BBC Breakfast
 

For any of you who watched BBC Breakfast this morning and saw the interview with the Professor of Modern Diseases vs Richard Hammond, here's a copy of the e-mail I sent (very hurried!):

I have to say I was very annoyed by the attitude of your guest in the piece on road safety. I understood him to be a professor of medicine, so how exactly does this qualify him to judge Richard Hammonds' comments as "twaddle"?

The Transport Research Laboratory report 323, so far the only reliable piece of research into accident causation in this country and widely accepted by road safety experts, lists the top 10 causes of accidents as:

Failure to judge other person’s path or speed 10.7%
Behaviour - careless/thoughtless/reckless 8.8%
Inattention 8.0%
Looked but did not see 7.5%
Excessive speed 7.3%

Clearly the biggest problem is driver behaviour and particularly poor standards of driving. There is no road transport system in the world that could that as a system, as suggested by your guest, could eradicate this kind of behaviour and certainly there is no automated device that can detect these kinds of problems.

It's about time that the media helped to spread the truth, that as drivers we need to get better and that we need more rounded road safety strategies that do more than alienate the driver and fixate on one single issue.

Damn right -- especially relevant for me as my brother-in-law has just had his Harley written off and his knee smashed by a cnut in an MGF who t-boned him ...

My bruv was riding in London, broad daylight, observing the correct speed on a 30-limit road with cameras, with his lights on and Screamin' Eagle pipes which ain't quiet. MGF comes straight out of side road and hits him square on.

I'd say that's:

Failure to judge other person’s path or speed
Behaviour - careless/thoughtless/reckless
Inattention
Looked but did not see

and NOTHING to do with speed.

Nice one Notorious!

They are also using the large accident figures for other countries as an excuse to blame drivers in this country. No good reason for including us in those figures except to generate another news story. Our figures actually reduce the EU average.

Some years ago the average death count per day was over 20 due to traffic accidents. These days,in spite of the enormous increase in traffic, the count averages 10 per day.

I remember the tabloid press making a big issue of the road casualties during holiday periods when in fact the average was exactly the same as the normal daily average!

Anything to sell papers of course-true or not :(

Les

I must admit, that "professor" peed me off too.

As was correctly pointed out by Hammond, you can't just compare speeding (whatever that means) and drink driving - but for the Prof to suggest that road design could be used to reduce accidents caused by speeding and drink driving??? :confused:

Maybe he means that no roads will go within 5 miles of a pub (er, or off licence, or supermarket, er, or house) :rolleyes:

Pathetic!!

mb