Safe Speed Forums

As a road user I have every right to comment on organisations that claim to campaign for road safety. I've asked some civil questions and haven't had a real answer. I'm drawing my conclusions, but still retain my open mind on road safety.

The fact that you have a forum that anyone can join rather flies in the face of your 'bye bye' comment. If you don't want "cheap seat barracking", take the forum away or make it hidden from the public, for paid up members only.

Again, these decisions are not up to me, or you.

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Regulation without education merely creates more criminals.

All I was pointing out was that a member of Safe Speed has stated they support speed cameras. Don't you think it's a little strange that somebody that thinks this should join a campaign who's primary output is related to; disproving percieved safety benefits of speed cameras; highlighting percieved safety disbenefits of speed cameras; and also campaigns to have them scrapped?

Also, members do have a common interest; there's no way I would join Safe Speed so it's perfectly viable to use an individual member's attitude to question the ethos of the campaign as a whole.

I.e. please don't argue with me/it.

Are these discussion forums or submissing forums?

martin - I have to say it. The very same applies to the pro-cam argument in that their conclusions likewise have not been "peer reviewed"


Police stats are published - but criteria of collation may be similar but not necesarrily standardised to a norm "control model" to compare to... and conclusions of all stats have NOT been subjected to a thorough study nor even a standardised audit by the appropriate government office to date.

As for spindrift - I think you must agree that his track record and numerous bans from CYCLING fora for his argumentative and ad hominem insults which are provoked only because folk do not agree with him - do not make him an "expert".


Folk can hold other points of view - but that guy does not hold a debate. The mad Cats once pasted up the parting comment from the then owner of Pistonheads whereby the the owner posted that he had given him room to post his views but that it had become blatantly obvious that there was no intention of debate onl what came across as rabid accusation of all who drive cars as "cyclist killers" That was July 2005 by the way. This has been going on for years with this person who has been banned umpteen times from each forum for his style of posting. That factor alone should tell folk all they really need to know about his "character".

So .. if a person posts rabid and unreasobable rants and Paul banned a few who sympathised with his campaign but whose views were perhaps unreasonable and not in keeping with general rules of decent debate - then banning someone would be a reasoned action to take. Spindrift, as we know, does not debate and if anyone tries to bully a discusion forum into a sibn#mission forum - then you need look no further. :roll;

Oh and as for "being members of safepeed" - many a paid up member does not post to the forum which is open to all to discuss issues relating and not indulge in ad hominem insult of which I gatther spindrift's latest handle posted plenty.

I do not hear spindrift on the radio nor does he identify himself in public as an "authority figure on road safety".

he spends all day and every day in internet chatrooms which make his claims to riding the Tourmalet etc rather doubftul.

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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.

Road safety policy, or what passes for it today, is built predominantly around speed restriction/enforcement and the manipulation & misrepresentation of everything else concerned to fit this ethos, for the most part at the cost of any other policy or enforcement.

So, any campaign group wanting change must address the way speed is over addressed as it's core point.



strikes me that today, if you're not happy with the way things are going you're automatically "right wing".

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Fear is a weapon of mass distraction

Of course they must address it as a point - not necessarily the core point. The question isn't that though - it is about whether the campaign is almost exclusively about speed cameras. That is the impression that the website, the forum and the media output of the camapgin gives. The only aspect of the public face of the campaign that isn't speed camera focussed is the monkier it gives itself of being a road safety campaign.

I'd expect a campaign on road safety to encompass all aspects of being on or near the roads. I'd expect an enlightened road safety campaign to widen its agenda to include the effect of roads on society, so that anything it was campaigning for had been thought through exhaustively in terms of its likely effects on society. I'd also expect it to have positive policies and not to base its campaigning largely on decrying what it disagreed with.

Indeed that is so, my point is, how can you be sure that it is not the government who are reporting seeing a red banana?

Thats exactly what the safespeed message is- that road safety is about so much more than speed. The reason speed enforcement is focused on by safespeed I'd say is because speed enforcement is seen as "the answer to everything and the only answer" in governmental policy - To correct someone, you must first show them why you believe they're wrong.

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Fear is a weapon of mass distraction

So why does the campaign focus on speed cameras if safety is about so much more than speed? Why let your agenda be dictated to by the government? Shout about the 'so much more'!

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The world runs on oil, period. No other substance can compete when it comes to energy density, flexibility, ease of handling, ease of transportation. If oil didn’t exist we would have to invent it.”

56 years after it was decided it was needed, the Bedford Bypass is nearing completion. The last single carriageway length of it.We have the most photogenic mayor though, always being photographed doing nothing

I do wish you and others would cease with such remarks. Just for the record, I don’t think all speed cameras should be scrapped.

However, I do think they could more correctly be regarded as Safety Cameras if they were used, for example, outside a school at times when there are actually children - not at midnight or during school holidays!

For example, I may be actually be in favour of a speed camera set to 20 mph detecting the road from the entrance of the school to the nearest bus stops where I live from 8:15 a.m to 9:15 a.m and again from 3:00 p.m to 4:00 p.m throughout the school term.

If I had to list, in order of importance, that which I regard as going from bad to worse you may also be surprised to see 'speed' actually shows it's face in #1...

1) Excessive speed ‘for the conditions’
2) Mistake due to youthful ebullience and/or inexperience
3) Drunk driving
4) Driving too close to the vehicle in front
5) Driving whilst distracted by mobile phone and other in-car distractions
6) Poor judgement
.
.
~20) Speed in excess of the posted limit

Sorry if that spoils your perception of 'every' member of SS.

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The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not necessarily represent the views of Safe Speed.
You will be branded a threat to society by going over a speed limit where it is safe to do so, and suffer the consequences of your actions in a way criminals do not, more so than someone who is a real threat to our society.

I agree with you on that, with one caveat. 20 (speed in excess of the posted limit) often contributes to 1,2,4, 6 ...
Because it changes the cultural norms, and makes it "OK" to ignore rules. It raises the average speed, gives
a poor example to young drivers and makes people believe that the speed limit is a suggestion, not a law.

This is going round in circles. I don't think I can make this any more simple for you.

A campaign is there to influence policy and people, therefore you must address the existing policies and what people currently think or are told.

Government: "Our road safety policy is to focus heavily on a single aspect of road safety and not really bother too much with anything else"

Road safety campaign group: "We must focus heavily on showing the flaws in enforcing this single aspect at the expense of everything else".

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Fear is a weapon of mass distraction

" They might be good for the organisers of track days but speed cameras are killing ordinary road users, says Paul Smith, of the Safe Speed Campaign

British road safety is in trouble. The number of road deaths isn't falling as expected and recent figures from Europe put our rate of road safety improvement behind 20 other European nations. We used to have the safest roads in the world but we have been overtaken.

Although it appears that Department for Transport (DfT) targets are being met, it's only the trend in serious injuries that provides this positive result. Unfortunately for the DfT, and for the rest of us, the numbers being hospitalised following road crashes haven't fallen for a decade. The only reasonable conclusion is that serious injuries are not falling either, but DfT statistics suffer an increasing degree of under-reporting.

When asked to investigate why road deaths were not falling as expected, the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) deduced that "some drivers must be getting worse".

I have spent the last six years looking at road safety as a system and I'm pretty sure I know what's going wrong. Modern traffic policies are making drivers worse. This has been allowed to happen because the DfT has no working definition of what it means to be a good driver or even a proper understanding of what drivers really do. Yet driver behaviour, specifically the quality of driver behaviour, is the hidden fundamental on which all road safety depends. Unfortunately, the DfT has been taking driver quality for granted or possibly ignoring it altogether, an issue that Sir John Whitmore addressed in his most recent Telegraph Motoring column (June 2).

The process of driving is one of real-time risk management. Drivers who manage risk well stay out of trouble. They recognise risky situations and wait, hang back or steer clear.

Of course the potential risks involved in driving are enormous. Shutting your eyes for 20 seconds would probably cause a crash, possibly ending or ruining several lives. And while driving blind would certainly be daft, this actually tells us something important. It's not so much what we see that matters, but what we do with what we see. We use it to manage risk.

Sadly, most people haven't been taught to drive as risk managers. We are taught manual skills (steering, clutch control, gear changing) and rules (go this way or that, stop here, don't stop here, don't speed, don't drink and drive).

The necessary risk management skills are acquired gradually with experience (at least as far as that experience goes in everyday driving) and they are easy to overlook because they are mostly subconscious. We learn where to look, how to recognise danger and how to respond to danger when we see it, making all sorts of subtle, semi-automatic judgements.

In particular, we learn to adjust our speed in order to remain safe in the prevailing road, weather and traffic conditions. The speed at which you choose to drive is an output from your own internal risk management system. Yet the DfT regards speed as an "input".

Road safety policy should have one overarching purpose - to make our roads safer. And the critical measure of success is the way road deaths are changing. If the number of road deaths isn't falling as expected in Britain, but it is falling as expected in other countries with similar economic conditions, then we know that something is wrong with our policies.

And there is something wrong with our policies. Not only do they neglect driver quality, but they are actively making us worse. We are prioritising and concentrating on the wrong things. At the heart of our policies are speed cameras, which have largely replaced comprehensive traffic policing. The dream is that cameras reduce risk, but the reality is that they are reducing the quality of our risk management.

Cameras give us legal compliance targets, not safety targets. And the divergence between the two is now very marked. We now have a nation of drivers concentrating on compliance rather than safety. The whole concept of speed cameras denies that we are capable of managing risk, yet road safety absolutely depends on individual risk management in real time. So the DfT has not only failed to understand what driver quality is but has given us policies that undermine it. Worse, it has fed us a false dogma to justify its policies. That false dogma has infected our road safety industry, with millions now believing that the only way to safer roads is slower traffic.

Yet our roads are not becoming safer. After falling for decades in spite of vastly increasing traffic, the number of fatal crashes has remained fairly static since the DfT replaced traffic police with speed cameras. If it had announced that all those traffic officers would be issued with blinkers and stopwatches and would sit on a chair at the side of the road looking neither left nor right, we would have thought it madness.

The only possible route forward is for the DfT to admit its fatal mistake and pull the plug on the failed speed camera programme. This would certainly be a dramatic step, but it is an essential one, as a mere change of emphasis would leave the false dogma intact.

We really need a fundamental change of attitude. We need to lead the world again and show the way.

Speed cameras and the official propaganda that justifies them are the cause of our current problems, not the solution. They have to go and they have to go now.

That's why the Safe Speed campaign is launching "Scrap Speed Cameras Week" tomorrow (see http://www.safespeed.org.uk/sscw.html), and why more than 25,000 people have already called on Downing Street to scrap speed cameras. To add your name to the online petition, which closes at midnight on Tuesday, June 26, go to petitions.pm.gov.uk/scrapcam.

* Paul Smith is founder of the Safe Speed road safety campaign. "



So, B Cyclist, what fault can you find with the above statement? Ever sentence seems to make perfect sense to me, as an experienced driver.

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My views do not represent Safespeed but those of a driver who has driven for 39 yrs, in all conditions, at all times of the day & night on every type of road and covered well over a million miles, so knows a bit about what makes for safety on the road,what is really dangerous and needs to be observed when driving and quite frankly, the speedo is way down on my list of things to observe to negotiate Britain's roads safely, but I don't expect some fool who sits behind a desk all day to appreciate that.

Safe Speed is a Campaign for Intelligent Road Safety, initially concentrating on the removal of Speed Cameras.
Hope that helps you

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Safe Speed for Intelligent Road Safety through proper research, experience & guidance.

This 'Campaign' is is focussed on proving or rather disproving the speed kills mantra that has been taken as government road safety policy for the last decade or so. The Government focussed on speed, Paul instinctively knew this to be too simplistic and set out about debunking it.

It's not about the government 'setting the agenda' or Safespeed 'dancing to their tune' or any other childish attempt to provoke discord in these fora.

It is the government that laid down the challenge when they saw speed cameras as a means to cut spending on road policing whilst possibly reducing road deaths and invented the 'one third' lie and other devices of spin. Paul and others took up the challenge, strove to counter the government line, we now see that automated speed enforcement is becoming discredited and unpopular so the 'authorities' are slowing looking towards alternative methods. But the Speed Klls Mantra had to be tackled before a wider debate was given a fair hearing.

To summarise I believe that Safe Speed has focussed on the government policy of reliance on automated speed enforcement (the removal of cameras if you like) and rightly so because until the lie was exposed there would be no appetite for a broader, evidence based approach, to Road Safety.

There you go chaps, there's your answer, from the only source that can be considered the voice of the campaign. Try as you might, weepej, to insist that anyone else posting on these forums represents the official SafeSpeed line, to do so is intentionally deceitful, given the extent to which you have been re-briefed.

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Regulation without education merely creates more criminals.

So you wish to remove controls before having a suitable replacement in place? I think you need to read Abercrombie's post on this page again, which makes a very important and prescient point.

Which controls are you talking about?