Safe Speed Forums

That's a very good point Smeggy. The baseline assumption is clearly that we should expect trends to continue until something acts upon them.

When a long term trend does change we have to look for the reason or reasons.

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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

We dont' have much evidence to prove that cams work and my ex guv proved it by kicking the Co Durham force into a synchonsised team which worked together to keep crime down and people safe.

We do not claim to have things quite right here - still being worked on - but our stats and N Yorks, covering a huge and diverse area, seem to show less KS than those with forests of cams.

Do explain to us how achieve this cos as far as I know all officers here are human beings - but with a healthy attitude to technology and using as a tool to achieve a safety led goal. We do not have forests of fixed cams.

We do have police cars - marked and unmarked and the public just know we may appear "suddenly and from nowhere"

Perhaps that's the secret - police making it clear by their presence that they will not accept nonsense

Wildy once reported back to me that she once read of a poster claiming he loved scams as he could manipulate them in the manner Steve despairs of - and he is right to be concerned about this. I am too actually. This is not "road safety" after all Driving at an unsafe speed but slowint to perfection at the scam which you cannote really miss once you have spotted it regardless of colour

But normal average people - they are so scared of us. They should not be - we are just doing our job of trying to keep things safe and we may not even issue a dreaded punish ment dependent on professional judgement based on what was observed.

Martin - your previous sig about advanced training saving lives was far more realistic as a comment.

Of all the 43 Forces - only two show a KSI improvement and and appear above average on aggregate. These two upper middle ranking forces have the lowest KSI rates year on year in the UK.

Neither has forests of fixed cams. Both use a van and traffic police. They target the real danger spots and the really dangerous twazak. .

Neither force can afford to be complacent and each tries level best to reduce KSI anyway. But even so.. still much lowere rates than elsewhere - yeet no different as such in urban and rurals settings

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What is with you patton? One moment you seem like an intelligent rational human being, and the next you spew seemingly-brainwashed invective; I'm genuinely disappointed mate, I thought more of you than that.

The numbers add up. I understand the human factors, and I sympathise with the emotions. I can appreciate how the promise of safety from speed cameras can be alluring to those who are not only emotionally vested in road safety, but deceived by the notion that 'speed kills'. At the same time I am at a loss as to how patently intelligent people can shutter their eyes to such blatently telling figures?

Incidentally, the loss of trend as purported to 2005 is not a wild extrapolation, as I understand it, but a perfectly feasibly interpolation given DfT figures.

The reason could simply be down to the law of diminishing returns.

No it couldn't. The law of diminishing returns has applied the whole time.

The projection is a diminishing returns projection.

The law of diminishing returns is exponential decay and we're projecting exponential decay. It's exponential decay that we're NOT getting any more.

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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 wonder - you've done "best fit" to a Y=Exp(1-aX) right?

What is best fit to a Y=Exp (1-a(X-B)) where B is the assymptote of accidents that, no matter how well you educate/improve cars etc etc are going to happen through, eg, heart attacks, strokes, passsengers flipping their lid and gonging the driver...

I've run dozens of fits. I think the fit on http://www.safespeed.org.uk/smeed.html matches that pattern.

I don't agree that there's an assymptote - that's tantamount to saying that you can't make a car any safer. There could be an assymptote in terms of number of crashes, but none in the number of injuries.

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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

Well, stepping back and looking at the graph as a whole, the returns certainly appear to be diminishing to me. But what do I know?

As for our ability to make cars safer, safer for whom? I understand that making cars safer for the occupants in a crash has made them more dangerous to any pedestrian who may get hit by one.

Try this Google:
http://www.google.com/search?&q=%2B%22d ... l+decay%22

A few of the first page hits look as if they might help.



That's a very good theory, but the support for it in the crash stats is extremely limited. It certainly looks as if the seat belt law caused a 'transfer of risk'.

But the long term trends show pedestrian safety improving fastest.

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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 know what the law of diminishing returns and exponential decay means Paul. I don't wish to get caught up in the minutia of the term - perhaps it was the wrong one to use.
However, it certainly seems perfectly feasible to me that improvements in car safety through design have simply finished giving us any big returns in terms of casualty figures. How much more can you do to protect an egg inside an egg box once you've engineered the restraints, fitted cushioning systems and crumple zones. Make the egg harder?

Educate the driver perhaps?

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Thing is, all these vehicle improvements are still rippling through to cars which typical people own. Not all cars have: crumple zones, SIPS, ABS, traction control, airbags etc, let alone all of them.

Of course, assuming he/she realises they need educating and will respond to it. If we'd carried on as before perhaps we may have been able to mitigate the trend loss.
But I'm focusing on the loss of road safety improvement (in terms of road deaths) as a result of reaching finite limits in terms of vehicle safety.



I suspect that the cars that the majority of people drive are fitted with the 'big gains' safety devices that their equivalents of, say, 20 years ago were not. The rest that need to filter down are twiddly bits that may make micrometric imporvements if they were fitted to all cars.

Sorry mate. I was trying to help after you said: "But what do I know?"



We've been getting very real and valuable vehicle safety improvements through the period of trend failure - so this argument simply won't wash.

EuroNCAP didn't start until about 1997 (from memory) but we're putting much stronger new cars on the roads now because of it. Not to mention all the other safety innovations of the last decade. Most of the cars being scrapped at end of life now have NONE of these modern features, so the national fleet is getting very strongly and progressively 'upgraded'.

And of course there's always a risk that we may assume that there's 'nothing left to invent'. But that only happens because we don't have the imagination of the population of inventors.

And even if we did 'run out' of vehicle safety improvements, we could then start on upgrading drivers. You'll remember of course that I'm certain that we're downgrading drivers with bad policy to such an extent that the massive vehicle safety improvements are being negated.

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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

A quick Google gives hits of the average age of a UK car as being between 7-9 years old; let’s say 8. I suspect the big gains such as airbags and crumple zones were not nearly as ubiquitous as they were then compared to today’s new cars. Given that, I would say we are on a steep part on the curve of the 'net amount of included safety equipment'. For the curve to be flattening out, most cars would have to have most of these gains already - which I sincerely doubt.

Let’s not forget, in-vehicle safety features is one factor of many that could be affecting the fatality trend over time. Others include:

- post crash treatment, has medical intervention suddenly not got any better?
- road design, has resource been diverted away from engineering of road layout
- net distance travelled, this has actually levelled out in the last few years to something like +1% per year, so if anything this should be accelerating the downward fatality trend!


I reckon we have deviated into something worthy of a separate thread.

Without Googling anything I know that my 1997 Mondeo is safer than my 1982 Sierra was. And my wifes Focus is safer still.
Google searching for the answers to all of the worlds problems aside , I still believe that it is far too fanciful to attribute any loss in fatality trend to speed cameras and the supporting policy alone - crap though it may be. The UK of 2007 is different from the UK of 1987 in an enormous number of ways, political and demographic changes have altered the face of and attitudes within our society dramatically. My gut feeling is that the answer* is more likely to be found within this tangle of interacting factors, rather than one single cause alone.

* If indeed there is a question to be answered, a line on a graph can be made to mean anything we want depending upon how we choose to interpret it. Statistics, lies and all that stuff

But I don't believe that Speed Cameras actually save lives either - apart from maybe the odd one or two in instances where a camera is actually being employed where it can make a difference.

I wouldn't mind knowing how allowing someone to commit an offence that is so hideously dangerous can possibly save lives, and moreover why it is preferable to allow someone to speed rather than having a traffic officer pull them over and deal with it at the time.

And if it were all about saving lives, wouldn't it be more prudent to address the causes of the 95% rather than 5% of accidents which are caused by speed in excess of a limit.

There will be one - but much smaller. It will have in it, among others, those who get frightened to death, those who, despite the warnings, fail to, eg, put on seat belts.. those who have brittle bones and will injure just by hitting the kerb.. But yes - that is VERY close to zero in the cosmic scale.

Let me have a quick doodle with the spreadsheet...

But is the 2007 Mondeo significantly safer again?


That may be, but the plot I have given (I have no reason to doubt its validity or my interpretation of it) shows a sharp deviation indicative of something less gradual. It’s just a bit too coincidental that the curve of the deviation from the long-term fatality trend follows the rise of speed camera usage.


With that I completely agree.