Safe Speed Forums

I disagree with the main thrust of your campaign, which is to oppose the use of speed cameras. These cameras are in many areas the only way of enforcing speed limits, so that you are effectively campaigning against the need to adhere to limits. This means that you are campaigning for the right to drive as fast as you want, and you are representing this as a road safety campaign. There is no emphasis on safer roads or driver responsibility, these things may get a mention in the small print but your headlines scream "One third of road deaths caused by speed cameras!" and similar nonsense.
I'm here to debate, not to be a troll.

Not here is Suffolk it isn't! Suffolk County Council imposed a 30mph limit in all the villages regardless of how appropriate it m ight be. The problem is a village might only have a few houses and they extened the limits way beyond the more densly populated part of the village in most cases.

Under this Government I can quite beleive that in the next 5 years, cyclists will have to be registered with fines for those who break the "rules". What is a cheap healthy and fun sport or method of transport for many, will become an over enforced bureaucratic nonsense the same that driving a motor vehicle has become. It will be a sad day when that happens but when it does, the bleating on C+ will no doubt be resounding.

For one thing it's what pedestrians do. You don't get 7-800 pedestrian deaths a year because of pavement cyclists. For another, 30mph is cited as the speed at which no more than half of them get killed, and that's been accepted by road and traffic planners for years; presumably based on real traffic accident data. You objected to a recent road safety campaign that drew attention to this fact, I believe.
http://www.safespeed.org.uk/forum/viewt ... 7c1c798e66

Then the best thing to do is consider the evidence, discount the rubbish evidence and reach a conclusion.

So far your arguments are based on 'the physics', and such arguments cannot fly because we're already hundreds of times safer than the physics would suggest based on crash severity. If you (one) also look at crash frequency, we're 'zillions' of times safer again.



Show me one shread of evidence that cameras deliver a safety improvement. (and I'll show you why it's wrong.)

* Road deaths are falling far more slowly than expected



I am absolutely certain that road deaths would be one third lower if we had good road safety policy.



Excellent. I hope you enjoy your stay. The 'finding fault' comment wasn't directed at you or any individual.

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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

Don. Seriously for a moment.

You state that the 30mph limit is in place on the off chance that a pedestrian may step off the pavement, and if a pedestrian DOES step out infront of a car and is injured, its automatically the motorist's fault if he/she was 'speeding'.

The appropriate and safe speed for the conditions is the speed at which you can stop in the distance you KNOW to be clear. If there is a chance that a pedestrian may step out infront of you, then the distance you KNOW to be clear must be the distance to the pedestrian. Therefore you adjust your speed accordingly. There comes a point where (unless you slow to zero) the pedestrian enters the distance in which you cannot stop. What then? The pedestrian has just as much responsibility for not stepping into the road as the motorist does for maintaining an appropriate speed.

If speed cameras are the only method of enforcement in certain areas then the enforcement is sadly lacking. I think you'll find that most posters here would sooner see 5 properly trained traffic police than a single camera.

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Science won over religion when they started installing lightning rods on churches.

The 30mph speed limit dates to the early 1930s.

The pedestrian risk at various collision speeds dates to 1979.

Clearly something from the 1930s cannot be 'founded on' 1979 research.

When the impact speed TV ad finishes with 'It's 30 for a reason', that is an official lie intended to support speed camera 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

At no point has the Safe speed campaign lobbied against speed limits, Paul has re-iterated thousands of times that speed limits are a useful road safety tool if used effectively.



Not at all, the point is that the speed someone drives at is just a symptom of their ability, style, consciousness and attitude etc. People need to recognise that it is just as possible to kill under the speed limit as it is above it, and all of the above have a much greater impact on the likelihood of hitting someone or something than the speed they were travelling at. The problem is that Speed and Physics have taken over as the only road safety tool in the box and that tool has very blunt edge and is woefully inadequate for the job.



I think you are wrong, to me this is the very corner-stone of the campaign, let drivers take responsibility, empower them to do so, speed cameras do exactly the opposite they tell drivers that the speed limit is safe and nothing could be further from the truth.



The 1/3rd figures were used to back up the need for speed cameras, if there is a “nonsense” I think you should point it out and tell us why it is nonsense.



There is a problem with road safety in this country, generally it’s quite good but it is getting worse over time. It used to be that road death and injuries fell year on year, the rate of that decline started to slow before actually reversing.

Now it fell despite increasing numbers of cars on the roads, greater car ownership and road use. Of course all those things are still occurring and our roads and vehicles and medical treatment is also getting better, so what happened to the trend?

It started getting worse at about the time traffic police were being pulled and speed cameras introduced. There may have been other factors I don’t know but is it just coincidental?

The question for is, “Does the zealous automated enforcement of speed limits produce a positive result for road safety”, what do you think?

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It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.

Upton Sinclair

But, in reality, they're a completely useless method of "enforcement". Under the DfT rules they have to be sited in places where it's effectively "safe" to exceed the speed limit (ie 85th percentile speed has to be greater then the ACPO threshold - meaning that the statistically safest drivers on the roads consider it safe to travel at a speed in excess of the limit + 10% +2mph), and they only "cover" a small amount of road, so it's hardly surprising that despite millions of convictions for speeding, the casualty figures are virtually unchanged.


I think that you are guilty of "putting words into others' mounths". There may be the odd nutter here who thinks that, but I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of us do not.


If you take some time to read the forum, you'll see that the subject of driver responsibility etc is rehearsed almost ad nauseam! As for the "One third...", in the days of "soundbite politics" I guess that a simple and striking headline is a necessary evil.


Then may I respectfully suggest that you read more of the website and forum so that you don't give the impression that you are...

I hope that you've noticed that you've received far more civil treatment here than "we" get when making contrarian points on C+.

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"Politicians are the same the world over... We build bridges where there aren't any rivers." - Nikita Kruschev

Non sequitur; this does not follow (and clearly isn’t the case).

The understanding that if a pedestrian is hit by a motor vehicle travelling faster than 30mph then they have a less than 50% chance of survival may not have been the basis for the 30mph limit but it's the justification for keeping (or lowering) it. There certainly have been enough dead pedestrians where the speed of the vehicle is known or can be calculated for this figure to be considered reliable.

There aren't enough police to enforce speed limits everywhere, and there never will be, but it would be possible to have a camera on every road.

I've often wondered, and perhaps somebody will have this information to hand.

Are the statistics on the likelyhood of pedestrian fatalities derived from real world figures, or cadaver research?

It was my understanding that cadaver research was used in the 90%/30mph 10%/40mph quote.

Also, child cadaver research appears still to be banned, for understandable reasons. Should this ban be lifted? I seem to recall that Volvo used to do this kind of research until it was outlawed.

But why is enforcing speed limits so important when the breaking of them features so little in crash causation? Would not efforts be better spent elsewhere?

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It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.

Upton Sinclair

Yes, the impact speed risk figures are 'reasonable'.

But despite having the travelling speeds, we don't have the impact speeds in sufficient quantity.

Or perhaps you would feel satisfied if 20% of child pedestrians injured died, instead of 0.4%? That'd be a jump from ~50 to 2,200 in built up areas.

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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

Sometimes 30 is a perfectly appropriate limit, Don. The problem is that increasingly, daft limits are being applied in the wrong places.

At risk of going all C+ and posting endless links, why is this road a limit?

Apart from the bit in the middle which is 2 lane each way SC, it's a DC main road into Southampton.

The slowest/least safe bit is the bit described above. The rest has barriers down the road side so there is virtually nil chance of car/ped conflict.

The fastest/safest bit is on the right where the overbridge is. There is NO pedestrian conflict AT ALL here, and 50-60 would be entirely safe.

The other fast/safe bit is the DC over the river.

Now guess where the two speed cameras are.

The problem is that Joe Average Driver will conclude from this that the 30 limit is pointless and ignore it EVERYWHERE, whereas if it was only used where it is appropriate, maybe people would obey it.

Or do you think an urban DC primary route with barriers along the sides SHOULD be 30mph?

There are two types of pedestrian:- those you can see and those you can't. They conceal themselves behind parked vans and in bus shelters and then rush out. Not always, but enough to make a cyclist or motorist wary of any roadside object large enough to hide behind. The sort you can see are no better; with all the self-preservation instincts of a lemming trying for a miscarriage they'll stand in plain view, perhaps looking straight at you or perhaps looking the wrong way before stepping out. Riding or driving at 1 mph is not an option, but going at a speed which'll probably kill them isn't something you should consider doing either. If you have the attitude that anyone who can't see you coming or recognise the danger deserves to die, then you shouldn't be driving. The actual danger comes from the 1 ton block of steel that you've brought onto the road, and it's that fact which makes you responsible for the safety of others, the least you can do is drive at a speed which, according to official figures, gives them a 50% chance of surviving. If you decide to go faster then you've made a conscious decision to act in a way that will probably get someone killed in the event of such an accident.

You will never get enough police on the road to replace the cameras, but if you did you can bet your licence that they'd be just as unforgiving to speeders as PC Gatso.

You missed my point:
"This means that you are campaigning for the right to drive as fast as you want"
Which I don't believe is the case.

And so, as Sixy says, people slow - it's nothing to do with the limit.



You mean people should be selecting an appropriate speed for the prevailing conditions? Welcome aboard!



Quite Agree



Hmm, I don't think that's a good idea, how about driving at a speed which means that you are able to stop before hitting them, in my book a much better option than hitting htem at all, but you're entitled to your point of view, but it sounds dangerous to me.



Agree again, drivers (along with all other road users) should be given the responsibility to look after themselves and all other road users.



Not true, you see that is the wonderful difference between Police and Camera's, Police can tell the difference between inappropriate speed and legal speed, which , as you alluded to above, is very important.

Remind me again why is enforcing speed limits so important when the breaking of them appears not to be contributing factor in the vast majority of collisions?

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It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.

Upton Sinclair

For one thing it's not that much effort. Install a camera, check the film, post a letter.
For another the perceived risk is high. so cameras reasure people.