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That's what I mean by 'the state of the nation and what's on telly'. I agree with you - it's cultural. There is only one answer to this - technically block the non compliant road users. Coppers need the system tools to find the non compliant road users and quickly destroy thier vehicles.

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Ian's figures are adjusted for traffic volume so the effect of the recession should be neutralised. Are you both using the same underlying statistics (albeit yours are for a shorter period). If they are the same, I can't see a particularly valid reason for the foreshortened time series.

For some reason recessions have a big beneficial effect on the fatality rate as well as fatalities. If you look at the fatality rate gains in Ian's chart you'll see a big benefit (23%) over the 3 years 1990 to 1994 which is followed by a 17% gain over the 9 years 1994 to 2003. I really don't believe these two trends belong together. The end of the recession and the begininning of speed camera policy makes 1993/1994 a pivotal point in these trends.

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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

Speed cameras are a huge cultural influence.

"Technically block the non compliant road users" sounds absolutely fabulous. Unfortunately I don't believe any such thing to be even remotely achievable.

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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

Yep, take us to that place, although I think the authoritarian legislation required to impose such a regime would have even the least liberal among us quaking in their boots!



I wasn't really trying to make a big point with the graph Paul, it was simply using the figures from this thread and factoring in the increased mileages between 1991 and today. (Although i've just realised I forgot to remove the Ks from the KSI figures when compiling the chart - hardly makes a jot of difference to the overall effect though.)

The chart when viewed from 1994 to 2003 is much more similar to yours



I place the blame for the rise in the 'non-compliant' groups on several shoulders.

• The government, for redeploying many traffic police to other duties, and thinking that safety cameras would replace them.
• The vehicle manufacturers for taking their eye of the ball, and relying too heavily on passing EuroNcap standards, rather than being solely commercially driven towards safety, and ourselves the general public for not demanding that same safety emphasis.
• The criminal fraternity in particular street robbers for demanding more police resources to deal with them around 1993/94, when road policing at the time could do no wrong and they were therefore seen as ripe for plunder.
• The Police for relying too much on technology and intelligence led policing to create efficiency therefore lower numbers when the value of high visibility policing cannot be underestimated.

I therefore agree with most of Paul’s points regarding the cause of the decline in road safety improvements. My emphasis would be more that speed cameras have been seen by government as a substitute for trafpol, which is seriously wrong, rather than combining that with Paul's argument that speed cameras themselves are having a negative effect.

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Fixed ideas are like cramp, for instance in the foot, yet the best remedy is to step on them.

Ian

Speed cameras, CCTV, traffic light cameras etc. have put us on the right track. Many users who refuse or are unable to comply are being blocked technically. We need to extend this type of trivial ‘administrative detection’ (e.g. computerised MOTs, insurance, vehicle/driver tracking) as much as we can to free up police time to do non-trivial tasks that require human intervention. Holding radar guns at the side of the road does not count!

This disparity between the K trend and the SI trend is explained if you consider that serious injuries are sustained on a scale from 'too serious to be slight' through to 'almost dead'. It seems that the type of accident that causes SIs at the lighter end of the scale have decreased (in severity and/or number) while type of accident that causes SIs at the heavy end of the scale (or Ks) have stayed the same.

I would suggest that the type of accident that causes SIs at the lighter end of the scale are low speed or involve few occupants and vehicles or pedestrians in good lighting conditions, e.g. commuters on slow, congested roads. I would also suggest that the type of accident that causes SIs at the heavy end of the scale are high speed or involve many occupants and vehicles or pedestrians in poor lighting conditions, e.g. youths on nights out, fast lane m-way smashes, etc.

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You're dreaming. It's already obvious that automated policing bears heavily on responsible folk while "real criminals" circumvent it.



Personally I don't believe it for a second, although my evidence is limited.

But, if you're right, then the high severity crashes that speed cameras are supposed to be discouraging are carrying on just the same. [1]

So if you're right, then that's yet more proof of speed camera programme failure.

[1] Of course, that really means that the high speed crashes are getting worse, because we know that vehicle safety is improving faster than the growth in traffic.

[edited for typos]

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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

I would go along with most of that, exept I'm perhaps a bit more optimistic regarding EuroNCAP. For sure it's by no means a perfect system, but whilst it no doubt leads to some strange anomalys I really support the idea of establishing some form of industry wide benchmark, if only for the way it must surely force the lower performers to try and pull up to the standards of the others. EuroNCAP also allows the consumer to make a better informed choice about which car is the safest. Or at least it should - if it doesn't then perhaps the scoring system needs fine tuning, but even if that is the case then I still support the underlying principle of establishing an industry wide system of safety measurement. And for all its flaws I'd be amazed if it hasn't made a positive contribution to road safety since its inception.


But we have clearly identified several negative safety effects that the deployment of cameras cause. Now it may be that you are right and we are wrong - that these negative side-effects are outweighed by the benefits - but the fact is that at this point nobody knows. The DfT / SCPs refuse to even accept the possibility that side-effects exist so they have never been measured. So at the moment we have no way of knowing for certain whether the net effect of cameras is positive or negative, though I have to say that the data we have so far seems to point to the latter. Either way, to continue to roll them out in increasing numbers without properly analysing their effects seems to me to be bordering on criminally negligent, particularly when we know that the data required to form an objective analysis must exist and is being deliberately suppressed by the SCPs.

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No, No, No! This still doesn't fit the data!

If cameras cause a reduction in impact speed at the "lighter" end of the spectrum, then any effect on SIs would be seen magnified in the "Slight" injury stats, as they outnumber SIs by approximately 10 to 1.

Or in other words, for every "light" SI that is reduced to a "Slight" there should be about 10 "Slights" that are reduced to "Damage Only" and therefore drop off the scale of injury accidents completely. This isn't happening.

And even if it were possible, it would be of very dubious benefit. Surely you would agree that enforcement ought to be targetted at the more serious accidents, not the less serious ones...

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

By freeing up coppers from standing in the rain, they can go after the baddies.



While many other 'serious' injuries are being prevented. Which equals, in the balance, an improvement. And this is only the start of the drive to implement administrative warnings and detection. As more systems are implemented and tied together, we can expect to see leveraged improvements in this form of deterrent. Let us not emulate King Canute, holding back the tide!



That sounds like received wisdom to me. I know that vehicle safety improves at a glacial pace while much more traffic means many more crashes. Of course, that is not the message big-business manufactures like to spread. They perversely prefer consumers to imagine that this year’s bull-bar equiped model is safer than last year’s, so that they can sell yet more cars to kill us, congest our roads and pollute our air. I don't want to be a piece of baggage on the conveyor belt of Pax Americana consumerism, so I take these claims with a pinch of salt. Why are you so ready to accept thier nonsense?

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....and Euro NCAP testing which has led to higher standards of crash protection in cars, not to mention huge strides in tyre designs, more cars having disc brakes all round etc. etc.

I don't see how SCPs can legitimately claim any credit for any alleged improvements without factoring out everything else.

False premise. We don't need "coppers standing in the rain". Neither do we need them operating or maintaining automated detection equipment, nor prosecuting technical-only offences.

We need coppers using their skills, training and instincts, identifying and dealing with real trouble.



I'm not looking at manufacturer claims. These are the factors I am looking at:

• Increasing manufacturer investment in vehicle safety. They don't spend this cash for nothing.
• Real science such as this: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/esri/vs ... 000351.pdf .
• Explaining the gap between Smeed predictions and our real achievement: http://www.safespeed.org.uk/smeed.html .
• Understanding the factors that have led to progressively improving road safety: http://www.safespeed.org.uk/factors.html

I'm totally convinced that vehicle safety improvements make equal crashes across the national fleet 4% more surviveable each year.

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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

The figures of people being fined by speed cameras increase year on year. Clearly this shows cameras have not effected the speed vehicles are being driven at.

If a speed camera is performing it's intended role, it would have no issued tickets from the site, would it not

As no camera sites have gained anything like its intended influance they have clearly failed.

Informing a driver, they are driving at an unsafe speed, 2 weeks after the event, hardley makes the road a safer place at that particular time.

Anyone explain that flaw

However a police officer would stop and deal with the offending driver there and then, preventing an accident from taking place, would he not

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Steve

Yes it would! The function of the system is to maintain the speeds within the desired limit by punishing those who stray outside. It cannot do this in absolute terms (yet), so instead the system monitors drivers' speeds, then causes a punitive action to occur to obtain the desired result through feedback. Once you have had one of these 'actions', you try to avoid them in future, unless you are a fool. If you are a fool, then it is best to wise up.



I had a bloke come by this morning, grumbling about getting caught. He just saw the flash, so sometimes you know even sooner than you would if a copper spotted you! Also, the publicity works well. For example, a bloke, Richard Windsor, was caught speeding down my necks of the woods a little while ago. Turned out he was duke of Gloucester, and high up in the "institute of Advanced Motorists". Looks like he'll get the chop now, because this self-appointed organisation (who are not chartered as far as I know) don't want people like that as members. Good for them! The good thing is that cameras can't tell toffs (who could talk their way out of it if a copper caught them) from yeomen. The road safety publicity created by the "Duke of Hazard" has been invaluable, and I am sure he would have got away with it if it had not been for the camera.

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As more and more drivers are caught speeding, cameras are therefore failing in their task, and have no impact on reducing speed.



The head of the advanced drivers banned under the totting up system, clearly shows it does not work

Mind you as advanced drivers are trained to spend all of their time looking for hazards, not at their speedo

Cameras do not restrict drivers from speeding, they have only one effective purpose, revenue

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Steve

I think that should read "...unless you are a fool, or are driving a vehicle with cloned/unreadable plates or one which isn't registered to you, or have otherwise taken precautions to ensure complete immunity from camera-based prosecution systems".

I've seen too many cameras, all of which were highly visible and in positions which would allow even the least alert of driver plenty of time to slow down, being set off in and around London for me to believe that every one of the vehicles caught on these cameras was being driven by a complete numpty. Either that, or there's a hell of a lot of faulty cameras out there.




Neither can they tell men from women, black from white, young from old... but then I'd expect a half-decent traffic cop to be immune to such discrimination as well.

Black drivers are many times more likely to be pulled over than white ones. Cameras, which cannot discriminate, will help us to reassure the public that traffic cops are decent or, if not, show us where discrimination is happening, allowing us to sack bad coppers and promote good ones – nobody could complain about that.

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In which case, if there is no genuine reason for them being pulled over more often, then the cop doing the pull isn't a half-decent one... That isn't an argument in favour of cameras, it's an argument in favour of getting rid of the bad cops and replacing them with decent ones.




How will cameras reassure the public that the few remaining flesh and blood officers are any more decent than they were prior to the introduction of cameras? Also, given that cameras can only detect a very narrow range of offences, would it be appropriate to use the ethnic/racial/gender/age/etc breakdown of camera-based prosecutions as a benchmark for the entire range of offences capable of being detected by an officer? Do we know that age, race, gender etc. has the same effect on other aspects of driving as it does on adherence to speed limits/red lights (or, at least, ability to avoid detection)?

What a can of worms that would open!

Can you imagine how quickly SCPs would be shut down if they published figures suggesting that visible ethnic minorites or women were proportionally receiving more NIPs. Supposedly unbiasedly gathered statistics to back up certain peoples' prejudices!!



PS. ...although Brunstrom would be happy if they revealed more old people were getting caught.

I suspect, digging deeper into that particular can of worms, they might not produce that result, because:

1. relatively few cameras are situated in inner urban areas where members of ethnic minorities are more likely to be driving, and
2. it might be the case (as one of a range of possible scenarios) that a slightly higher proportion of ethnic minority drivers were in unlicensed vehicles

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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