Three stories mentioning Safe Speed from June 2004:
http://www.topgear.com/content/news/stories/861/
Speed camera 'whitewash'
[15 June 2004]
The latest government review into the effectiveness of speed cameras has concluded that they're a success, with them typically saving a hundred lives each year. But road safety groups are queuing up to pick holes in the figures, claiming there's no evidence that a single life has been saved by the devices.
Notoriously anti-camera group the Association of British Drivers was quick off the mark with the publication of the survey results. The group's Mark McArthur-Christie said: "deaths on our roads have remained static for several years, with only marginal changes from one year to the next. There were more deaths on England's roads in 2002 than there were in 2001 - yet we're being told that cameras are effective. Even if there are any improvements, it's more likely that they're the result of better road or car engineering - as well as better health provision".
McArthur-Christie reckons the answer is to take a look at education and engineering, instead of sticking with the current emphasis on enforcement. "We're now at the stage where education is about teaching people to drive slowly, rather than to drive well. The only road engineering we're seeing is the imposition of obstacles to force people to slow down - and these hazards often cause more accidents than they prevent. Meanwhile enforcement continues apace, and drivers are now looking at their speedos and trying to ensure they don't get zapped for straying a few miles per hour over some unnecessarily low limit, that's been imposed for political rather than safety reasons."
Tony Vickers, also of the ABD, is equally cynical of the claims. He said: "Speed cameras should be a last resort, not a first. When a gatso is erected, it's often in conjunction with other engineering measures, such as interactive signs, junction improvements or better signing. So if casualties do fall (and they often don't), it's frequently because of those other measures. What the ABD doesn't understand is how the camera partnerships can be so sure of their effectiveness - every time we've contacted them to ask for casualty data, they claim they're unable to provide even basic information".
Paul Smith of Safe Speed is unconvinced as well: "If each speed camera saved just one life each year, there would be no deaths on our roads at all. The figures just don't add up - how can we see static death rates from one year to the next, a tally of 5,000 speed cameras, but claims that cameras reduce deaths by forty per cent?"
Smith continued: "Lives are being lost because of this country's obsession with speed cameras. Instead of looking into the real causes of accidents - and addressing them - we're taking the easy option. We're not measuring what's important; we're making important what's easily measured. The camera partnerships have to realise that you can't measure safe driving in miles per hour".
Richard Dredge
[I don't actually recognise those words attributed to me on this occasion - maybe they are "recalled from" something I said on one of a number of radio and TV broadcasts made on that day. But never mind, the sentiments are just fine. - Paul Smith]
=========================================
http://www.topgear.com/content/news/stories/875/
More cameras, more deaths
[25 June 2004]
Anti-camera campaigners have reacted furiously to news that despite recent government statistics purporting to show that speed cameras help prevent accidents, road deaths rose by 2.25% last year. The increase comes at the end of a ten-year period in which the rate by which casualties dropped fell dramatically - between 1984 and 1993, the annual death toll was cut by 32%, but from 1994 to 2003 the figure slumped to 3.8%.
Safe Speed laid the blame for the increase firmly at the door of the government, saying that the rise 'is caused by bad road safety policy.' The movement claimed not to have been surprised by the figures, which it says it has been predicting for years.
'Speed camera effects are wide ranging and not limited to immediate and local effects on drivers' speed,' said campaign founder Paul Smith. 'For example, speed cameras also affect drivers' safety priorities - and not for the better.
'It is very important that drivers slow down in areas of danger. I believe that all the indications point to speed cameras eroding this vital driver behaviour, and this is one of the most important factors that has lead to the rise in road death. By contrast, keeping to the speed limit is not a terribly important road safety behaviour. Our motorways are the safest roads in the world, yet on some quieter sections more than 90% of cars are exceeding the speed limit.'
Safe Speed quotes figures showing that 'normal road users exceeding the speed limit is a real contributory factor in less than 2% of accidents,' and Smith stresses that simply policing speeding to death while ignoring everything else send out the wrong message to drivers about the other, more real risks on which they should be concentrating. Fundamentally, says the campaign, policy-makers need to answer one searching question: 'Why are road deaths rising while speed cameras are spreading like a virus.'
Alan Kidd
=======================================
http://www.topgear.com/content/news/stories/878/
Driver groups decry camera call
[29 June 2004]
Barely a week after government figures were published showing a rise in the annual number of deaths on Britain's roads, Richard Brunstrom, the Chief Constable of North Wales and the national police spokesman on transport, has provoked fury by encouraging the government to extend its ever-increasing reliance on speed cameras yet further. Since the introduction of cameras, traditional policing of the roads has withered, with speeding convictions spiralling upwards. Meanwhile dangerous, drugged, drunken and even reckless drivers are becoming ever-more likely to get away with it - yet the government's own figures also show that only 13% of accidents are caused by excess speed.
Drivers' groups were therefore outraged by Brunstrom's comments, not least when he said 'the evidence is overwhelming that something like more than three-quarters of the population of the country support the use of speed cameras in the way the government is doing it.' Beyond this, however, the man who has been dubbed the 'Traffic Taliban' has called for the introduction of hidden cameras to help snare more drivers than ever.
'The evidence is that they (visible cameras) work less well than covert cameras, said Brunstrom. 'We ought to be looking at going to the Australian and New Zealand model of more comprehensive use of cameras - and not all visible - in due course.'
But British driver Paul Cody, who has just returned to the UK after a spell in Australia, told TG Online that the use of cameras there had reached ridiculous proportions: 'You can be driving for hours, miles from anywhere, without ever seeing another car - and then suddenly in the middle of nowhere there's a speed camera, camouflaged or hidden behind a tree. It's got nothing to do with safety, it's enforcement for the sake of it.'
'Enforcement for the sake of it' is something many drivers' groups say they believe Brunstrom is obsessed with. The Association of British Drivers has a web page devoted solely to charting his behaviour (you'd best laugh, because otherwise you'll cry), and he even went so far as to memo all chief constables, police authority clerks and camera safety partnerships asking them to refuse to correspond with the Safe Speed campaign. Despite having a 'restricted' security classification, his memo was leaked to the campaign's Paul Smith... who promptly published it online.
http://www.safespeed.org.uk/brunstrom4.html
Meanwhile, the Sun put Brunstrom in an embarrassing spot after a reporter using a speed camera clocked his daughter breaking the limit on the A55. And a retired bank manager has complained to the Home Secretary after Brunstrom called a press conference to rebut his claim that he had been overtaking a tractor when a speed camera caught him doing 39mph in a 30mph zone, thus ending an unblemished 50-year driving record.
Campaigners find it hard to avoid decrying Brunstrom as a crank, but it's best to remember that his words are still those of ACPO's chairman of road policing. He may have inherited James 'God's Cop' Anderton's mantle as Britain's most ridiculed policeman, but the man from North Wales wields a frightening amount of power - and drivers who ever go anywhere above the limit are right in the cross-hairs of his speed gun.
=======================================
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
Members
