This letter from Alan Bailey of Warrington appeared in the Sunday Times “Ingear” supplement on 8th August ...
Neither the government nor the vociferous road safety lobby has ever been able to produce statistically valid evidence to support the efficacy of speed cameras in reducing road deaths (“Flash, bang, gone – the end of speed cameras”, Sunday Times last week). In contrast, using government statistics, the Road Safety Foundation and EuroRap have demonstrated that 50% of the UK's road fatalities and 30% of serious injuries occur on just 10% of its road network at a cost of £18billion per year.
However, when relatively low-cost re-engineering is undertaken, casualty rates are slashed. This is highly cost effective, especially compared with the money squandered on so-called safety partnership bureaucracies without any noticeable reduction in casualties.
In the last 13 years about 20,000 people have died on these roads, many of whom might have been saved but for the government's obsession with speed cameras. Speed cameras were entirely consistent with Labour's punitive instincts towards any problem; but why are the road safety lobby equally obsessed when a 50% reduction in fatalities could be so easily achieved?
The GOS says; Well said, that man. My own involvement with a local road safety campaign has shown me that local authorities are quite happy to choose the cheapest option, and are highly resistant to the kind engineering solution Mr.Bailey is talking about. They'd much rather impose unnecessary and inappropriate blanket speed limits than actually make the roads safer. Then they can absolve themselves of all responsibility and lay the blame on drivers.
This is particularly unfair in the light of the statistics: we wrote recently that “one person is killed for every two million, eight hundred and sixty thousand car journeys. Just think what that says for the skill, restraint and self-discipline of ... 33 million drivers, that they can deftly weave their way round our overcrowded road system, keeping their temper, maintaining their vigilance, avoiding cyclists and children, more-or-less obeying even the daftest speed limits, concentrating on the road ahead, anticipating problems, and generally staying so safe that we have this almost unbelievably low death rate on our roads.”
The answer to Mr.Bailey's question seems pretty obvious to me.
Firstly, the people who work for, run and lobby in favour of the road “safety” partnerships are left-wing liberals who remain convinced, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that they know best and the rest of us are all idiots who need to be coerced into their way of thinking. I once met a police traffic officer who told me proudly that he believed in “driver education”. When he pulled over a speeding motorist he would explain forcefully why exceeding the speed limit was highly dangerous, antisocial, immoral and stupid. That was “education”, according to him. He evidently saw no need to mention that local speed limits are determined not by the police, but by politically motivated, cost-cutting local authorities determined to be seen to do something while remaining equally determined to spend not a penny more than they have to on road improvements, or that these days they are commonly established in defiance of the government's own guidelines.
And secondly, if speed cameras disappear, so must road safety partnerships and with them all the jobs, publicly funded conferences, fact-finding trips and general junketing, television appearances, kudos and self-righteous importance these people have been enjoying at our expense.
You've got to feel a bit sorry for them, really, haven't you?
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