Taken from the Telegraph:
Speeding is not the main factor in more than 80 per cent of fatal and serious road accidents, according to Department for Transport research published yesterday.
The study, based on analysis of 36,000 crashes over four years, found "loss of control of vehicle" was the key element in 43 per cent of accidents, the biggest single cause.
Excessive speed was involved in two fifths of loss-of-control incidents, suggesting that it could have been the prime reason in no more than 18 per cent of all crashes causing death or serious injury.
The research called into question the dominance of anti-speed measures such as cameras and road humps in recent road safety policy. Speed cameras have increased five-fold since 1999 and generate an annual fines surplus for the Treasury of up to £20 million.
The study was published as the Government released figures showing that, despite the investment in cameras, road deaths rose by two per cent last year to 3,508, the highest level for six years.
After loss of control, the most common prime cause of fatal or serious injury accidents was pedestrians "entering the carriageway without due care". This was followed by drivers "failing to avoid vehicle or object", failing to give way or executing a poor turn or manoeuvre.
Excessive speed was cited in 28 per cent of fatal crashes and 18 per cent of those resulting in serious injury.
Impairment through alcohol was the eighth most frequently reported contributory factor. Drink-drive deaths rose two per cent to 560 last year, about a seventh of the total.
The RAC Foundation urged ministers to adopt a more varied approach to road safety.
"The increasing focus on speed cameras and decline in traffic police means that offences such as drug driving and careless driving could be going unchecked," said Edmund King, the foundation's executive director.
"We should have more traffic police and introduce national speed awareness courses as a means of changing driver behaviour."
I know this will end up in the speeding thread but it is obviously the start of a big u-turn in policy so I thought it deserved a thread of it's own for a while :-)
Perhaps this explains the fee paying in the dvla thread as the govt must realise that revenue from cameras is about to shrink...
teabelly
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I know this will end up in the speeding thread but it is obviously the start of a big u-turn in policy so I thought it deserved a thread of it's own for a while :-)
Not if the Backroom chooses to debate this study on all the points raised.
Now there's a challenge for a Friday ;o)
No Dosh - Backroom Moderator
mailto:moderators@honestjohn.co.uk
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A similar report by police forces around 12 to 18 months ago on the causes of road accidents concluded that just seven per cent were due to speeding.
The Government, to prevent its case for more and more speed cameras being seriously damaged, combined some of the other causes of accidents with speeding and came up with the deduction that 30 per cent involved speeding.
Mission accomplished.
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Last week' Sunday Times mag had an article on the most dangerous road in Britian - the A59 Harrogate to Skipton stretch. Most accidents were caused as a result of bad signage, lane markings and road layouts - one example is a right turn refuge immediately after a crawler lane up a steep hill, the signage to say the crawler lane is ending is virtually non existent. Cars overtake slower vehicles, crawler lane ends, overtaking vehicle doesn't realise and piles in to vehicle coming other way, or teh stationary vehicle innocently waiting to turn right at the top of the hill. They estimated a sum of £250,000 spent on the road would have a dramtic effect on accidents. Incidentally North Yorkshire has a policy of having no speed cameras.
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If North Yorkshire Police have such a policy please explain why a new type of camera for catching Motorcyclists has been used in North Yorkshire.
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Apologies - a policy of having no speed cameras, unless there's an actual policeman stood behind it - i.e. no Gatsos, Truvelos or the like. The Chief Inspector still believes the opportunity to educate a speeding motorist and use discretion in handing out fines is better than an automated system.
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I agree completely that speed cameras and other passive means of control have had a huge negative impact, especially with the public's perception of traffic policing.
I'm not convinced by statistics however, whilst excessive speed is a cause in a certain percentage of incidents, inappropriate speed may well be indirectly linked to others.
EG. Driving down a narrow road with cars either side, speed limit is 30 - pedestrian steps out, you're doing 28mph so speed isn't a factor statistically - however, was 28mph an appropriate
speed for the conditions - no.
If you remove cameras you have to have more traffic police to keep things under control, however if they remove speed cameras revenue goes down so police forces will have to make further cutbacks which means even less police on the road.
A real Catch22 situation to which I think the only answer will come with a change of political willpower.
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A very clever report.
>>Excessive speed was cited in 28 per cent of fatal crashes and 18 per cent of those resulting in serious injury.
So, people will accept the 18% because its so much lower than previously. And then before you know it the 18% is publicly accepted as a significant amount and life carries on.
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The quest for a single figure for the effect of speed is always going to be a futile one.
Take a simple case: someone steps onto the road without looking, and the driver doing 30 in a narrow residential street can't stop in time.
You could classify that one as caused solely by pedestrian error, or as pedestrian error exacerbated by inappropriate speed, or solely as inappropriate speed (why was the driver doing 30 so close to pedestrians). The same goes for lots of other difft types of accident.
But however you classify it, all the research shows speed is a significant factor in a significant proportion of accidents: even if not a direct cause, it can make accidents harder to avoid and impacts more severe.
Speed may not often be the single cause, but it is a widely-occurring factor which can now be easily monitored without cost to the public purse. Of course there should be more traffic police etc, to catch all the bad driving which cameras can't catch, but that's no reason to abandon enforcement of speed limits.
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Taken to the extreme, if we had no speed we'd have no accidents.
We're therefore talking about a trade-off of some sort. If 90% of accidents were primarily caused by excessive speed the speed is clearly a major issue. If 2% are caused by excessive speed then it probably isn't. Somewhere in the middle, as this report seems to suggest means that we need to continue to monitor speed as a cause, but focus also on the other causes.
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Take a simple case: someone steps onto the road without looking, and the driver doing 30 in a narrow residential street can't stop in time.
Speed may not often be the single cause, but it is a widely-occurring factor which can now be easily monitored without cost to the public purse.
Not a very good example to use NW, since in your first point the driver may have been doing an innappropriate speed, but he was not doing a speed which the 'easy monitoring without cost to the public' method would in any way catch.
The point is that all these cameras are not tailored to catch people doing an inappropriate speed, just people breaking the limit. As your example shows, this is not the same thing, so while they continue to completely miss all the other dangerous behaviours on the road, they're not even able to successfully police speed.
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Not a very good example to use NW, since in your first point the driver may have been doing an innappropriate speed, but he was not doing a speed which the 'easy monitoring without cost to the public' method would in any way catch.
You're right up to a point: currently, cameras wouldn't catch him.
But there's no technical reason why cameras couldn't be set a lower threshold than the legal maximum on some streets, for example to catch those doing 30 when schools are emptying, or at other busy times, or on narrow streets where 30 is never appropriate.
And there are plenty of other ways in which speed could be automatically monitored, e.g. black box technologies to record speed which could be used in evidence if there was an accident.
As your example shows, this is not the same thing, so while they continue to completely miss all the other dangerous behaviours on the road, they're not even able to successfully police speed.
Not quite: cameras are currently unable to succesfully police all aspects of speeding. That doesn't make them inappropriate, it just means that they shouldn't be the only tool in road safety policing.
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NW: >But there's no technical reason why cameras couldn't be set a lower threshold than the legal maximum on some streets, for example to catch those doing 30 when schools are emptying, or at other busy times, or on narrow streets where 30 is never appropriate.
errr, so any speed camera might be set to any speed no matter what the speed limit, and we'd just have to guess what speed to go through at???
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Sorry, NoWheels, but you are oversimplifying here. The point about cameras is that they capture a single moment in time. There is no way to prove from that anything other than the speed of the vehicle at that moment. You are right that there are many places where doing 30 is unlikely to be appropriate but you cannot be sure from a snapshot. For starters, if 30 is never appropriate, why is the limit not 20?
A better system would be one that warns a driver that his speed seems inappropriate in stages. This would either be something in the car or a series of signs along the road. You could have it so that if he passes (say) three warning signs and does not drop his speed then a video recording is taken which can be analysed to more accurately determine the level of danger. That gives a driver several chances - he is warned that although within the speed limit he may not be safe and rather than going just on speed a more complete picture is available to base any punishment on.
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I know this will end up in the speeding thread but it is obviously the start of a big u-turn in policy
Out of interest: Do you really believe this?
I agree entirely that it SHOULD start something, but I don't for a moment think that it will actually make any difference to the profusion of cameras at the sides of our roads becoming yet more ... erm ... profuse.
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Speed limit signs are just that - not an instruction...:-)
Hence the old saying: "Speed in the right place at the right time."
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I once watched a programme about aircraft accidents and how they occur. An interesting analogy was used to describe what usually happens to cause an airline disaster, but it can be used for any accident. Basically an airline disaster (or any other accident) is very rarely as a result of one event. It's summed up in the Swiss Cheese Theory!
Swiss cheese is full of holes. In all the cheeses the holes are spaced randomly. If you choose a hole and look in to it in the vast majority of cases you will see cheese at the bottom of it. However if you look at enough holes in enough cheeses you eventually find one with a hole right through it, not one hole, but a number of holes which have formed in a line resulting in a chain of holes and the ability to see through the cheese.
A road accident is the same - a number of events occur which when combined result in an accident. A change in one of the situation's leading to the accident means it never happens.
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daveyjp wroteI once watched a programme about aircraft accidents and how they occur. An interesting analogy was used to describe what usually happens to cause an airline disaster, but it can be used for any accident. Basically an airline disaster (or any other accident) is very rarely as a result of one event. It\'s summed up in the Swiss Cheese Theory!
For a clear illustration of this look at a book called Emergency - Crisis on the Flight Deck by Stanley Stewart.
Misunderstandings of the nature of an electrical problem affecting fuel guages, confusion converting fuel from delivery volume to mass for weight and balance, hand amended minimum equipment lists and a misinterpreted comment on crew handover allow an Air Canada Boeing 767 came to run out of fuel over the great lakes.
The presence of an closed air force base, a crew member with glider experience who had used that base and the inherent skills of those on thr flight deck got it down (and evetually out again) in one piece.
It\'s so illustrative of how things go wrong that I\'ve considerd using it for staff training but Stewart\'s account is bit too technical.
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For me the key points were
"road deaths rose by two per cent last year to 3,508, the highest level for six years."
"Drink-drive deaths rose two per cent to 560 last year"
Obviously something is wrong with our road safety policy, with all our money being spent on cameras to make us safer we are actually more at risk.
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If you take the figures for deaths by vehicle kilometres road safety is imroving as there's a 5% increase in traffic. Shocked that the DfT's spinmeisters have not homed in on that one.
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If you take the figures for deaths by vehicle kilometres road safety is imroving as there's a 5% increase in traffic. Shocked that the DfT's spinmeisters have not homed in on that one.
the only reason i can explain this is the goverment thinks its better to be admit killing more people, via a faulty road safety policy, than to admit it cant encourage (read force) people to use public transport more.
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Read as people prefer to be killed in cars than in either buses which catch on fire and don't have seat belts or trains that crash due to faulty infrastructure and don't have seatbelts.
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buses which catch on fire and don't have seat belts or trains that crash due to faulty infrastructure and don't have seatbelts.>>
But thankfully both types of incidents are extremely rare and it's exactly the same with aircraft.
I'm sure than none of us have any qualms about catching a bus, train or plane - the chances of being killed or seriously injured whilst using any of these forms of transport are dramatically lower than in a car.
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Has anyone read the report? The headline is from the Telegraph, not the DFT report. This is the line taken by DFT "The third article gives an overview of the contributory factors to personal injury road accidents in Great Britain. The information is based on the pilot scheme the Department for Transport ran with the assistance of fifteen police forces in Great Britain. The article gives examples of some of the data that was collected, although it is not intended to provide a comprehensive analysis.
You can start here: www.dft.gov.uk/stellent/groups/dft_control/documen...3
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Has anyone read the report? The headline is from the Telegraph, not the DFT report.
Well done Nortones. Once again, the backroom was discussing someone else's spin on the stats, not that of the authors or of the govt.
The govt press release is actually a commendably neutral summary of the data: www.dft.gov.uk/pns/DisplayPN.cgi?pn_id=2004_0125
On acident causes, all the press release says is that there is a "summary findings of a pilot exercise to identify contributory factors to accidents". That summary is at www.dft.gov.uk/stellent/groups/dft_transstats/docu...f
It notes that "These results are not National Statistics" and identifies several problems in the classification and recording mechanisms, such as Only a single precipitating factor can be identified and has to be attributed to a single participant. In contrast, contributory factors are not explicitly assigned to any particular participant. Some accidents involve more complex circumstances for which the current system does not allow an adequate description. Anyone trying to use that data to downplay the role of speed in causing accidents is on sticky ground.
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Anyone know if there are any published statistics on accidents where there are roadworks?. It seems to me that just by listening to traffic reports on the local radio that there are an awful lot of accidents on the approach to roadworks, especially on motorways.
The appears to be a lack of urgency in clearing up roads works. Traffic cones are setup and then you get a few workers pottering around for months on end, while the approaching traffic gets tangled up, crashing and causing even more congestion.
Road works are dangerous! Get the job done ASAP and clear the obstruction.
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Ta NW: struck me that the issue was less than neutrally handled by the press!
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I take it, Malcolm_L, that you have some statistics that show the numbers killed on public transport and that these show that number to be similar to those killed in cars?
FYI, 285 people were killed on the railway last year. Only 12 of these were passengers. Most of the rest were tresspassers or suicides - not much the railway can do about those, although there will be a proportion of those in the road deaths. Oh, and the subject of seat belts on trains has been done to death on uk.railway and the general consensus is that they would at best make no difference and at worst (as in the Paddington crash) have caused more fatalities.
(I have seen no figures for buses but as I've never even seen a bus crash and know they are driven by very competent drivers I would expect them to be far lower than cars also)
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