Safe Speed Forums

The AA has today published the latest version of its annual survey of accident rates on British main roads.

Some predictable crap in there about the benefits of lower speed limits and cameras - but when you do other measures at the same time as cutting the limit, how do you know what has worked?

Also some of the most dangerous roads such as the A537 and A6 in the Peak District have already had their speed limits cut.

_________________
"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

Safe Speed issued the following PR at 13:46 this afternoon:

PR315: EuroRAP - road safety crippled by dogma

news: for immediate release

The new EuroRAP roads safety report published today indicates substantial
failures by authorities to improve road safety through proper engineering.
There are two main forces driving the failure:

- Lack of investment due to 'anti-road policies'
- Wrong solutions due to poor understanding of the nature of road safety

Paul Smith, founder of the Safe Speed road safety campaign
(www.safespeed.org.uk) said: "Clearly the government and local authorities do
not fully appreciate the nature of their road safety responsibilities. We have
seen vast amounts of money spent on cameras and reduced speed limits when
proper engineering treatments would have been far more effective."

"These wrong policies may make some roads safer, but they also make drivers
worse and the overall effect is bad enough to swamp the substantial benefits
arising from improved vehicle safety."

"National road safety policy is driven by politics and dogma when it should be
driven by science and understanding. The real foundation of road safety is road
user psychology and we won't get road safety back on track until this is
understood and properly factored in."

<ends>

_________________
Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Do they factor in how busy the road is when calculating risk?

An extremely busy road may have a relatively high KSI due to the increased number of road users. But when traffic volumes are taken into account, the actual risk to the individual may be much less than a road that is apparently 'safe' with low ksi.

EuroRAP is based on the individual risk factor - i.e. the likelihood of a (serious) crash affecting an individual driver. Expressed as KSI per billion vehicle Km (BVKM).

It's a good measure, but frequently not the right one to direct investment. For example a road with 10 vehicles a day and 2 crashes per year would rate as extremely dangerous, while a road with 100,000 vehicles a day and 50 crashes a year would rate as safe. But you can save more people by investing in the safer road...

_________________
Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Am i right in thinking SCPs use only KSI or personal injury collisions as their criteria for enforcement so they could end up targeting safe roads that are merely very busy and actually have a very low risk of a crash actually affecting an individual driver? (sorry for getting slightly off topic)

Absolutely.

_________________
Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Not really. Generally speaking, it would be a hell of a lot more difficult and expensive to make an already safe road significantly safer than to make a dangerous road significantly less dangerous.

Diminishing returns and all that.

_________________
Only when ideology, prejudice and dogma are set aside does the truth emerge - Kepler

Yes-ish. Obviously diminishing returns will be a factor, but I'll place my bet that the effect is too small to apply at the extreme ends of the scale (as per my example). But you're quite right to highlight another factor.

_________________
Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety