More bad news on the traffic front this week. The Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety, which advises MPs and the government, is flagging up the possibility that more and more council will introduce 20mph limits, and will police them with hundreds of average-speed cameras.
The Advisory Council proposes setting a target to reduce road deaths over the next decade to half the present level of 3,200 a year. This is, of course, a totally unrealistic target - all the best efforts of the increasingly draconian road safety industry over the last fifteen years or so have hardly reduced the casualty rates at all, so to expect to achieve a 50% saving is patently absurd.
Still, they don't really care what they do in the pursuit of this chimera. They're talking about "a blitz" on fat drivers, the sedentary, the elderly and the young. They say the government must even tackle poverty in its efforts to reduce road deaths, pointing out that children in the poorest areas are five times more likely to be killed in a road accident than those in the wealthiest areas (this may well be true - in the words of Paul Merton on Have I got news for you?, "why can't we just kill the working class?" That'd do the trick.).
Mind you, it's not all doom and gloom - there are little glimmerings of sanity in some parts of the country.
North Somerset Council has cut a third of its £300,000 contribution to the West of England Road Safety Partnership, after complaining the group had lost sight of its original purpose. It also blamed the Government for taking money generated by fines to swell central coffers, rather than ploughing it back into local safety schemes.
Councillors now want to spend their budget on other road projects, and have even threatened to cut all funding for speed cameras. North Somerset councillor Elfan Ap Rees, who is responsible for transport, insisted the cash could be better spent in other areas. He said: "Motorists have wised up to where the cameras are and slow down and then speed up again. The Government has also changed the rules. What used to happen was all the money brought in from fines was passed straight to the local authority and the road partnership. But it now goes to the Treasury which creams some off the top, so it is a money-making exercise."
Councillor Ap Rees warned that other councils could follow their lead and begin switching the focus of road safety strategies away from speed cameras. "We do not want to pull out of the partnership scheme," he said, "but it needs to listen to what we want to do because at the end of the day we are the employers."
It's not as if the Camera Partnership hasn't had plenty of notice that the Council was unhappy with it. As long ago as December 2003 a meeting of the Council's Strategic Planning Panel noted that there was a widespread public perception that the Safety Camera Partnership was more focused on raising income, rather than reducing accidents caused by speed; that the Partnership needed to address its public relations/communications strategy and to improve the way it presented itself to the public; that the Partnership's operational planning proposals failed in many instances to address the issues considered to be important by the public and by councillors; that there was no recognition by the Safety Camera Partnership that it had got some things wrong, and it appeared to blame everyone else; that camera sites should be reviewed on the basis of road safety not cost-recovery; and that the Partnership should be targeting evaders such as drivers without a car tax, licence or insurance.
The meeting concluded that if the Safety Camera Partnership chose not to take their recommendations then the Panel would recommend the Council to consider withdrawing co-operation and support, and possibly leaving the Safety Camera Partnership at the end of the contract period.
Needless to say the Camera Partnership has adopted the usual knee-jerk reaction, claiming that fewer cameras would put lives at risk in North Somerset (and probably hasten Global Warming, make polar bears extinct, encourage paedophiles and lead to an outbreak of promiscuous motoring by ordinary people who have no right to be using the roads because they're too stupid).
How wonderful! This is how local democracy is supposed to work, isn't it? Local people and their elected representatives making decisions about what they want to happen, and telling the paid officials to toe the line or else?
Oh, if only the rest of the country could be like this …
You can read more here, here and here.
The GOS says: Here in leafy Suffolk, the speed camera down the road has been set on fire. Ooh dear, how reprehensible.
It wasn't me, guv, honest!
Much as I hate the things, this kind of action has always seemed a touch too radical - and runs the risk of encouraging the traffic-nazis to introduce new, even more secretive means of dictating our behaviour. But you can see the vandals' point, can't you?
I am reminded that in Britain, peaceful, law-abiding, cradle-of-democracy, mother-of-parliaments Britain, there has never been a major constitutional reform that wasn't forced by some sort of public violence. If things get any worse, we may all be taking to the streets yet. You can work wonders with half a gallon of petrol and an old car tyre …
either on this site or on the World Wide Web.
This site created and maintained by PlainSite