeper into this idea and introduce it to newer users. It's actually (I think) the only really good analogy we've got. The beauty is that most folk can grasp it quickly and accurately.

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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

You could also say that the bussiness has got so involved with a new product that it has ignored its bedrock profitable products.

example Leyland was so involved in maxi/princess and rover and it forgot to advertise the humble mini.

road safety has been so engaged with car speed that they forgot other road users , road design and training

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Speed limit sign radio interview. TV Snap Unhappy
“It has never been the rule in this country – I hope it never will be - that suspected criminal offences must automatically be the subject of prosecution” He added that there should be a prosecution: “wherever it appears that the offence or the circumstances of its commission is or are of such a character that a prosecution in respect thereof is required in the public interest”
This approach has been endorsed by Attorney General ever since 1951. CPS Code

In terms of losing sight of your "core business" - The Coca Cola Company takes a bit of beating for their truly bizarre decision a few years ago to abandon "classic" Coke and bring in a new flavoured cola to replace it. Sales plummetted and it cost them a fortune and a lot of egg on corporate faces to backtrack on their decision. The DfT seems similarly to have "lost the plot" by discontinuing proper road policing in favour of "new flavoured cameras".!

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"Politicians are the same the world over... We build bridges where there aren't any rivers." - Nikita Kruschev

Yeah.

But be assured in the construction industry these days - where site managers and contracts managers are financially naive - the cost is the cost is the cost. Therefore value must be maximised.

So if speed controls are analogous to cost controls, where cost control is almost impossible, then road safety values must increase. This surely is represented not by speed containment but by better training at source.

The driver must add value to the road safety process through better training and continual improvement.

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Simon

That's rather arbitary, you could just as easily say speed controls are like [just about any other constraint in business]

You think? If you can improve the anaology, then that would be great.

I've found that it's actually very hard to come up with anything else that's remotely similar to or analogous with speed control measures. I'd go as far as to suggest that speed control measures are more or less the only member of the class.

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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

Fair point - I was thinking about it before, and came up with this:

Lowering speeds MUST imply lowering casualties tending towards zero (if everyone is moving at 0.1mph fatalities would be probably around 0)

Raising speeds MAY imply higher casualties without proper risk management.

Low costs MAY NOT neccessarily increase profit if demand is poor

High costs MAY NOT neccessarily reduce profit if demand is high


Clearly the first reason is what "Speed Kills" is entirely based on