Safe Speed Forums

I was reading a document on the DfT website relating to a shipping accident and was struck by the following statement:


Perhaps this is the kind of dispassionate approach we need to get to the real causes of road accidents and how to prevent them in future.

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"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

Couldn't agree more. Someone here, think it might have been Rigpig, said that the aerospace mob do things pretty much that way. Working out what went wrong and how it can be prevented is seen as a better use of effort than finger pointing. In that respect for road going transport we've actually gone backwards. Speed causes everything so blame is all that's left to sort out, and that's the motorist. Easy.

How much longer will we have to put up with it before tptb wise up and go the way of aviation and shipping?

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

Offered for discussion:

One of the problems preventing 'proper' investigation of routine road crashes is that there's so many of them. It's even worse if we're to try and learn something from incidents. (We probably have 30 million incidents each year.)

Obviously we investigate fatal crashes in detail, but the conclusions are rarely fed back to the motoring public in any useful form. But fatal crashes are mostly exceptional - sometimes they are even the result of bizarre and unlucky co-incidences that will never be repeated. We need to be wary about the risks of implementing plans and policies based on something rare and exceptional that'll never be repeated. This risk extends to more general cases. If we found a factor that was present in 10% of fatal crashes and somehow eliminated it, we'd very likely find that we had the same number of fatal crashes despite the absence of the factor. This is fundamentally because rare high severity events tends to lead us into looking at the wrong sorts of factors.

The true generic crash causing factors are much more likely to be revealed in the many millions of incidents. We'd find ourselves looking at psychological factors rather than physical ones. And I'm absolutely certain that that's where we should be looking.

But how on earth are we going to investigate countless millions of incidents? I think we have to interest individuals in doing their own investigations and learning from their own mistakes. Of course we do that anyway, but there's no assistance (readily) available for the average driver. So we've neatly returned to one of the Safe Speed manifesto suggestions: "Learn from your mistakes" TV advertising, backed up with a telephone helpline, and hopefully web and printed materials. There's a great opportunity here for a 'what went wrong' book.

A bit of a ramble, but there you go...

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

I see what you mean Paul - the only difference between the above accident and a fatal is that in this one, it happened in the small hours, and nobody coming the other way, or walking on the footpath was killed.
Later in the day it could have been different, or if the minibus had toppled over the high wall....
The cause was the same in either scenario, this one probably went almost unrecorded.

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Time to take responsibility for our actions.. and don't be afraid of speaking out!

Exactly! This is what we have been telling you for ages.
So why this? http://www.safespeed.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3424
And this.. http://www.safespeed.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3421
etc...etc...etc...etc...etc...etc...etc...etc...etc...etc...etc...etc...etc...
etc...etc...etc...etc...etc...etc...etc...etc...etc...etc...etc...etc...etc...
etc...etc...etc...etc...etc...etc...etc...etc...etc...etc...

That really does look like the special P45 panic. What are you hearing from the DfT? Bad news I hope.

I also think there's a bit of a problem with your comprehension because the links you gave have nothing to do with the subject you're responding to. Or perhaps you would like to explain?

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Nuts to that man! You know I have no such panick. Your comprehension is somewhat lacking but should surely be honed with the 8000+ hours of analysis. How can you possibly claim a tight link with an increase in fatal road accidents for speed enforcement and then claim that even if a contributory factor was removed we would probably have the same amount of fatalities because they are such rare and chance events! It doesn't fit and you have just blown your own case regarding fatalities and the attacks led by your claims regarding them out of the water, well done, we knew you would do it and you just have. We are encouraged that you have realised the problem with fatal accident reduction and may now see the reason why serious casualties are brought into consideration. It took a while but as we say we are encouraged, keep it up and who knows we may have you on board in just a few months.

Say what...................!!!!!!!!!!!


Is it me or is the previous post just rambling nonsense.....

SCPs have proved that they have NO interest whatsoever in the cause of accidents. This is proved by the fact that non-speed related data is used so often to support the use of the devices. Also virtually no research is done by them on the effectiveness of cameras apart from selected use of statistics.

When was the last time a camera was taken down because the death toll went up dramatically after they were in use? But if it goes down the SCP publicity machine goes into overdrive.

If there were no doubt then the government would not have put the brakes on further deployment would they...

If you are interested in accident investigation prove it by providing some actual data of your own....I am sure we could give you a shopping list. Otherwise just stick to the spin.

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Speed camera policy Kills

I think someone thinks they are being smart and employing reverse psycology...... either that or they're nuts.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

Interesting you should use the selected use of statistics phrase, look at who does it on your side.

This is in the claim on the SS website at: http://www.safespeed.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3424

They use this set of stats:


Very carefully selected from this:

Naughty.

Not naughty JJ, because some of those years you were not in operation, and the more recent ones you were.

Why does the graph not show deaths plummeting by 62% as Mr Hewitt of Hampshire claims they have?

Steve, all you're just showing us there is that since you've been in operation you've achieved absolutely bugger all in cutting the long term fatalities.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

Do you know, I actually understand what you're getting at. You're completely wrong, of course, as usual, and I'll tell you exactly why...

Speed cameras are intended to deal with just one narrow aspect of high severity crash causation. Even if they succeed in eliminating that factor that does not guarantee a drop in fatalities. (As you have appear to have admitted.) It's like squeezing a balloon - it just pops up somewhere else.

But, and it's the $64,000 but, all the while you're trying to mess with one insignificant parameter you're damaging the core values of safe driving. For example: You're putting out false and misleading information. You're distracting drivers from the road ahead. You're damaging the Police / public relationship.

Not only are you squeezing the fatality balloon and watching it pop out elsewhere, you're also inflating the bloody thing and making it larger and harder to squeeze.

And by the way, as a former sub mariner, I would have expected you to recognise when you were completely out of your depth.

[edited to add missing 'have' and remove 'ed' from appeared']

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

The word you were describing Paul is CHARLATAN, which Wikipedia defines as:

KSI's have risen from 3 to 5 at Ings during Steve's stewardship, showing his "SAFETY" Cameras to be an expensive FLOP, especially when you take into account that speed was rarely a cause OR contributary factor in the accidents at that site!!
And to think he had the gall to suggest that I was "imagining" accidents which I related on the now defunct CSCP forum, or had used a picture of Ings on a day when the Talivan was not there when I showed that tall grass and overhanging tree branches were hiding the van!

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Time to take responsibility for our actions.. and don't be afraid of speaking out!

The Safe Speed topic you refer to is a copy of a letter printed in a local newspaper and is nothing to do with us. I don't know the writer (as far as I know).

What's more he's ABSOLUTELY CORRECT about the awful performance of Cumbria Cameras. You don't save lives. You can't save lives. You haven't saved lives. You never will save lives. In fact you're making the roads more dangerous.

He's also ABSOLUTELY CORRECT to highlight the years in which you have blighted Cumbria with your presence. Or would you like to 'do a Brunstrom' and claim credit for improvements that were a matter of record long before you existed?



I tell you what's naughty about that graph - the purple line does not have 'equal value' at either end. The risk required to take a life in 1994 was quite a bit less than it is today. In the intervening years we've had huge improvemnts in vehicle safety, huge improvements in road engineering safety and huge improvements in post crash medical care. In fact it's roughly 40% harder to kill someone on the road now than it was 10 years ago.

TRL says the reason we haven't realised these benefits is because drivers are getting worse. It's bad policy that's making drivers worse and you're part of that bad policy.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

And why are drivers getting worse?
Maybe it's because:
1. They are continually told, or have implied to them, that the only meaninful attribute needed to be a good driver is to obey all speed limits absolutely at all times.
2. Training has not improved to cater for the increased number of vehicles on the roads.

True. More vehicles and bikes mean more road users and thus more hazards due to volume. Most are not trained to use their cars - they do not know how to use the safety led technology which they purchased with the car either. Perhaps - free lesson in how to use (with COAST refresher of ocurse ) might be marketing ploy.

JJ- we do things the old fashioned way here . Intelligence led policing and lot of reminder posters on roads which we consider to have a problem seems to work quite well! Add a dollop of COAST chat - and we seem to make progress!

You need to get out more!

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Take with a chuckle or a grain of salt
Drive without COAST and it's all your own fault!

A SMILE is a curve that sets everything straight (P Diller).

A Smiley Per post
FINES USfor our COAST!

Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon - but driving with a smile and a COAST calm mind.

Imagine if every plane crash was investigated by people who sell new aircraft engines. Every accident would be put down as caused by "old engines" in order to drum up new business, regardless of what really caused the crash. Imagine what would happen - planes would be crashing left, right and centre because the real causes of the crashes would never get addressed.

It sounds crazy, but that's exactly what is happening on our roads.

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“For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.” - H. L. Mencken