Safe Speed Forums

With 'Road Safety Week' next week, Safe Speed issued the following PR at 13:01 this afternoon.

PR398: Road safety weak - so it's back to basics

news: for immediate release

The forthcoming road safety week (starts 6th November) seems like an excellent
opportunity to highlight just how WEAK British road safety has become. We're
fresh out of ideas and stuck with enforcing technical regulations to a needless
and distracting degree.

Paul Smith, founder of the Safe Speed road safety campaign
(www.safespeed.org.uk) said: "Fundamentally we need to do two things to earn
safer roads. We need to help the vast majority of responsible drivers to manage
risks better and we need to use the force of law against irresponsible drivers.
Presently we're doing very badly at both.

"The grossly irresponsible 'rogue drivers' are out of control, with
insufficient Police on the roads to even scratch the surface of uninsured,
unlicenced, drunk or reckless drivers."

"Responsible drivers need far better information to help them enhance their
skills as risk managers. Enforcement doesn't come close to meeting this need,
and is actually tending to replace the vital skills that gave us the safest
roads in the world."

"We're saying to drivers: wear your seat belt; don't use your mobile phone and
stick to the speed limit and you will be safe. But that's far from the truth.
We need, expect and receive far more from our drivers than this oversimplified
regulation based approach."

"Road safety isn't mainly a matter of compliance with regulations - instead it
is a question of just how good we are at managing risk. The risk management
skills of concentration, observation, anticipation, hazard recognition, hazard
assessment and hazard response are the true heart of road safety. Largely we
acquire these skills working alone and unaided after we have passed the driving
test. Our risk management skills are amazing with just one injury crash caused
per 160 driver-years [1] - but there is still massive room for improvement."

"The reason that current road safety policy is failing to deliver significant
reductions in fatalities or hospitalisations is because the engineering gains
are being offset by losses in driver quality. In fact 'policy' has entirely
failed to consider driver quality issues. Speed cameras, for example, do not
make us better risk managers - they make us worse risk managers with their
minefield of distracting and misleading side effects."

"We need to get back to basics and we need to do it now. Unfortunately most of
the road safety industry doesn't understand what the basics are."

<ends>

Notes for editors
=================

[1] 32 million licenced drivers divided by 200,000 injury crashes annually = 1
injury crash caused per 160 driver-years.

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

On the header -"ROAD SAFETY WEAK" --- perhaps a "?" might be in order, or was that a statement