Jza

The UK government recently suspended the deployment of more speeds cameras pending the outcome of of a University College London probe into whether they actually save lives.
We have no doubt, then, that the investigators will be taking a close interest in the Motorcycle News revelation that road deaths have risen dramatically in those areas favoured with the most Gatsos.

According to the MCN figures - joyfully reported in today's Sun - Hertfordshire saw a 24 per cent rise in speed camera numbers between 2003 and 2004. In the same period, road fatalities rose by 34 per cent.
Likewise in Wiltshire, camera numbers went up 14 per cent, and those killed 22 per cent. In County Durham, meanwhile, a lone Gatso oversaw a 22 per cent drop in fatalties.
The Sun is also delighted to report that in North Wales, where "Gatso fan Chief Constable Richard Brunstrom has a league table for traffic cops", 56,247 speeding tickets were issued although this had little effect on safety, with an 18 per cent increase in road deaths.
The reason? Simple, says safety expert Paul Smith: “Crashes are avoided by making a safe plan based on what you see. Cameras move attention away from hazards to speedometers.”

http://www.theregister.com/2005/07/...so_deaths_link/

Jza

stilover

Don't worry. Once the independant review is published, it will say that speed camera's save life. Then it will be business as usual. More government bollox to make us think they are doing us a favour. I live in county Durham that has no speed camera's cos the CC doesn't belive in them. Durham has the lowest fatalities in the UK. The CC retires end of this year, and once he does they'll sprout up like mushroom. Why? cos then they'll say that yes, the county has the lowest fatalities in the Uk, but with these new speed camera's we can redude fatalities even more, and once they say that, they'll be no stopping them.

HOWY

Surely Durham has lower numbers of fatalities because it is a smaller county than most others i.e less roads/traffic

Mungo

The problem is how the statistics will be interpreted. I can just imagine the thought conversation in Whitehall going something like this:
"The road death rate went up 24% last year"
"That's terrible ,what are we doing to reduce that number?"
"Putting in more speed cameras"
"How many extra gatsos did we install last year?"
"34% more than last year"
"Not nearly enough to reduce the death rate, obviously"
"Let's double them next year"
"Great plan"

HOWY

I gather the electronic 'Slow Down' signs are more effective at reducing speed anyway and are much cheaper to install than gatso's. Maybe the report will suggest them instead.

stilover

Maybe Hell might freeze over aswell

andyfish

Nothing to do with safety. everything to do with money and performance measurement. there is an assumption that the vast majority of drivers speed. this is an area which can be measured and some government targets can be met. in addition, the cameras are used as cashpoints. the arguments that the police forces and others use that they don't actually see any of the money raised is a mute point - the cameras have to be paid for by someone (and if you are a CC it's better that a motorist pays for gatso rather than wasting your budget on hand held units and intelligent policing). government targets serve only one purpose - to make governments LOOK as though they are achieving something. a triumph of optimism over reality.

i wonder if anyone has observed the relationship between more gatsos / less visible policing / more accidents? your average joe soap in the street may have but not our wonderful politicians who make policy.

of course these arguments will run their course and become irrellivant - the GPS technology which is being piloted within 5 years to measure travel and therefore tax the motorist will be used in 10 years to measure your avarage speed over a given distance. the FPN and fine will be posted to your home address before you reach your intended destination. orwell had no idea that the big brother animal he dreampt up would be realised so fantastically. (yes i know we will get the civil liberties lot piping up, but when did our civil liberties ever come into the equation?).

get your aa map / road angel (or equivalent) now and enjoy your scoob before it all changes.

andy

hedgehog

Durhams figures lower figures are "per mile driven" and so take into account population and size.

The road infrastructure for Durham is pretty much average in its make up with the mixture of urban, rural and motorway having no remarkable differences from other counties.

It should also be noted that the CC in Durham, who is being replaced soon as pointed out, believes in training for drivers rather than in heavy handed enforcement. Clearly teaching drivers to drive better does not fit in well with current policy which is to force them off the road totally.

budgie55

I must admit that when I am driving through an area where I have not been for a long period of time or even driving in a new area altogether I do tend to make an effort to look for speed cameras. It makes one wonder how many people may be killed or injured due to drivers not concentrating on the things around them while they are looking for speed cameras. Dont get me wrong Im for a number of cameras in accident black spots and certainly around school roads, but its now got to the point where all that matters is the ££££'s the cameras ("piggy banks" as J Clarkson likes to call them lol) rake in.

automodellistagt

whenever im in an area i dont know im allways looking for speed cameras. Personally i think, that on average, theyre bloody dangerous.

hedgehog

The problem with what you have just said, from my perspective, is that you've asserted that cameras distract drivers from watching the road and then asked that they be positioned outside schools. The one place where cameras should not be placed is anywhere that the motorist must devote his or her full attention to the road, your comments on distraction fully support this argument. Your comments may also be supported by government figures which indicate that accidents increased at 743 camera sites.

With this in mind I would assert that there should be no cameras at accident black spots and no cameras outside schools or in areas where there are lots of people walking beside or crossing the road. These areas should and can be effectively policed by police officers who can detect driving which is likely to pose a danger but which may be happening well within the posted speed limit. As it is the cameras have been used as a political tool to get these police officers removed from the roads and to get the motorist used to the concept of automated enforcement. They are most certainly not a safety device.

Abdabz

The government always pitched the speed camera justification at the wrong market... It should have been made clear from the start that they were to punish those incompetent drivers who are unable monitor their speed or that choose to ignore the limits set out by law...
Catching these incompetents / deliberate law breakers keeps my taxes down which is BRILL...
Any lives saved is a bonus...
As for them killing people - I have to say I'm sick of GATSO's jumping off kerbs making me swerve into walls Its the ones with sniper rifles that scare me most...

shaunywrx

What like a train spotter?
Surely it would much easier and safer to watch your speedometer.

OllyK

It would be safer to be watching the bloody road!!

Iain Young

Interesting. But how do these people (MCN) know that the accident / death rate wouldn't have gone up by even more if there hadn't been cameras? They're just as bad as the people who claim they reduce accidents. There's no solid data to back either case.

OllyK

Because even without a camera, you would expect the accident rate to drop (regression to the mean).

Iain Young

Why?

More cars every day on the roads, mean a higher probability that they will hit each other.

hedgehog

What we can do is produce a trend line which extends past trends to give a possible indication of a future outcome. In the case of road deaths the trend line was heading quite steeply downwards, this has been reflected in other countries as well and Germany saw a 12% decrease in fatalities last year which they attribute to engineering (road and vehicle) and improved medical facilities, but since the introduction of cameras the UK downward trend has started to level off. When we consider that other countries are still seeing significant improvements in their road fatilities we would expect our trend to be similar but, as pointed out, it isn't. With this in mind it is reasonable to look for a source of the problem and the cameras certainly fit the bill extremely well indeed. The government themselves admit that in the last year for which we have figures accidents increased at 743 cameras sites and they have placed a temporary ban on the erection of any more cameras. Clearly they are also now of the view that cameras have a negative impact upon road safety and that the public will only stand for this for so long.

Tiggs

roll on GPS speed detection.......that'll sort it out!

Iain Young

Of course it might have nothing to do with the cameras, and more to do with the shocking state of the roads themselves. Most roads in this country do not come anywhere near meeting the safety standards set out by the EU, and so if you have to brake hard, you stand a very real chance of having an accident. Interestingly, this decline in maintainence standards has also been coinciding with the introduction of cameras, and so who can say which is having the greater detrimental effect?

p.s. GPS speed detection is not the answer. It won't stop bad driving. It'll just slow it down a bit...

shaunywrx

Yes i did mean as well as the road obviously,
P.S. i'm not defending the camera's in any way.

hedgehog

The state of the roads and the pressure from the greens to stop all road building and "enhance" congestion causing aspects of current roads in built up areas must certainly be a factor. The data certainly fit very nicely with the installation and proliferation of the cameras but as you say a totally watertight causal relationship has not been established. However, it does look like, at the very least, the cameras are a significant element.

In terms of the GPS thing there was an interesting letter in a national newspaper this week from a chap asserting that speed cameras should be installed as "widely as possible" and taking the I never exceed the limit and so have nothing to fear we must drive by the numbers on the poles line. It is reported that the same chap was recently involved in an incident where he drove headlong into oncoming traffic because he believed he had "right of way" resulting in 2 vehicles being written off. Now, I am sure his accident happened at or below the posted limit but just because the sign said he was safe didn't mean that he could ignore the basics of observation, anticipation and planning. So as you say implementing more and more restrictive policies aimed at just one aspect of road safety, your velocity, will just result in more people feeling justified in their actions because they are within the law. As a motorist I would really rather that this chap occasionally drove at 35mph where it was safe to do so than that he spent his days ploughing into oncoming traffic because the sign said he had right of way and wasn't exceeding the posted speed limit.

pat

Not entirely sure what's new or sensational about this "news" ?

For years the Government have conviently decided to spin the findings of its own statistics body, the TRL, to support the ridiculous policy they've been vehemently pursuing despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. They took the little bit of info that the TRL discovered, that excess speed was a factor in a large majority of accidents, but must've missed (more like deliberately ignored) the bit that said that in only 6% of cases was it the primary cause.

What the TRL was really saying is that "most of the accidents are caused by muppets who can't drive, have no appreciation of other road users, have no concept of safety or the need to actually think about the manoeuvre they're about to perform, and if those involved hadn't been going as quickly as they had, they might have had time to correct the fsck-up before it became more than an embarrassing faux pas". One could expand on that a little with "if they hadn't been such muppets in the first instance, then they might never have started the manoeuvre, and then the speed would have been immaterial because nothing would have happened". Ho hum.

So, given that the TRL already said that the biggest problem is that drivers aren't paying enough attention to what's going on around them, the "obvious" answer was to place even more things round them to worry their already overworked minds. Can anyone see where this is heading? It should come as no real surprise, then, that the average egotistical driver will be more concerned about not getting a fine or points on their license, than all that other irritaing crap.... wazzat again? err, yes.... other road users and/or pedestrians.

If they say "speed kills" one could counter "inattention and ineptness kills many more"....

The key to effectively reducing acidents is proper driver education, road planning, and appropriate road furniture; sufficient to allow the driver to judge the safe speed correctly without overloading them with useless information they don't need and without adding the burden of having to worry about getting a ticket for exceeding some ludicrous speed limit.

Troll over.

Pat.

Turbohot

Very correct!I was once stopped for speeding after i had left a restaurent after food.I told the copper i was busy watching the road rather than watching the speedometer( i was doing 38 in 30).He said to me- You should really watch the speedometer in a car like this!"
What a chav!
I was warned by him.No ticket.

Leslie

It is absolutely true that the signs which flsh your speed a you approach are more effective that anything else at causing people to slow down. No one likes it to be announced that they are over the limit. Much cheaper to run as well and don't upset drivers either.

We have a few of those around this area and they do a good job in the smaller villages.

I does not of course produce the vast sums of money that the authorities make out of speedcams which gives the lie to what is said about speedcams and safety.

Les