Safe Speed Forums

Absolutely Weepej! As you so rightly say, it cuts both ways!

Let's face it though. The onus ought to be on the providers of this "cure" to prove its efficacy - NOT on the public to DISprove it! That's how it works in all other walks of life! Can you imagine what would happen if a pharmaceutical company produced a slimming pill and backed it up with all the scientific rigour that the camera partnerships use for their "cure"? Ask yourself why, when there are plenty of internationally recognised "trauma-scoring" systems already in use by hospitals all round the country (and, indeed, the world) for assessing "serious injury", the camera partnerships choose not to use hospital figures? In any other field, claims made without isolating all the other potentially confusing factors (like road improvements, car improvements etc) would be laughed at!

It is impossible to demonstrate any positive effect of cameras? What of proper use of local control areas such that all other variables are kept equal? Why, after all this time, hasn’t this test already been done?

Is it right to claim levels of effectiveness of policies when the most obvious and basic of confounding factors are clearly unaccounted for?

Is it right to have a system whereby policies can be forced upon us, at our cost, without justification or accountability, which also happens to fail scrutiny?

These don't work both ways!

Mole's point is also very valid.

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

The underlying and original cure though is speed limits.

Speed cameras are there in an attempt to increase compliance with speed limits.

Why is the cure speed limits? Perhaps the underlying cure is safer cars? Consider this, it is now extremely difficult to steal a car without the keys, consequently thefts of vehicles has dropped massively. Hence there are less car thieves driving stolen cars - a group identified as being at huge risk of causing an accident. All sensible accident reduction initiatives seem to be ignored, so that we can continuously be told "speed kills!"


I would dispute this, and the millions of people fined show that they aren't particularly good at increasing compliance.

Somebody I know was caught twice in the same number of weeks, six points altogether. It's increased their compliance.

Clearly not, if the compliance had been increased they wouldn't have been caught.

Er, it has though, I just said that.

If the camera had increased compliance, they would have complied with the speed limit, and thus not received 2 seperate endorsements for speeding. Your example merely strengthens the argument that cameras do not encourage people to slow down.

I picked up 6 points in the space of about 5 years after 28 years of ticket free motoring....it hasn't changed my driving habits, just made me more wary of where the speed cams are.

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My views do not represent Safespeed but those of a driver who has driven for 39 yrs, in all conditions, at all times of the day & night on every type of road and covered well over a million miles, so knows a bit about what makes for safety on the road,what is really dangerous and needs to be observed when driving and quite frankly, the speedo is way down on my list of things to observe to negotiate Britain's roads safely, but I don't expect some fool who sits behind a desk all day to appreciate that.

Let's assume that these statements indicate that there is no clear evidence either way. In this case then the sensible course of action is to remove the cameras and all the infrastructure and staff involved.

Why? Well, it all costs money (which is probably being spent unnecessarily) and it has also alienated large sections of the public from the police. Surely the reversal of this is, on its own, a good reason to ditch automatic enforcement.

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Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

You have missed an important point that I have explained many times before...here it is again:
The cameras were placed at locations that had a high incidence of KSI collisions and excess speed.
The success or otherwise of the cameras or any other road safety measure is measured in reduction in KSI casualties.
It is the effect of speed on the outcome of a collision, however caused on the seriousness of casualties that is the factor being mitigated.

There, it's in colour now. Can you now see the difference and realise that you can't use the collision causation percentage to justify the removal of automatic speed enforcement because...dare I say it..."speed Kills!"

You can't even get past this fact by making vehicles that don't distort in a collision because if you make them stop too fast and protect the occupants they would stop too quickly and injure themselves. Well you could but the arresting mechanisms would put us in vehicles even larger than the pointless Chelsea tractors that are so popular in transporting children to the 'danger areas' we call schools.

Greenshed. This seems to be the fundamental dichotomy.

You want speeds reduced so that when collisions occur the injuries are less severe.
Safe Speed, AIUI, want drivers to drive at such speed and in such a manor as to avoid accidents

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

Here we go with that marvellous analytical tool "assume," you can base a whole campaign on it...why not?

What money is it costing you? None as I recall, no increase in tax or public spending other than by those who have transgressed.

What evidence have you of alienation? A few surveys. There are many that show exactly the opposite and I don't seem to find anyone who has a massive objection to the system other than a passing annoyance with most people saying "if you get caught it's your own fault" etc.

After all, getting caught once can happen to anyone; getting caught twice is annoying but indicates you have been mighty careless, going the whole way to 12 points shows exactly what it is meant to, you need to be off the road and do some hard thinking.

Perhaps we should have a measure in place that will cut the death rate on the roads by 50% overnight...raise the minimum driving age to 22.

Given the numbers pinged by the cams - the cams are not effective at slowing folk down.

Worse - they only slow folk down at the cam site and - the rest of the time - normal flow of a few mph above but in "fine danger from cam and tolerance as "safe driving" from the police out there"

Driver error causes crashes - and human beings will make a series of errors which all combine and co-incide to create an accident. Better training .. cops out there on the roads to nail bad practice - that improves driving standards and ultimately safety. Even Brunstom has accepted this. Blimey .. Dick Brunstrom made a comment which does not comply with the policy per N Wales official website.

Of the speed cams in Cumbria? I've lived here since marrying Wildy.*
The cams are on the same roads which the police used to nail speeders in the past. They are on the same safe sites. Not where any fatal occurred. Ironically - we've noted more reports of acccidents since the cams appeared. All A&E stats - including Cumbria's and Lancahsire's are available on line. They support the peer reviewed research papers as published by Oxford University. research which rather contradicts Steve's spurious claims to the contrary. They are not at the sites which showed any KSI. They are on the same sites as used by police in the past .. the spots where any driver may drift over the speed limit because the road opens up to a cracking straight. Lived here now for 24 years now. The cams are not sited as Steve claims. They are at the points identified as points where some drivers may drift over the limit safely albeit not in letter of law.




Steve keeps claiming his vans do more than enforce speed. If that were the case - then I would expect him to crow about it in the Gazette etc. There has been no such PR because all a speed cam can do is measure .. errr.. da DA DARRRGH! [i]speed It does not stop a defective person in a defective car .. nor does a photo showing rear of a car and a head concealed by a head rest show someone on a mobile phone or applying make-up as once observed on one drive past one of the vans. I've never read of any claim the daft bint had been reported for it either

Oh.. education in the schools? That's the one with the kids and the speed gun at mid morning break time. We heard all about it from one of the fosters No Green Cross actually taught though Priority .. "obsession with speed limits and little else"

I will remind Steve to read Brunstrom's comments about too much emphasis on a speed camera not solving the dangers out there.

Back to the original point though. A cam van should not have trigged the VAS sign. He was thus "speeding". Your driver owes you £60 here.

*
[size-85]We will not pretend that our departure to Arizona is going to be a huge wrench for us - we LOVE our home and our pals here. But the opportunity was just too .. errr...and we will be coming home to see our elder kids and family regularly anyway.. [/size]

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Actually it's costing the NHS who are picking up the pieces by not enough attention to serious driver training and lip service on short term gimmick.




You need to get out more. Might I suggest the village pubs and restaurants?

Not to mention the farm shops and other small shops around here. All we've met see speed cams as a money making scam.

Does not matter where we are either.



35 mph in a 30 mph zone over a period at 3 am in the morning does not maketh a dangerous driver. We have issues over the "wide oiks" who slow perfectly for the scam as demonstrated once on BBC Traffic Cops.




We have already upped to 18 before they can sit the driving test. They can learn from 17th birthday just the same though... as in Germany.

But again - boils down to education and your mob are not exactly delievering anything but a dated dogma when the real issues lie in how we get across real road safety to our young "hot heads" and the idea that skilled driving means driving to COAST principles at a safe speed within the normal flows of traffic - which will normally comply on average but will fluctuate up to 10%+5 and down again on any one normal safety led journey. Speed tickets and penalties should only be issued as last resort or when that person's driving fails to match the overall conditions of the road .. and this can include driving inconsiderately too slowly for the condition as much as inconsiderately too fast for the conditions

_________________
If you want to get to heaven - you have to raise a little hell!

Smilies are contagious
They are just like the flu
We use our smilies on YOU today
Now Good Causes are smiling too!

KEEP SMILING
It makes folk wonder just what you REALLY got up to last night!

Smily to penny.. penny to pound
safespeed prospers-smiles all round! !
But the real message? SMILE.. GO ON ! DO IT! and the world will smile with you!
Enjoy life! You only have the one bite at it.

Less speed IN = Fewer serious injuries OUT.

The incidence of collision is exponentially (^2) proportional to speed. Seriousness of injuries is exponentially (^3) proportional to the speed at impact. Death on impact similarly but (^4) as I recall.

The public road network populated by the public (funnily enough) will never be populated by sufficient highly trained and skilled drivers to create an environment where those highly skilled can use that skill in a way that will protect those who drive but are not as able; say the older, less interested and to a large and significant extent the young and the novice. It remains a fact, even the best commentators in Safespeed cannot deny it, that more speed gives less time to react and mitigate the unexpected. When the unexpected occurs, it always does because we have uninterested and less skillful divers of all types, the increase in speed creates a bigger danger. This, I would summarise, is the basic premise of a system of speed limits; they mitigate the masses to a reasonable level of risk from expected behaviour. They don't work or are reduced in effectiveness if they are ignored.

Take the boxing ring with a number of children walking round it.
1. They walk slowly and at all times they are able to miss each other; well there may be a clumsy one that knocks shoulders but causes no harm.
2. Get them all to skip, a few more collisions occur because the space is being used up quicker; most knocks are again harmless but there is one clash of heads and one has to be attended to by the nurse.
3. Get them to run reasonably fast but not as fast as they feel able, oh dear! More collisions occur and this time the nurse is starting to run out of bandages and asprin.
4. We then get them all to run around in the same direction and collisions and subsequent injuries reduce to the same level as when they were skipping.
5. Now, after replacing some of the injured so we have the same amount of children in the ring we get them to run in the same direction but as fast as they feel able to. Injuries, serious injuries increase.
6. Finally we reduce the numbers to just 8 in the ring and get them to run as fast as they feel comfortable but this time in any direction; every time this is done we have serious injuries resulting and frequently.

I haven't done this experiment but you can easily see that if it was done that you would be able to confidently predict the outcome as I have here.

Yes, there is a dichotomy but which is the publically acceptable and practical solution?

My father, a pretty good driver still and in his younger days excellent in my opinion but is now less able to react and I now see some mistakes made when I am out with him. My daughter, pretty good for a 4 year novice, makes some elementary mistakes. Both of them could put themselves in positions that would come unexpectedly on the driver using the Safespeed method and be in excess of the speed limit, a driver who is willing to increase risk on the strength of their self belief in their skills and capabilities yet when those fail, for whatever reason, the extra speed brings in the laws relating to speed and injury outcome; more is more.
My father carries my mother in his vehicle; my daughter carries my grandchildren, the extra risk resulting from the adoption of the Safespeed side of the dichotomy is not acceptable.
I know that anyone can be killed or seriously injured at or below the speed limit; that is not an issue; what is an issue is that there is an increase in risk when the speed at which people are allowed to drive increases.
Unfortunately for Safespeed they are in a minuscule but vocal minority campaigning for something that is socially unacceptable and scientifically proven to be inefficacious.

On the occasions I have been involved in HS stats I can say that if I was relying on their ability to count to cure me I would be better off shooting myself at the onset of the slightest ailment.

They are and they generally work but you can't always mitigate for the stupid people who keep getting caught even when you let them know they are there with signs. The most stupid even get caught when they know they are there and pass them regularly; how mad is that?

When I read that sort of thing I'm put in mind of this post:


viewtopic.php?f=36&t=15414&start=0&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

Note the attempts to blame the hedge.

They've slowed down now. Job done.

AIUI the second offence was committed before the first NIP was received.