Safe Speed Forums

Brunstrom's latest pronouncements raise the issue of exactly what the mechanism is by which the advocates of speed cameras believe they will improve road safety.

Originally, I'm sure there was a naïve belief that putting a thousand grey boxes around the roads of Britain would encourage most drivers to adhere to speed limits most of the time. But, as we know, it just doesn't work like that.

So we are left with two potential mechanisms:

(i) a significant number of accidents are caused by licensed drivers exceeding the posted speed limit by a substantial margin at specific, identifiable locations. Therefore highly visible cameras will help to reduce these accidents. Sorry, but I don't think speed-related accidents conveniently fall into such blackspots. Where there are blackspots they are usually related to misjudgments at junctions, as any accident map will show you.

(ii) greatly increasing the likelihood of being caught speeding will result in a marked increase in limit adherence by drivers. Even if this would improve safety, again, this just hasn't happened, despite 3 million convictions a year. I suspect the level of convictions would have to rise to a politically and economically unacceptable level before it had the effect of making most drivers drive like IAM candidates on a test.

So it would be interesting to hear from camera supporters (where is Itschumpionman when you need him?) by what mechanism they believe that speed cameras and Talivans will improve road safety.

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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

I'll give you my two pence worth. Inappropriate speed for the conditions is a factor in some accidents, and accidents which are not directly caused by inappropriate speed for the conditions are worse at high speed than at lower speed, because of less response time and greater impact force. This implies that a reduction in damage and injury should come about if we can achieve less driving at inappropriate speed. I hope I haven’t said anything contentious yet!

Determining a case of inappropriate speed for the conditions is not an objective process, and cannot be measured in a meaningful way, because each set of circumstances is different. This is made worse because each driver has their own level of ability and no driver accurately assesses their own ability. However, we still have the requirement to provide information to drivers to allow them to set their speed appropriately. Political choices made long ago defined the present process for this, which consists of a test of minimum ability and knowledge and a system of top speed limits. The rationale for the test is obvious. The rationale for the system of top speed limits seems more opaque and may be steeped in politics and common sense, but many countries seem to have adopted a similar system, although some are much more stringent - for example, the Alberta school zone limit is 18 mph. It should be noted that those who consider themselves to be good drivers often aren't, so any guidelines would have to be pitched at the lowest acceptable level of ability, rather than the average, in keeping with the basic philosophy of hoping for the best but preparing for the worst.

Studies suggest that any limit applied to a group is largely ignored unless that constraint is enforced in some way. Cultural norms are a powerful factor in this. For example, unlike any English town, it is highly unusual in Calgary to find litter or dog excrement on the streets because it is socially unacceptable. In southern Germany, it is quite common for drivers to urinate in the road next to their parked car, which is very rare in England! Again, it is the norm in that country to act like that. Indeed, the determining force of the cultural norm is so powerful that English people can live in foreign lands for many years and not adopt the local customs. This shows that cultural norms are deeply rooted and take years to change.

So, back to the speed limit. Due to lack of enforcement, it has become the cultural norm to ignore it. That means more driving at inappropriate speed, which in turn means that we are missing out on the possibility of less damage and injury, especially among those who are the least able to drive well. It is these people who are tailgating, and zooming around at bad speeds, following the cultural norm of ignoring the speed limit. I am not so concerned about the highly skilled driver, although it is impossible to sort the wheat from the chaff, so the regulations have to apply to all. It would be best if we could persuade drivers to take heed of the limits, thus reducing pressure on poor drivers to drive quickly, but this has not worked well enough.

Little social stigma was associated with drinking and driving until after the breathalyzer was introduced. Following that, motorists largely avoided excessive drinking and driving because it became so easy to catch them, and later a new social norm was eventually established.

In the same way, little social stigma is now associated with speeding, but now that the cameras have been introduced, motorists will realize how trivial it is to catch them and they will start to avoid excessive speed and a new social norm will eventually be established. As I said before, cultural norms are deeply rooted and take years to change, so this may take a little while, but I think smart motorists already know the score, and are starting to do the right thing. Once the tipping point is reached, a new norm will be established and speeders will have to pay for their fun on a race track, which is right.

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Why does it have to apply to all? Why is it "impossible to sort the wheat from the chaff". I think you confuse the impossible with the perceptually impractical, but recognising various levels of driving skill can be done in many ways and does go on in other countries. For example - in France there were lower speed limits imposed on drivers within a few years of passing their test and such drivers had to carry stickers on their vehicles indicating thus. In Italy there are restrictions on the engine capacity of vehicle you are permitted to drive when you are a learner and just post-test driver.

(But then neither of these legislative measures aimed at improving road safety raise any revenue now, do they??!!)

'Good' drivers are rewarded every day with lower insurance premiums, so your statement is presumptious nonsense (as is much of your argument that follows).

A culture where "speeding" was socially stigmatised may or may not improve safety, but that's another issue entirely.

The question was, how is current speed camera policy actually intended to work to make the roads safer. Over the long term it might lead to "speeding" becoming socially unacceptable, but with the current trend of absurdly low limits and prosecutions for marginal infractions of them the opposite is the case. Twenty or twenty-five years ago, there was still a certain amount of stigma attached to having points on one's licence. That has totally disappeared now, when three or six points are commonplace amongst generally cautious and responsible drivers.

I always feel any comparison between speeding and drink-driving is inappropriate as the two are entirely different activities. But to make anything become socially unacceptable, you have to start from a position where most people don't do it. Even before the breathalyser, probably well under 10% of drivers ever consumed enough alcohol to take them over the legal limit before driving. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of drivers exceed speed limits, and always have.

To achieve the "tipping point" you want, it would be necessary to develop a "critical mass" of drivers who did adhere to limits all the time. I don't see how current speed camera policy is going to achieve that, even if it was a desirable objective.

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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

Basingwerk, if we are going to have have this level of policing on the roads, would it not be better to have it done by real live policemen? Surly if real people were actually stopping motorist, ( and stupid pedestrians and cyclests) it would be more effective.

If someone steels or clones my car they not going to be maddly worried about cameras are they, because the fines will come to me? But if there is a physical police pressence on the roads, acually observing the driving and using their discresion and experience (sorting wheat from chaff) to decide who is the problem and pulling them up, people would have a lot more faith in the system.

If we are to believe the media that 1 in 20 cars are uninsured, just how are cameras going to stop them? They're not taxed either, because you need to show proof of insurance to get your disc. They are probably not mot'd either. But a camera won't see them, so they get away with it and when they hit you you've got all kinds of problems.

If your diving an unregistered car, what do you care about cameras? You can do what you like and they will never catch up with you.

Also, just how safe do you want the roads? Transport2000 quoted the total number of KM's travelled by road and the number of fatalities and I worked out that if I drove 12k miles per year I wuld need to drive for over 7500 years before I was involved in a fatality. That, quite frankly is safe enough for me. Smoke and it WILL kill you drive and the chances are it won't.

Presumptuous? You suggest that the length of time since passing your test and your ability are co-related. Some excellent 25 years old drivers who see the antics of 60 year olds might suggest that this is presumptuous, might they not? But thanks anyway for your rebuttal. Please let me know which other parts of the argument you find presumptuous, and which parts you do not find presumptuous so that I can so that I can respond in more detail to remove the presumptions.

I agree entirely that good drivers should are rewarded every day with lower insurance premiums. The flip-side is that bad drivers are punished with high premiums. That is another argument for automatic detection technology - the feedback goes to the insurance company to allow them to assess risk more accurately. Indeed, by levying high premiums on those convicted of speeding, we can assume insurance companies believe it is a risk factor.



That is another argument for automatic detection technology. It’s good that those guilty of offences should subsidize my road tax in the same way that they subsidize my insurance. This is not just selfishness – it is a reward for good driving.

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An alternative, (more likely?) explanation would be that the number of speeding points on your license nowadays is a measure of mileage driven more than anything else. Speed cameras are predominantly found on busy stretches of road where traffic density is high and therefore the potential for things to go awry is high. Drivers using such routes must be more likely to accumulate points. When speed cameras are everywhere this is the inevitable outcome. Of course if you drive longer distances you are more likely to be involved in an accident, without necessarily being a 'bad' driver. Insurance risk is not a measure of how good a driver you are likely to be but rather of how likely you are to have an accident - the two things are not necessarily the same. Women and older drivers are a lower 'insurance risk' but this is at least partly due to lower average mileage.

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Adam.L, coppers, unlike scameras, need to eat. That means they are a drag that I have to pay for out of my taxed. I don’t like taxes. On the other had, no-one can say that they aren't needed. We need good coppers like In Gear for stuff that is hard to detect automatically. But we don't need coppers for stuff that is easy to detect automatically, like speeding. That is the way of the world, by the way. One of the motifs of modern time has been the gradual replacement of manual work by automatic machinery. You’ll note that people still go to work despite all the systems – they just do less mundane things, and that is what is happening here.

Your remarks on stupid pedestrians and cyclists are noted. I assume you don't mean the walking and cycling public in general, but the few cases of stupidity you see now and again as you go zooming by in your car. Of those, of course, some will be physically and mentally impaired, but you'd never know that from your car, would you? Others don’t know the risks they are running, but they aren’t encased in a metal box, so I cut them some slack, after all, I’ve got the heavy advantage.

Although it is true that cameras can't detect theft in real-time, other control technology can help in this respect. Normally, at this point, I would plough on about biometric keys, remote track and control technology, self-identifying vehicle chips, drive-by RF transfers and satellite systems, but Pete317 and authurdent sometimes object! Of course, such systems must be complemented by coppers to do the hard work - the systems take care of the easy stuff, like tracking stolen vehicles and stopping them remotely. The same applies to tax dodgers. Self-identifying vehicle chips and drive-by RF transfers with remote track and control technology to stop them would end this practice. And that is only the start, sorry authurdent. Same goes with MOTs. A centralized DB of MOTd cars, Self-identifying vehicle chips and drive-by RF transfers coupled with track and trace satellite technology. And, of course, biometric keys linked to identity systems to back this all up.

With respect to how safe driving is, you are leaving out serious injuries from your figures. If you factor that in, you might find that the risks are higher than you think.

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Another sweeping generalisation. I merely cited two examples to show that a couple of nations disagree with your statement that it is "impossible" to determine the difference between a highly skilled and not-so-skilled driver.



Well, Paul has a terrific analysis on the site about the real-world difference between actual impact speeds in accidents and the perception that the free travelling speeds are what matters, but you conveniently ignore it.

A reasonably skilled driver exceeding a speed limit could (and probably will) avoid an accident that an unskilled and unconfident driver concentrating disproportionately on his speed would be involved in. Preventing accidents is more important than making sure they happen (more often but) with lesser severity

Anyhoo......

Good point, authurdent. Assuming for one moment that the chance of receiving a ticket is randomly based on how far you drive (which is isn't - if you drive under the limit, you can drive forever and never get a ticket), there would be a high co-relation between number of speeding points versus mileage driven. Yes, I see what you mean. But even then, the deterrent mechanism is still coherent, because longer distance drivers could revert to the average risk by driving more carefully (and save money on fines/insurance), which would be a good thing for other drivers, like me!

A more likely case, (i.e. there is a co-relation between number of speeding points versus mileage driven, but other factors such as bad driving weaken it) makes the argument for cameras stronger. As for women drivers; their lack of testosterone may also be a factor - they seem to be more social drivers than men, and I expect they carry less risk per mile. It would be interesting to see the stats on the proportion of women drivers fined for speeding versus the proportion of male drivers fined, corrected for distance, of course. Even a glance at these pages shows that the majority of correspondents are male – perhaps this shows something?

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Scuse me for chipping in here, but has anyone noticed that this seems to be worse in some places than others? I used to have to go to Wimbledon a lot to get the tube in central London, and around the station I usually had to play dodge the pedestrian who can't use a crossing properly (but not so much of a problem in Raynes Park a few miles away). Few cases, basingwerk? Most times I went there someone would cross against the lights or simply without using a crossing at all... in rush hour traffic and often with a mobile phone clamped to their ear. Hey, maybe using a mobile really does fry your brain if these cretins are anything to go by. I can think of a few other locations like this, but the weird thing is that in other places pedestrians seem to be more switched on. I don't remember seeing the same problem, or at least not to anything like the same extent, in Cheltenham, Birmingham, Milton Keynes, Ashford, Portsmouth or Southampton (though I admit that my familiarity with those places consists of one route in and out and the small area of the town that I needed to be in).
Well, I think walking out in front of traffic without looking and while having a mobile phone conversation speaks volumes about the mental impairment of commuters in Wimbledon maybe you've got a point there. Seriously, I doubt if that many people taking these risks can fulfill normal definitions of mental/physical impairment, and in most cases we're not talking about people who could be expected to be unaware of the risks. It's normal every day commuter types rushing to get to work that I used to worry about round there. But why pedestrians a few miles away seem to have more sense is a mystery to me.

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Quite, both the driver's propensity for driving above the speed limit and the mileage will contribute to the points. Whether one is more important than the other, neither of us can say with certainty. However, the correlation between miles and accidents seems self-evident, whilst the correlation between marginal speeding and accidents is up for debate. Your other argument about what drivers 'should' do is neither here nor there (IMO ). 'Ought' and 'is' are not the same thing.??? How? If you are alienating a large proportion of OK drivers while claiming to be after the dangerous ones, how does that make the case for speed cameras stronger.Indeed, already established to a good degree by evolutionary psychologists.We would need to correct for other things also - ratio of male to female drivers in the country in different age categories, type of employment, other?? And still it would not be straightforward, as women tend to be exposed to elevated danger at junctions, possibly through hesitation and the tendency to perform manoeuvres slowly? The fact that most posters here are male could just as easily be showing that men are more likely to rebel against injustice, how likely is that?

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Plus each individual driver's powers of observation and memory. Not to mention whether they have invested in a device that warns them of speed camera locations.

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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

Playing good old devil's advocate again here

Imagine we're back in 1988 and the general public of the United Kingdom are having a discussion about these new fangled 'speed cameras' that are about to appear. I wonder how many of 'the large proportion of OK drivers' would have said something like...

1988 = "Great idea, catch all those fools breaking the speed limit"

Of course the reality has turned out somewhat different, when it transpires that they are the fools getting caught by the cameras.

Today = "Er hang on, we meant everyone else...not me in particular."

This example is not dissimilar to the story related by a senior traffic police officer at around that time (1988 ish) who was repeatedly asked to set up mobile speed checks in local towns an villages, by the residents sick of people speeding through their little piece of England. And who do you think the police caught first and foremost when they set up said traps? Go on, have a guess

This appears to support my hypothesis:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3573912.stm

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Yes, and it also supports my hypothesis that increasing track and trace and control loop technology will be used for all manner of mobile applications, such as this one (insurance mileage monitoring). In fact, this is a most excellent/highly satisfying advance in my argument that speed cameras will be obsoleted by new, more effective instruments working in real-time using network and database technology. Soon (IMO), there will be so many ways to track and trace violators that these bulky, standalone, unnetworked instruments will be obsolete, and a hundred other indicators will be available to the authorities to penalize wrong doers.

In the light of this, it seems foolish to rage against cameras - what does and does not constitute wrong-doing, and what should be done about it are the real questions, not the measurement technology, which just provides basic information and which (as you know, authurdent) I believe is inevitable.

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Basingwerk, was your mother a virgin, by any chance? You are just too holy to be true

Basingwerk my mate...

you wrote



True - only some are not increasing for three points now as too many have them.... and thus there is recognition that prosecution for a silly overspeed blip does not mean a automatically dire risk.

And mate - how come my kid sister - lives in urban sprawl - who has held clean driving licence (also an IAM - you feel so left out in this family if you are not a petrolhead.. ) - has higher premium based on her post code than bloke with 6 points on licence and whopping mega turbo charged car in rural backwater?

Answer - because our kid's car is more likely to be stolen which increases the risk factor in her case. Similarly - I pay extra on my premium because I travel into a large town quite often. Both our kid and myself are more likely to run into a speed camera as well.

You could just as easily get zapped you know if draconian enforcement were employed.

As for mentally impaired cyclists and pedestrians... should they even be allowed out alone? They pose danger to themselves and other people. They run out in the roadway, and the driver and passenger who may be travelling below the speed limit are placed at risk here.

There is a responsibility on all of us to take care on the road. I live in the countryside. If I decide to walk to village pub at night - I wear clothes I can be seen in - and I carry a torch. I also look out for traffic. To me - it is simple. By same token - my bike is also well lit and I wear appropriate clothing.

I can't ask her. She died of cancer back in '87.

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Yes, but neither you, me, the BiB, the judge, the traffic engineer, the ambulance driver, the polictican, the camera, the pedestian not even the driver himself can be confident that he is a skilled driver! Any driver (picked at random) could be good, bad or a complete bonehead. Now, you might think "what good is it to know that some drivers might avoid an accident, and some can't, but not be able to tell which"?

It tells you that you have to plan the system for the worst acceptable driving, and then add even more margin for plain stupidity. There will be some drivers, who think they are good (but they can't be in the least bit sure about it!) who would like to drive faster. As most crap drivers think they are good, that is just thier opinion.

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