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Mpaton2004's sig is currently:



And I'd like to hear the evidence for that assertion.

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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

There's plenty, just visit one of the literally hundreds of published pieces of research!

Are you completely stupid?

Name one piece of research that considers the effect of a speed camera or cameras on road safety as a system.

Name one piece of research that considers the side effects due to speed cameras and supporting policy.

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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

If they were "safety cameras" they may. Butits "speed" cameras that don't.....

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Speed camera policy Kills

My take is subtlely different to MPaton's.

I say "Speed cameras save very few lives in specific circumstances, but cost a lot more lives and injuries through side effects".

Edit: I see Paul is on the same lines - but didn't see so before I posted.

The chap being freed from his car on the Staveley bypass yesterday morning was only a mile from a "safety" camera, as was the young man killed on Bannerigg last February.

However neither of the two drivers who crashed at Ings having been taken ill at the wheel have crashed there since the safety cameras were installed, so I guess they must work - drivers either crash before they reach the cameras, or before they are put up!

The major result of course has been the miraculous amount of money donated to the treasury, and squirreled away by the various partnerships!

If a rogue pilot was to break the rules regarding air safety, wold the authorities take a picture of his contraventions and send a penalty in the post, allowing the contraventions to continue? Why not - if it works on the roads, why not in the air?

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Time to take responsibility for our actions.. and don't be afraid of speaking out!

Well, effectively there's nothing to stop a rogue pilot whatsoever except military intervention. It's not like there's Police planes who pull you over at the nearest cloud are there?

None of it "peer reviewed"


But Martin - we don't have speed cams as per the "norm" elsewhere - nor does N. Yorks. This does not mean we monitor "naughty drivers" with a stopwatch

We have gadgets and one van. But we do not use civilians. All prosecutions are fully in the control of police officers - who use - cough - discretion and a line in acid lecturing on safety and COAST -led driving. It might have escaped your notice but Nemesis has made a post about a potential invite to one such course. Others replied back that this course - like the DIS - are indeed COAST led.

Now the fact that the the official correcting course actually teach and assess per COAST is no accident. It happens to work very positively. I would suggest that this should be offered to all who do offend. By all means keep it as points free to the blip brigade - but extend it to a learning experience - even if the overspeed warranted a fixed penalty as clearly the the lady in the "high heels" story which Wildy posted up apparently learned nothing from previous automated fixed penalties

As for "saving lives" - yeah Martin - I am perhaps sounding self praising and maybe complacent - but Durham and North Yorks have always remained consistent in managing to keep serious incidents to a consistently "lower than UK average" in each respective patch. Neither force uses fixed Gatsos nor does either have a Partnership set up. All enforcement has remained completely under police controls and professional judgement.

We will not pretend we have it down to zero as this is impossible as accidents and incidents will continue because no human can profess to be perfect and each one will make an error - sometimes tragically fatal at some time in their lives;

These tragically fatal errors of judgement haunt the normal person but no speed camera or policeman can stop this. Heck mate! "scanny" posted up one muppet behaving as such in front of a MARKED car It did not lead to any accident or collision - but potentially it could have bent metal and perhaps broken a human bone.

Now as for N Yorks and Durhams' KSI stats: each area has a "nightmare" patch which attracts motor cyclists who will buy and ride powerful bikes beyond their capability for starts. Our most serious involved hitting a tree at what we estimate to have been 180 mph. He was taken straight to the mortuary by the way. He was deceased on impact. Not a pretty sight either.

Both patches - from Newcastle down to South Yorks really suffer from career criminals who clone cars and drive in a "devil may care fashion". Our stats (N Yorks?Durham) seem to indicate a higher stop and prosecute rate than Cleveland/ Northumbria /Cumbria and S and W Yorks No disrespect to colleagues there either. Perhaps they have different calls on resources - which is another issue. We all police very different areas and demography of crime hot spots does determine deployment of resources as well.

Now I cannot go into specific details as we do keep things "softly softly .. plenty of rope - play cards closer to chest" on a lot of our work as this would be tipping off the criminals that we are on to them if you like Where we really require intelligence from our public - we make these PR high profile appeals.

But Martin - our stats seem to indicate we are correct to keep enforcement fully in police hands. Durham covers an area not too dfferent from Lancs, Humberside and South Wales: we monitor our performance against these forces more as these are a closer match to compare "like with like" in terms of area type, size of Force, demographic features and so on.

N Yorks covers a much wider area and far more diverse than ours. Their crimes will be even more varied than ours.

In the pecking order - both forces fare very well and have a very satisfactory overall performance in all areas of their work.

But if this were measures solely of road safety issues - then each would be challenging for the top spot in the pick of the police force parade - based on the consistent year on year below average KSI and higher vloume prosecutions for careless/inconsiderate/ drunk/drug/dangerous/TWOC/unlicenced/uninsured offences recorded

Not blowing trumpet. We could do better and catch more of these - but we need the staff and we currently have been through a budget crisis like all the other 40-odd police forces

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Take with a chuckle or a grain of salt
Drive without COAST and it's all your own fault!

A SMILE is a curve that sets everything straight (P Diller).

A Smiley Per post
FINES USfor our COAST!

Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon - but driving with a smile and a COAST calm mind.

Lot of cases in the press recently about pilots trying to take off whilst impaired by drink or drugs. Fortunately someone must have reported them first for this to happen.

Or do they do random checks?



I suppose if a pilot makes an error - plane stalls and it goes down. Black box would not give a clue as to fitness of pilot to be in charge of that plane really.

Touchy subject Martin. One of the Swiss died when a plane crashed into the sea. Body not recovered.

This Swiss family including self practise a Catholic worship. But to the Swiss - lighting a candle at a grave side means much to them. They have no body in that Swiss grave and they find that a bit awkard. (Swiss custom is very different to UK custom. When a villager dies - the whole village follows either a horse or heifer drawn hearse and attend the funeral service in their local church. I

Black box was retrieved - and inquest held. Plane went down because of a fault in one engine and bad weather front apparently. Swiss hooligans quite OK with that explanation - but drunken pilots would set Wildy off on one

We do not want rogue pilots. We want to set off and arrive safely after all. You pilots are responsible for hundreds of lives when in flight after all. You expect to come home from a holiday

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Take with a chuckle or a grain of salt
Drive without COAST and it's all your own fault!

A SMILE is a curve that sets everything straight (P Diller).

A Smiley Per post
FINES USfor our COAST!

Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon - but driving with a smile and a COAST calm mind.

By the way Martin (or am I really addressing "jec" on this one -as a Martin post questions scams and a "jec" post is the opposite - let us just make one thing clear:

No one is mocking you or attacking you. We are listening to you.

I think people are rightly questioning the "sig" as we know from Steve that there are concerns over "manipulation" ; "choosing different routes" and thus shifting the problem caused by umpteen people cramming onto one road and creating new hazards and danger as a resutl and even "regression to the mean" on these roads which show huge KSI reductions at the site .. but no overall difference to overall stats as road users avoid the scammed areas

In short - Steve C is aping Durham's "resting black rats" if you like OR Basking sharks who appear suddenly and from nowhere

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Take with a chuckle or a grain of salt
Drive without COAST and it's all your own fault!

A SMILE is a curve that sets everything straight (P Diller).

A Smiley Per post
FINES USfor our COAST!

Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon - but driving with a smile and a COAST calm mind.

As I have said in past posts cameras only catch the driver who goes over the limit for a few yards or so not for mile after mile so how does fining £60.00 and 3 points on the licence stop accidents WHEN NO ACCIDENT OCCURED as any driver can pass a camera at the correct speed AND THEN GO LIKE A MADMAN until the next camera and slow sown again and as I have said cameras don,t catch and prosecute the dangerous / drunk / uninsured / illegal vehicle / driver but for once the BiB has said it right THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH POLICE on the road on traffic duty to catch the real criminals like the ones above.

I seem to remember that when all the b******* about cameras came in we were told that it would release more BiB,s to patrol on the "front line" so to speak where the hell are they?

Answer :spending the majority of their shift filling in forms to satisfy prats like Charles Brunstrom (the biggest hypocrite ever to wear a police uniform) and satisfying this government who are hell bent on figures and statistics as we all know figures can be manipulated to show anything as has been proved by the camera partnerships !

When the figures disproved the argument that cameras save lives (as printed in the Daily Mail) the response was from the camera zealots "these figures only represent a small period of time in an overall year" what absolute c*** !

Obviously money comes first not safety this is a secondary issue if at all with these zealots as what they know about road safety could be written on a postage stamp and still have room to spare!

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"There But For The Grace of God Go I"

"He Who Ain,t Made Mistakes Ain,t Made Anything"

Spannernut

Still waiting. Or is this the "ignore anything that I can't answer" attitude which exists in every "safety" camera proponent to a man?

mpaton2004, perhaps you would like to produce a rebuttal to the 40 side effects of cameras that Paul has found?

We won't get a substantive reply, because, on reflection, I realise that the sig is simply trolling.

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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

Not got time to do all of them, but bar a few, most of them are unproven nonsense.

I particularly like the one that blames the divergence on the introduction of safety cameras in 1994. I don't have figures, but I suspect 99.9% of the country didn't even know what a safety camera was until about 1998, so they can hardly be blamed for the slowdown (of which there have been several over the years!)

Additionally, I don't get the "We are 1,200 lives a year behind expectations" - another piece of claptrap. You can extrapolate that to eradicate all road deaths in less than three years!

With the latest DfT claim amounting to 25 lives saved per year by 6,500 camera (each camera saves a life once in 260 years), many of the 40 side effects may well wipe out the entire benefit individually.

It is INCONCEIVABLE that total loss of life caused by the 40 side effects is less than 25 lives per year. Hence the 'speed camera save lives' claim is shown to be entirely unreasonable.



That's right. In the early years the loss of trend was fairly insignificant.



Well, you might if you were innumerate. But then I'm not innumerate, thanks, and no such silly mistake has been made.

I project a proper trend in road deaths, with a proper policy, leading to around 400 pa in 2050 (assuming that linear traffic growth continues).

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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

See here:



Remember, the fatality figure for 2006 was higher than 2005. Paul's figure is certainly in the right ballpark.

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Views expressed are personal opinions and are not necessarily shared by the Safe Speed campaign

Martin - once upon a time 20 mph would kill. In fact - Mad Doc's Moggies and his pet Stag are still pretty lethat at those speeds.

Modern cars crumple. Bad news as such when it comes to repairs But good news if they hit someone at 30 mph. The modern car ist the real reason why some (but not at all all) surive a 30 mph hit.

As cars improve in safety features - so to do external hits. But on the other had the easy crumple does not necessarily help car occupants - another factor behind those stats if you like

Bottom line - COASTY save lives as does ADVANCED TRAINING which was your previous sig as I recall

So - what is it JEC and not Martin (Martin - word of advice my old son - assert yourself or wives think they are in the driving seat :boxed in: and likely to get some earache from Swiss lionesses

A camera or training which saves lives.

Our internal records seem to point ot a decent DIS succes rate and a fair result on other acide lectures based on COAST values

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Take with a chuckle or a grain of salt
Drive without COAST and it's all your own fault!

A SMILE is a curve that sets everything straight (P Diller).

A Smiley Per post
FINES USfor our COAST!

Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon - but driving with a smile and a COAST calm mind.

No, it's claptrap and you know it.

Stating "1,200 people per year behind expectation" is deliberately misleading to the reader, and it is based on the flawed assumption that the trend would have continued down had speed cameras not been introduced. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to show that this would have occured.

That 'is based on the flawed assumption that the trend would not have continued down had speed cameras not been introduced'


What do you think could have prevented the downward trend if not the cameras?

The trend in risk values ran from the dawn of motoring until about 1994. Spot figures from the turn of the century and the 1930s fit the exponential decay trend line, and we have excellent data since 1950.

No one, and I mean NO ONE standing in 1994 would have predicted a massive variation from the long term trend in risk values.

It's certainly not 'deliberately misleading'. I believe it with a passion, and in fact it's the 'smoking gun' that made me give up work in 2003 to run this campaign. I didn't do it for fun. I did it because I feared for British lives.

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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