Safe Speed Forums

My history with Paul dates back around 5 years or so. Around 2002/3 I sent him a 6,000 word refute to his report 'Speed Camera's - The Case Against'.
Obviously it didn't go down well with him and all I saw at the time, was a website dedicated to the removal of all speed cameras. Paul had used much scientific reasoning in an attempt to prove his point but he never once used the one true road safety talent that he possessed, that of an advanced driver. However, my differences with Paul are largely unimportant because for me the debate was over a long time ago.

To me it is, and still is as plain as the nose on your face that speed cameras work. But all of this scientific drivel had been built up around the argument that needed to be cut through. In one respect, I'm gratefull for it as it helped my understanding of the issues.

So do speed cameras work.....absolutely. The simplest way to explain how, is to acknowledge that speed cameras are a speed reduction tool. Currently they have reduced a few mph in average speed from those driving in excess of the speed limit, which has resulted in saving around 100 deaths per year. Cut all speed limits by 10 mph and enforce them with cameras and casualty rates will fall again until we have no speed left in which casualties can occur.

Now it may surprise you to learn, that I am now very much anti speed camera. This was a gradual process that started whilst researching Stephen Ladyman a couple of years ago. He was making some address in Westminster and he stated that 'White Van Man' was one of our highest risk drivers on the road any yet this was an enigma because as he was one of our most experienced drivers then he should be one of the safest. The reason for this is clear, but evidently there is very little understanding of road safety to those who are/were governing road safety. (May explain why Dr Ladyman is no longer minister for road safety).

Now the biggest problem with speed cameras is the fact that they do work. Many of you will be aware of PACT's request early last year for all 30mph residential limits to be reduced to 20mph and enforced with speed cameras. This would obviously mean if passed that thousands upon thousands more speed cameras would be erected. What this also showed me was the lack of imagination that our governmental advisory groups have with regards to casualty reduction. And it is because of this lack of imagination that they have developed such an overwhelming dependence on speed cameras.

Do speed cameras save lives...yes of course they do, but more of them is not the answer. In fact, I now believe, as Paul did, that speed cameras are hampering real advances in casualty reduction. The government are settling for minimal reductions when, if only they used a little imagination, they could prevent hundreds from being killed and injured on the roads.
It is possible to make massive reductions in road casualy numbers with fewer speed cameras, but that is down to us motorists, the government won't do it for us. Speed cameras are not guilty of causing casualty rates to increase, but the DfT is guilty of failing to prevent hundreds of deaths and thousands of serious injuries each year purely because they can see little further than speed reduction as the main casualty reduction tool.

Road safety can be measured in MPH and the government know this. Cut speed by 30% and you'll cut deaths by 50%. The cost of this is the loss of livelihood to thousands of motorists and the total witdrawl of freedom to enjoy our motoring. That is one direction I no longer wish to proceed in.

There is only one way to beat the speed camera, lobbying those who have complete faith in them is not the answer. The motorist has to take the responsibility for road safety back into their own hands. Only then can the speed camera become obsolete.

Speed cameras dont work.
If they did no one would be getting caught by them ergo theyre flawed.

As for the rest of your cunningly disguised camera support statement, well, less said the better.
The fact that youve placed it here is indicative of someone who wishes to stir up trouble, i for one dont appreciate your stance given the undeniable fact above especially as youve tried to use this area of the site to promote it.

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Tom,

Sorry, but if speed cameras are working why are we not seeing an appreciable benefit in terms of a reduction in annual road fatalities?

I also think this is a highly inappropriate area of the (wide ranging) forum to post such message.

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Simon

Indeed, now moved here.

_________________
"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

Agreed.

This area of the site is devoted to Paul's memory. Show some respect, Mr Heavey. If you have something to say regarding your support of speed cameras then post it here.

Ok..
First point to make is that I have already apologised to the moderator for posting this here, it was not intentional.
Second point is that I was invited to make comment on a part of the site that I felt was far more inappropriate that this.
This is a new thread and I believe it can be moved.

Speed cameras do work and that is the main problem with them. So long as you keep denying this fact, the more their numbers will inevitably grow.
The anti speed camera lobby must take on a new direction or it will continue to suffer more failure after failure. Quotes such as DeltaF's show how ridiculous the discussion has become. It makes no sence.



If you'd care to explain this one to me i'd appreciate it.

Sigma, what does it tell you if casualty rates have gone down at camera sites but overall casualty rates have remained steady. Where are the fatalities occurring?..

It's time to open your minds.

What a load of contradictory nonsense... in particular this line!

Please read this, then perhaps delve into thisthread. If you cut through the crap I'm confident you will see how things are not as the SCPs portray. (I will respond in that thread but time is short right now.)

The whole point of speed cameras is to slow people down because it is conceived (incorrectly according to the TRL) that speed play a big part in accident causation. If people are getting caught by speed cameras, and an increased number of people are expected to be caught year on year that means people are not slowing down, ero they have failed.

It was some SCP spokesperson that I first heard say "every time a camera flashes it has failed", one of the few things I agreed with that came from a camera partnership.




It's fairly simple. There are a vast number of people driving on our roads today, there are a vast number of near incidences where collisons nearly occur. Very occasionally (statistically) a collision will occur and people will swap insurance details and that will be that.

Even less occasionally vehicles will collide in such a way that people may require medical treatment.

Even less than that, some people may require an overnight stay at a hospital.

And, thankfully, a very very tiny percentage of all road users may be killed.

Where and how they die is very much a random event, they can cluster as random events do, but more often they are reasonably well spread.

it may go like this
Year Killed
y1 0
y2 2
y3 1
y4 3 place camera
y5 1
y6 0

Yeah - camera saves lives!

or regression to the mean, the only explanation that works when you consider that according to the TRL only 5% of all collisions have speeding above the speed limit as a causal factor.

so to answer your question, the fatalities are happening where they always happened, at entirely random places.

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There is also possibly some element of "Hawthorne effect", whereby changing any element of the "system" brings about a short-term increase in attentiveness. In many cases, the introduction of cameras has coincided with changes to signing and marking, and/or reductions in speed limits (the A523/A52 from Leek to Ashbourne being a classic example of this).

But what should have been done is a study of the casualty trends in police force areas with numerous cameras, versus those with few or none (e.g. Lancashire vs Durham). And I'm pretty sure that would have shown no significant advantage for the camera areas.

Cameras may move casualties around, they don't cut them overall.

_________________
"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

Then why did road deaths increase last year?

The fact is the 100 deaths per year figure is based entirely on flawed statistics and ignoring regression to the mean.

The idea that reducing free travelling speed will reduce impact speed is fatally flawed.

They are not exactly changing behaviour or improving any standard. That's what I interpret Deltaf to be saying.

My wife Wildy posted up some link from Germany whereby the authorities there remarked that the drivers had got used to it being there so vry few were actually copped .. yet the same 12% they reckon on copping each year were copped by the mobile vans seem to back up the fact that folk just slow down for the camera .. but then speed up again afterwards. This point was also raised by Steve Callaghan who claimed drivers were "manipulating his cameras".

Indeed they are.. and Cumbria's stats on KSI are worse when you compare the prat stats to the A&E ones. Something repeated up and down the country and backed by a peer reviewed piece from Oxford University...

My wife also posted up another German press cutting whereby a German town set up a two way speed cam at a site where a driver had killed tw pedestrians. The driver happened to have been drunk at the time. So the speed camera saves what exactly? Given the Mayor himself stated that the cam does not guarantee any safety anyway...... but would generate income given the fine system in place there which does not affect mobility in the same way either. It more or less rakes in 35 euros on average per driver with no penalty points..



I do not need to. I know what comes in here and the demands on the blood bank my department screens for lurgies.

Check out the hospital stats. The casualties have not dropped. In reality - they are perhaps increasing.

You could argue RTTM at the actual cam sites. In fact, Kevin Delaney pointed out that a good many resulted from the one off which killed all 4 occupants of the only vehicle involved - at spots where no incident occurred before or since. In most cases a young kid who may or may not have even been qualified to drive in the first place..

They are occurring away from cam sites.. result of TWOCS, drunks, druggies, fatigued, kids who run across motorways on the run from police or rival gangs... , hit/runners. The types who slow for the cams but who drive dangerously the rest of the time .. and even the ones who do not speed .. but whose capability behind the wheel is still dangerously inept and below standard in terms of COAST skills. Like the one who was perfectly legal speed wise but who clearly failed to notice me with Lupines and hi-viz the other evening and came way too close to me Or the ones who did give me space but failed to notice the on-coming vehicle riding on the centre line and wing mirrors clipped. One or the other should have eased off and the car which passed me could have waited behind and passed when safe to do so. I was at 25 mph by the way. downhill ..

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I too would be interested in a better explanation of how you can be so sure they work. Don't get me wrong, I DO believe that they make the vast majority of motorists slow down over the white stripes on the road at that point but to my mind, that's not "working"!

To my way of thinking, the RTTM effect seems like a perfectly good explanation for the drop in figures at camera sites and, even if you could show that RTTM has NOT been responsible, the fact that the overall number of fatalities hasn't changed significantly, Nationally, seems to me to indicate that they are not "working", just moving the deaths elsewhere.

In my county (Cumbria), the SCP haven't had any appreciable success in lowering deaths. "SI"s have gone down, it's true, but only if you use their figures. There is a well-doucmented BMJ article showing that hospital figures show no such decrease. One of the things that really annoys me about the SCPs is that they seem to take any fall in KSIs as an indication of THEIR success whereas it is, of course, multi-factorial. In Cumbria, we had a reasonably constant (practially since the war, if memory serves!) drop of about 5-7% per year. Now for the SCP to be able to claim ANY improvement WHATSOEVER, I'd expect a greater-than-7% reduction per year! In other words, a continuation at 7% means "no difference" and a reduction of less than 7% means things are getting WORSE.

To understand how speed cameras work you have to look far beyond the overall numbers.
Speed cameras in the main have been placed in the main in highly pedestrianised areas. becomming less frequent as we get out to the motorway network.
If collisions were entirely random as you say then any reductions across the board would by its very nature have to be even. But it hasn't.

In 1992 469 motor cyclists were killed
In 2005 569 were killed
an increase of 18%

In 1992 other vehicle user deaths stood at 2209
in 2005 it stood at 1813
A reduction of 18%

In 1992 pedal cyclist death stood at 204
In 2005 it stood at 148
A reduction of 28%

In 1992 Pedestrian deaths stood at 1347
In 2005 it stood at 671
A reduction of 50%

This just demonstrates that intelligent speed camera placement works, where there are more speed cameras, there are greater reductions in casualties. RTTM was good while it lasted but it is now obsolete as a valid arguement.

Remember, I am working for the same objectives as you are, to rid our roads of speed cameras and give freedom back to the motorist. Only my approach is from a different angle.

Mole...Brilliant

That is exactly one of my own theories. Speed cameras act more like burglar alarms. They prevent fatalities occurring in specific places but do nothing to prevent casualties form occurring elsewhere. THis is why we are in awful danger of speed camera numbers increasing massively.

If we all wised up a little, we would realise that speed cameras are only a tax on bad driving..

And an increase in motorcycling has been widely reported.

1992 is not a good base year, as overall fatalities fell from 4229 in 1992 to 3814 in 1993. And further to 3621 in 1995.

Yet in 2006 they were 3172.

http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/statistics/da ... ype182.pdf

There weren't many cameras around in 1995, so it's hard to attribute the 1992-95 fall to cameras, but since then there has been a massive increase in their numbers, but very little overall fall in fatalities.

Why not look at the 1996-2006 10-year stats?

_________________
"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

Folks,
Im sorry if I offended anyone tonight but it was unintentional.
There is hope for you lot yet.
Goodnight..

1992 was a great year to choose as it was the year before speed cameras were switched on in the uk..

As a member of the admin team I accept that.

Your post raises a number of interesting issues which people have been busy answering

_________________
"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