BRAKE, the organisation that campaigns to get us all out of our cars (they call it a road safety campaign, but really they're just a bunch of short-sighted Luddites who would like to see the entire economy grind to a halt so that all the people currently working will lose their jobs and become just as useless as the short-sighted Luddites themselves, thus making the Luddites feel very self-satisfied because they were useless first) issued a press release last November claiming that breaking the motorway speed limit is the reason why congestion is so bad. It's nothing to do with inadequate capacity, or people refusing to use lane 1, or the police closing arterial roads for hours on end to protect themselves every time someone's hub cap falls off. No, all you have to do is stick to the speed limit and great swathes of congestion will magically disappear.
For God's sake, how can anyone take this group seriously?
We then hear that speed cameras in Oxfordshire are to be reinstated on 1 April 2011 because “early evidence shows that speeding has increased by as much as 400% at camera sites.”
If speeding has increased by 400%, you'd expect that there'd be absolute carnage as a result, with collisions all over the place. Well, er, no; it seems there haven't been any more crashes than usual – certainly nothing of note, anyway. So if 'speeding' has gone up by 400% yet there's no increase in accidents, where's the evidence that speed kills?
Actually, this report represents an absolute triumph for the motor industry. They've shut down the speed cameras policing a 50mph limit, so now drivers are going past at 200mph. Modern cars must be better than we all thought.
The Royal Society for the Protection of Accidents, a hysterical auntie of an organisation we have mentioned in these pages before because of their determination to stop us having any fun at all in case we get a splinter, recently issued a press release supporting scameras, on behalf of what they call the 'Road Safety Consortium'. This consortium is apparently self-appointed, and consists of RoSPA themselves, the AA, the Association of Industrial Road Safety Officers, the Cyclists' Touring Club, GEM Motoring Assist, the Institute of Road Safety Officers, London Road Safety Council and some shower called Road Safety GB.
That's nice: plenty of balanced, unbiased opinion there, no doubt. Where were the Institute of Advanced Motorists? Where were the police, who obviously have views about speeding because (a) they're the ones who pick up the bits and (b) they do a fair bit of speeding themselves? Where was the Association of British Drivers?
For a summary of why scameras are so great, you can read the consortium's press release here. Unfortunately their case is so flimsy they have to resort to subterfuge. They claim that in 2009, 355 people died in crashes that involved someone exceeding the speed limit. Further down the page, this becomes “355 people were killed, and 1,689 seriously injured, because drivers or motorcyclists exceeded speed limits”. Spot the deliberate mistake? One moment someone speeding was “involved” in an accident, the next the entire accident was their fault – which, in case anyone reads this who enjoys a tenuous hold on the logical thought-process, is not necessarily the case. You might have been doing 32mph in a 30mph area, and witnessed an accident. That doesn't mean you caused it.
They then go on to make an even more tenuous claim, stating that “A further 220 people were killed, and almost 2,000 seriously injured in accidents where someone was travelling too fast for the conditions”. Not exceeding the speed limit, you notice, but still going too fast because it was snowing, or icy or something. No argument there; it's perfectly possible to be going too fast for the conditions, but still be inside the limit. But hold on ... they're using this as an argument for retaining speed cameras, aren't they? How does that work? Speed cameras only catch people exceeding the limit. They can't make judgements about road conditions and what constitutes a safe speed, and they can have no effect whatever on the 220 figure. It's dishonest and fraudulent to claim they can.
But if you dig a little deeper into the announcements of this consortium of liars and dissemblers, you find that this sort of untruth is a pretty regular occurrence with them. A couple of years ago they issued a press release saying that “drivers and riders who exceed speed limits cause more crashes, and kill and injure more people, than drivers who do not exceed speed limits. In 2008, 362 people were killed, and 1,935 seriously injured, because drivers or motorcyclists exceeded speed limits.” That first statement is very questionable indeed: research in Canada showed that drivers who habitually do 10kph more than the speed limit have only half the accidents of those who habitually do 10kph below the limit – see here. We have also seen on the internet a report from the Road Safety Laboratory in which they explain that a third of all the British drivers who always obey the speed limit have reported being involved in an accident in the last three years. Unfortunately we can no longer find the report; possibly it's been suppressed because it ran counter to the propaganda of the road safety industry.
What the actual statistics from the Department for Transport said for 2008 was that excess speed was recorded for 4.7% of vehicles in OTS based on the contributory factors. They don't say 4.7% of crashes were caused by exceeding the speed limit, simply that this was a contributory factor in 4.7% of accidents – not at all the same thing.
Incidentally, we're not advancing any argument about the advisability of speed limits or the culpability of drivers who ignore them, though we are deeply suspicious of the motives at work behind many speed limits: all too often, we suspect, local authorities impose unrealistic and unnecessary speed limits because they are the cheapest and easiest response to pressure from public and the media following a road accident. It's certainly true where we live.
Nor do we dispute the claim that pedestrians are far safer when traffic is moving at 30mph than they are when it's doing 50. We have actually looked at the figures from the Department for Transport, and they're indisputable. Which is why we were amazed to read the following statement in the Department for Transport's own report “Relationship between Speed and Risk of Fatal Injury: Pedestrians and Car Occupants, September 2010” ...
“Even though the risk of pedestrians being killed at 30 mph is relatively low, approximately half of pedestrian fatalities occur at this impact speed or below.”
How does that work, then? And what about all the so-called “road safety experts” who are so keen that we should all drive at 30 to safeguard jaywalking pedestrians who haven't the sense to get out of the road when a car comes? Are they lying? Why haven't they told us that even if we are all good boys and girls and stick to 30 all the time, it still won't have the desired effect because 50% of jaywalkers will still die?
“Well,” I can hear them bleat, “it would be worth bringing city traffic all over the country to a permanent grinding halt if it saves the life of just one drunk tottering homewards down the white line in the middle of the road.”
No, what annoys us is not the speed limits themselves so much as the garbage that is talked about them, as though they've been brought down from the Godhead on tablets of stone rather than having been dreamt up on the back of an envelope by a couple of spotty oiks in cheap suits who work for the local council.
But let's not leave all the number-crunching to those liars in the Consortium. Here are some figures for you: the number of people killed and seriously injured (KSI) in cars has fallen by 9%, according to DfT figures. In the year ending June 2010, 10,350 car occupant KSIs were recorded, compared with 11,424 in the year ending June 2009. In the same period, traffic flow decreased by 0.9% and the number of fatal and serious accidents on all roads dropped by 7%. And that's with an increasing number of scameras turned off. Pick the bones out of that.
In Portsmouth they lowered the limit from 30mph to 20mph on all residential streets, at a cost of £500,000. Now they've found that it has not brought any significant reduction in the number of accidents. The number of people killed or seriously injured on affected roads actually went up, not down, after the limit was lowered.
Here's a letter from Malcolm Heymer, a retired traffic engineer, in "On the Road", the newsletter of the Association of British Drivers ...
I recently read in a professional journal that "Road speeds are determined by road and traffic engineers." If only that were true!
Speed limits are now set by politicians with no understanding of their correct use, and road safety 'professionals' are increasingly less likely to have a highway or traffic engineering background, so do not understand the science of speed limit setting either. I worked in local government as a highway and traffic engineer for over 30 years, so I'm well aware of the pressure applied to elected councillors by vociferous residents for lower speed limits. Many of these demands are based on grossly exaggerated claims of vehicle speeds, which are not supported by speed surveys.
Without professional advice based on a sound knowledge of how speed limits should be used, it is not surprising that councillors often capitulate. Speed limits set below the 85th percentile lead to frustration, a high level of non-compliance, and even an increase in the highest speeds (I'll attest to that. Here in Suffolk when a blanket limit was imposed on the entire length of the A140, speeds actually increased in two different places, one of which was right through the middle of a village – GOS). Consequently, accidents can increase rather than fall.
Studies used to discredit the 85th percentile principle for speed limit setting, by claiming a relationship between average speeds and accident frequency, do not withstand statistical scrutiny.
The almost fanatical belief in the value of lower speed limits is illustrated by an example in J J Leeming's seminal book on road safety, “Road Accidents: Prevent or punish?”.
A parish council wanted a 30mph limit, which was resisted by Leeming (the County Surveyor) and the police. The council eventually forced the issue by installing street lighting, thus creating the speed limit. Accidents increased. When Leeming reported this to the parish council, the response was: "We don't care if accidents have increased, we have got our speed limit!"
Such irrational thinking and dismissal of evidence is still prevalent today. It's turning the safest drivers – those who would naturally travel at around the 85th percentile speed – into criminals if they continue to exercise their speed adjustment skills. The principle adopted by the Arizona Department of Transportation in regard to setting speed limits should be applied in Britain also: "The normally careful and competent actions of a reasonable individual should be considered legal."
And finally in this catalogue of stupidity and falsehood, a story from New Zealand. Four years ago in Wellington they reduced speed limits from 50 to 30km/h (30 to 20mph) to improve pedestrian safety in an area with a lot of bus traffic. Bus-pedestrian collisions increased. Apparently bus drivers drove slowly, obeying the new speed limit, so pedestrians took that as an invitation to walk into traffic.
And in America a Federal Highway Administration study found that painting crosswalks on busy, four-lane urban streets with traffic faster than 35mph increased pedestrian accidents. Pedestrians who used those crosswalks were more likely to get badly hurt than pedestrians who crossed similar streets without them. A recurring theme is the danger of making people feel safer than they really are, and that's exactly what happens with speed limits. We've all driven behind some w*nker religiously doing 28mph on a wide-open, empty road, happily enjoying the scenery or chatting to his passengers, obviously thinking smugly to himself “Look at me, I'm such a safe driver! Nothing bad can happen to me now!”
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