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Safe Speed presents...

Why and how speed cameras

cost lives

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Section 1

• What is happening on our roads?

• Why is this happening?

• How do we fix it?

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Our road safety disaster

• Since 1993, we have lost a 50 year beneficial trend in fatal accidents.

• Road deaths are “stuck” at over 3,400.• But projections of pre-1993 trends lead

to present road death estimates of 1,800 to 2,200 per annum

• Over 5,500 people have died on our roads to date due to this loss of trend

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What changed in 1993?

• We began to base our national road safety policy on “speed kills”, backed by speed cameras.

• We also ran national campaigns about the dangers of speeding

• And the Police began to leave the safety of the roads to “PC Gatso”

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Is this happening worldwide?

• No. We have noted that many countries continue to show road safety improvements at the previous rate.

• Germany, France and Italy for example have clear ongoing improvements

• Sweden and Australia are showing a similar loss of trend to ours

• These effects demand proper scientific study

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A system supported by lies

• It isn’t true that speed causes many accidents (Only about 5%)

• It isn’t true that slowing traffic alone will reduce the number of accidents

• Claims of accident reductions at speed camera sites are normally due to statistical errors.

• The lies are generally mistaken beliefs based on over-simplification

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Faith and facts

• It’s easy to believe that “speed kills”• Flawed and limited research appears to

support the idea• The modern road safety establishment

tends to accept the flawed research• But looking just a little deeper reveals no

supporting substantial facts• “Speed kills” is a matter of faith not fact

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Speed

• Speed is easy to measure

• But we’re not measuring the right sort of speed (more on that later!)

• The attraction of easy measurement and the hope of a road safety quick fix is deluding a generation

• But after a decade of speed limit reductions and ever-increasing speed enforcement the results are awful

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Information control

• The road safety information from the DfT and the so-called safety camera partnerships is very tightly controlled to make the modern road safety policy sound reasonable and successful

• It’s highly immoral and dangerous to feed false road safety information to the public

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Section 2

• What is happening on our roads?

• Why is this happening?

• How do we fix it?

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Does speed kill?

• Of course it does. The faster you go the harder you crash, and the less time you have to avoid a crash.

• Of course it doesn’t. The most careful analysis of UK road safety shows a very limited connection between speeding and accidents.

• What’s the reason for this conflict?

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Speed kills?

• There is much confusion over the exact meaning of the word “speed”

• It is true that inappropriate speed for the conditions is extremely dangerous

• It isn’t true that exceeding a speed limit in itself is dangerous

• “Speed” can still kill just as effectively with high degrees of speed limit enforcement

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Is faster more dangerous?

• In the real world faster roads are safer.

• Most accidents take place in town on 30mph roads

• Our Motorways are the fastest roads and also by far the safest.

• Faster roads are safer is true as a sound general principle

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Excessive Speed Accidents

• Gross examples are not generally caused by “normal motorists”

• Most are probably entirely within the speed limit anyway

• No degree of speed limit enforcement will prevent all of them

• In fact very few are potentially within reach of speed enforcement

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Dangerous Speeders?

• Joyriders in stolen cars, drunks, police drivers on call and reckless drivers are not normally curtailed by speed enforcement

• Normal responsible motorists a few miles per hour over the speed limit are rarely dangerous

• Reckless behaviors sometimes mislead us about the dangers of speeding

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Speed limits and Speed enforcement

• Are both good… We need them

• But we do not need high levels of speed enforcement directed at purely technical infringements

• Worthwhile speed enforcement must be targeted at safety infringements

• Has greatest effect on open roads away from hazards - exactly where it’s needed least

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Real accident causes

• The vast majority of accidents are caused by road user error

• A small but important proportion of accidents are caused by road user violations

• The vast majority of road user errors that cause accidents are carelessness, inattention or misjudgement

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Carelessness and Inattention

• Cause probably 75% of all road accidents• And probably 30 million near misses

each year - (but only 2 million accidents and only about 2,000 fatalities)

• We should be very afraid of those 30 million near misses - the wrong policy could turn some of them into dangerous accidents very easily

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Driver attention

• Tiny changes in average driver attention can make accidents out of near misses

• “Speed kills” road safety policy is making quite large changes in the things that drivers pay attention to

• We should not be surprised that fear of speed enforcement is causing lower average driver attention to important safety factors

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Driver’s safety priorities• Experience teaches drivers to pay greatest

attention to the most important safety factors

• High levels of speed enforcement force drivers to give quite high attention to a fairly low safety priority

• Too many drivers are now paying attention to speed limit compliance while an unseen dangerous situation develops ahead

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Speed matters

• The more we tell road users of the importance of speed limit compliance, the more they respond by treating it as an important safety factor

• But keeping to the speed limit will not ensure that you can stop in time

• We need “safe speed behaviour” instead

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Safe speed behaviour

• A safe speed is one that always allows a driver to stop within the distance that he knows to be clear

• Keeping to a speed limit is no substitute

• You could drive safely for years without having a working speedo, but wouldn’t last a minute with a blacked out windscreen!

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Too much speed enforcement

• Criminalises safe drivers causing injustice

• Increases road dangers by distracting drivers and distorting their safety priorities

• Drives a wedge between Police and public

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Section 3

• What is happening on our roads?

• Why is this happening?

• How do we fix it?

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International Fatality Rates

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There is an alternative

• There are vast differences in road safety performance between countries

• The average UK driver is a very long way from the ideal

• Road safety performance is a consequence of culture

• Better safety culture leads to safer roads

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The three “E”s of road safety

• Engineering, Enforcement and Education

• Recently we’ve had poor enforcement - too much dumb speed limit enforcement, and not enough intelligent Police enforcement

• We’re missing out on the benefits of education - we could be doing so much more

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Enforcement

• There are dangerous behaviours on our roads that the police must deal with

• But Police traffic strength is thought to have reduced from about 15% in 1993 to about 6% now

• That makes it all the more important that they must apply their efforts to real dangers and not technical offences

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Engineering

• Real and constant gains in road safety come from vehicle safety advances and road engineering improvements.

• These are big gains which are providing an ongoing benefit worth at least 5% per annum

• Traffic increases annually by about 2.5%. It’s not enough to fully offset the gains from engineering improvements.

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Education

• Another classic way to improve road safety is through road user education

• It’s proven to work to reduce accidents

• But we’re hardly doing it

• There’s huge scope for improvement

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The fourth E: Encouragement

• Ask any modern manager how to improve the performance of his team, and he’ll tell you they need encouragement and incentives

• It’s the same with our drivers. We can improve their performance with encouragement and reward.

• Such schemes have proved effective in commercial vehicle fleets

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Improvements in drivers

• A culture which encourages higher standards

• Incentives for improvement

• Educate to prevent repeating mistakes

• Build on existing strengths

• The average UK driver is at a very low standard compared with the ideal

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What are our strengths?

• We take driving seriously - both nationally and as individuals

• We have the safest roads in the world

• We have had the benefit of a centre of driving excellence

• We have defined and proved excellent core values for real road safety

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What are the core values?

• Individual responsibility

• Care and consideration for other road users

• Courtesy

• Patience

• We must build on these core values to create an improved safety culture

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Building a safety culture

• We’ve already earned the safest roads in the world years before we had speed cameras

• We can use the same principles to give equal improvements over the next few decades

• Modern thinking in health and safety can help us to do even better

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But...

• Speed cameras will have to go

• They are dangerous, distracting and misleading

• They don’t measure important safety violations, they only measure technical infringements

• And they don’t detect drunks, reckless drivers, stolen cars or bald tyres (to name a few!)

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Conclusions

• Too many speed cameras are actually making our roads more dangerous

• “Speed kills” road safety policy is based on lies and mistakes

• There is an alternative based on a proven approach

• We must get back on track as soon as possible

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You can’t measure safe driving in miles per hour

Visit

http://www.safespeed.org.uk

for more information

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Regression to the mean

• There’s a new cure for the ‘flu• All you have to do is clap your hands

every day that you’re sick• Virtually everyone who tried it got better• Therefore we know it’s 100% effective• In road safety, “regression to the mean”

often leads to illusions of benefit from a safety treatment.

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Regression to the mean

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