Safe Speed Forums

Hi Paul,

Yes, another Politically Correct judgement by the ASA

Does this mean that someone else can still complain about the advert, but for different reasons?

When I first saw the ad. and it showed a relatively narrow street, with cars pretty much double parked on it, my first reaction was: Doing 30mph down that stretch of road would be potentially leathal. Yet there was no mention of 30mph being a limit and not a target. The message as always is, "Just don't exceed the limit, and everything will be just fine" .....

I've had 20 minutes on the telephone with the ASA and it's not dead yet. They will accept further arguments. The best chance of success would be to find exactly how the advert breaches the code of advertising practice (CAP). http://www.cap.org.uk

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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

paul

Thanks for the effort it may even have helped create some disruption in the Dft bearing in mind recent changes there.

I think that the civil servants now running the national show will be more cautious.

The fact that they now want to run communications on a part time basis involving the regions could create less comms and more accurate comms.

A good result even if we may not see it straight away. I am particularly pleased to see a formal admission that "speed" is a factor in "12%" of accidents.

As the reference is to "speed" and not speeding should we presume that this is now the figure for "excess or inappropriate speed"? Speeding is clearly, as we have always known, a single figure percentage factor.

I believe that this official statement will become most useful in the future.

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Former Military Police Officer and accident investigator

I do find it funny that the Transport Research Lab are regarded as a independant reasearch body. They are almost entirely funded by research requests from the department of transport.

It would be worth looking at their balance sheet to see how much of their income comes from the government.

T2000 are also in a similar situation with large donations from transport for london (how can a pressure group be funded by the group who runs the services they are allegedly lobbying to improve?)

Regarding the various statistics from the different organisations about the potential of someone being killed by a car at eithrer 30 mph or 40 mph, I wonder if the actual circumstances of any accidents were fully covered in their research.

For instance if a person is standing in the middle of the road and is hit by the middle front of a car going 40 mph, then that's going to be much more likely to be fatal, then if they were only just hit by a glancing blow from the side of the bumper.

Excuse me but.....

...what "investigation" ?

It's my understanding that the research is based on projected injuries as a result of crash test dummy modelling. There becomes a point where a chrash test (based on sensor data) can detect a low probability of survival.

To the best of my knowledge it has nothing to do with real world data we simply don't and never have had the fatalities.

I'm looking at re-igniting this complaint. The critical point is number 4. The DfT's response is extremely hollow. Can anyone with time to do so, please have a look at CAP and help me to try to find the best approach.

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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

Two parts of major interest:

Section 5.1 note (3) of the TV code says:

(3) Even if everything stated is literally true, an advertisement may still mislead if it conceals significant facts or creates a false impression of relevant aspects of the product or service.

Section 6.7 says:

Advertisements must not encourage or condone behaviour prejudicial to health and safety and advertisements must not use techniques that may directly harm viewers

Now, if the average impact speed in collisions is 11mph and 0.4% of pedestrians on average die, I think you could make a very strong argument that the ad is likely to increase the average impact speed closer to 30mph.

People might be misled into thinking that a death rate of 'only' 10% would be a big improvement on what we have now, and make sure that they hit people at 20-30mph to 'minimise' injuries.