More speed cameras to go

[User]

 

[germanicdogman]

one easy solution privatization and hey presto all cameras working.
also they could fit all traffic lights with cams too,i am sure it would make a fortune,

 

[subaqua]

what annoys me about speed cameras is the eejits who drive up to em at 10mph over the limit yank on the brakes to get under the limit and then accelerate like a tw@ away from them. causes nothing but jams .

now average speed cams they are the way to go.

 

[ufkacbln]

what annoys me about speed cameras is the eejits who drive up to em at 10mph over the limit yank on the brakes to get under the limit and then accelerate like a tw@ away from them. causes nothing but jams .

now average speed cams they are the way to go.

According to the ABD the same happens, only at the "exits" where drivers dramatically slow / stop and dawdle so they don't set off the second set!

Never occurs that driving sensibly would negate the need for this braking


Mind you my favourite ABD claim was that average speed cameras make drivers tired!

 

[slowmotion]

I'm really not wading in with a big wooden spoon. I'm really not. I very dimly remember reading an article that said that the TrL research showed that "excessive speed" was the cause of about 7% of KSI accidents, but that this somehow became 30% when spun by special interest groups and the SpeedCam industry.
I have no views on the matter, but can somebody point me towards that article.

Thanks.

 

[slowmotion]

Speeding as a recorded cause

1. Traffic and Road Research paper LR 323 published in 1998 found that “excessive” speed was recorded as a contributory factor in only 7.3% of accidents. Despite that Marie Taylor of the Traffic and Road Research Lab used the data to claim that 30% of accidents were speed related. To do that she combined the following: (1) Failure to judge another person’s path or speed, 10.7%, (2) excessive speed (includes breaking the speed limit) 7.3%, (3) Following too closely 4.1%, (4) Slippery road 3.0%, (5) Aggressive driving 1.4%, (6) Weather, e.g. mist or sleet 0.8%, (7) Other local conditions 0.4%, Total 27.7%. The combination was referred to as “inappropriate speed”. That was allowed to morph, in the minds of the policy makers and the public, to “speeding” (meaning breaking the speed limit) and to 30% when in reality breaking the limit was present in less than 7% of accidents.

Hey, Bingo!

 

[Norm]

And even the 7.3% is only "excessive", which is not the same as "over the limit".

I think they make a great safety tool, I despise the crap that surrounds them. Cameras make their own case when installed appropriately, they don't need all the bull and lies from the "safety camera partnerships" which just gives unnecessary ammunition to the likes of the ABD.

 

[mark barker]

I don't think they work at all. I have no firm evidence to support my theory, but I know plenty of my friends have points on their licences from speed cameras. If the cameras worked then surely they would only get caught once and the rest of my friends would learn from their mistakes and slow down. But they don't.

 

[Dan B]

Driver impatience at the end of SPECS-enforced stretches of road does seem to be a real consideration, in my limited experience. If you don't accelerate to NSL in the space of 20 yards and one second flat, the driver behind will tailgate and flash lights at you until you do. But that's the driver behind's problem, not the specs cameras

We need insurance-mandated rear-facing video cameras with ANPR and automatic youtube upload...

 

[marinyork]

They catch people not concentrating, there are signposts warning that they are ahead, the cameras are highly visible and then there is all the road markings which are a real give away, and all that is additional to the speed limit that they should be adhering to. I would charged them with "Driving without due care and attention"

I think it's just a reflection that many drivers don't really pay very much attention to the speedometer at all, especially in urban areas. I take the angry 'I don't want to have to be watching the speedometer all the time' for code that I hardly ever look at the speedometer and I feel slightly guilty about it now you mention it, but I don't want to admit any failings as I'm an excellent driver.

 

[John the Monkey]

And even the 7.3% is only "excessive", which is not the same as "over the limit".

15mph more than posted limit was the definition of "excessive" in the 2004 report Road Peace quote.

I think they make a great safety tool, I despise the crap that surrounds them. Cameras make their own case when installed appropriately, they don't need all the bull and lies from the "safety camera partnerships" which just gives unnecessary ammunition to the likes of the ABD.

Even the RAC Foundation thinks they improve road safety, for pitys sake. It's not about that though, it's about having the temerity to demand that drivers obey the law.

 

[turnout]

Speeding as a recorded cause

1. Traffic and Road Research paper LR 323 published in 1998 found that “excessive” speed was recorded as a contributory factor in only 7.3% of accidents. Despite that Marie Taylor of the Traffic and Road Research Lab used the data to claim that 30% of accidents were speed related. To do that she combined the following: (1) Failure to judge another person’s path or speed, 10.7%, (2) excessive speed (includes breaking the speed limit) 7.3%, (3) Following too closely 4.1%, (4) Slippery road 3.0%, (5) Aggressive driving 1.4%, (6) Weather, e.g. mist or sleet 0.8%, (7) Other local conditions 0.4%, Total 27.7%. The combination was referred to as “inappropriate speed”. That was allowed to morph, in the minds of the policy makers and the public, to “speeding” (meaning breaking the speed limit) and to 30% when in reality breaking the limit was present in less than 7% of accidents.

Hey, Bingo!

Oh! TRL 323!

That's an old speedophile myth that clings on in peoples' memories.

Needless to say, like much of the anti-camera rhetoric, it's a pack of lies from start to finish.

How dangerous is speed? The ABD’s lonely ‘factoid’ and the real world. From [1]

The Association of British Drivers (ABD) likes to cite a Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) report as a source for the true contribution of speed to road crashes and casualties.




ABD members use the TRL report to contradict the ‘mainstream’ figure indicating that at least one-third of crashes are speed-related. According to the ABD, the TRL report proves that the true figure is under 5%. This is the only source of such a low figure. The ABD and a few motor lobby journalists are the only people to use it, generally to support the argument that ‘it is not speed but bad driving that is dangerous’. The ABD especially likes to use the figure in letters to local papers where highway authorities are implementing speed control measures in response to deaths and serious injuries or local demands for safer communities.

The Slower Speeds Initiative wrote to the Transport Research Laboratory concerning the ABD’s use of the study. The TRL referred us to reports on speed. This is because the TRL study cited by the ABD, TRL Report 323, concerns ‘A new system for recording contributory factors in road accidents’. TRL 323 is not a study of crash causation. It is a study of how to collect data. It was not designed to draw statistically reliable conclusions about the causes of road crashes. The accidents included in the three month study were not a statistically representative sample of all accidents. There is no basis for using the study to generalise about the speed-crash relationship.

The very low figure quoted by the ABD comes from a table which showed pairings of factors: In 4.04% of crashes recorded in the study, the person filling in the form paired 'excessive speed' (nowhere defined) with 'loss of control of vehicle'. 4.04% is only a subset of all speed related crashes recorded in the study. This use of statistics has been described by a professional statistician as ‘extremely naughty’ and by the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions as ‘mischievous’. DETR go on to say ‘it is interesting that none of the many other TRL reports on speed and accident risk have been mentioned by those using this report as the basis for their argument.’

In order for ABD's preferred interpretation to be factually accurate, Newton's Laws of Motion would have to be wrong. Overturning 300+ years of scientific consensus is going to need some fairly compelling evidence. The TRL 323 methodology for recording contributory factors simply does not ask the questions which would reveal the inherent dangers of speed:

• Would the factor still have been present if the driver, and/or all the other drivers involved, had been driving more slowly?
• IF YES, Would the factor still have resulted in a crash?
• IF YES, Would the crash still have been so severe?

It is obvious to almost everyone (with the exception of libertarian motorists with a soap box to drive) that higher speeds reduce the amount of time any driver has to respond to the unexpected and that higher speeds increase the force of any impact. The importance of reduced speeds to crash prevention and reducing crash severity is no mystery. In fact, the TRL study beloved of the ABD and its fellow-travellers, indirectly acknowledges the overriding importance of speed:

‘Virtually the only factor that road accidents have in common is that all would have been avoided if those involved had known with certainty, a few seconds in advance, that an accident was about the occur.’ Lower speeds provide those few extra seconds.

Among the TRL reports the ABD does not like to cite is TRL 421, ‘The effects of drivers’ speed on the frequency of road accidents’ published in March 2000. Unlike TRL 323, this study was designed to discover the speed-crash relationship. The authors looked at 300 sections of road, made 2 million observations of speed and got 10,000 drivers to complete questionnaires. They found that

• the faster the traffic moves on average, the more crashes there are (and crash frequency increases approximately with the square of average traffic speed)
• the larger the spread of speeds around the average, the more crashes there are

Significantly for the ABDs argument, and for the rest of us, they also found that:

• drivers who choose speeds above the average on some roads tend also to do so on all roads
• higher speed drivers are associated with a significantly greater crash involvement than are slower drivers

For these reasons they conclude that the speed of the fastest drivers (those travelling faster than the average for the road) should be reduced. The study confirmed what is described as a ‘robust general rule’ relating crash reductions to speed reductions: for every 1 mph reduction average speed, crashes are reduced by between 2-7%. More specifically, the crash reduction figure is around

• 6% for urban roads with low average speeds
• 4% for medium speed urban roads and lower speed rural main roads
• 3% for higher speed urban roads and rural main roads

To put the dangerousness of speed into perspective, how many drivers care about or would notice a 2mph reduction in their average speed? Yet, averaged across the entire road network, a mere 2mph reduction in average speeds would prevent more than 200 deaths and 3,500 serious casualties a year.





The authors of TRL 421 suggest that this target (about a sixth of the overall speed related casualty figure) is a ‘reasonable minimum’ to aim for.




More importantly they use it to show ‘the sensitivity of accident numbers to a small change in average speed’. In other words, speeds that might not seem excessive.







Speeds that TRL323’s methodology wouldn’t even record.








http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk/wiki/ABD's_Lonely_Factoid

 

[StuartG]

There is a big difference between in excessive speed being a contributory cause to a collision and the effect of speed on KSI.

If you reduce maximum speed limit from 30 to 20 in London residential areas then the best figure we have is 40% reduction in KSI. Collisions are avoided which would otherwise have happened because the driver has time to stop/avoid. At 30 mph "excessive" speed would not even have been recorded as a contributory factor.

Also when speed is not a direct contributory factor to a collision it is a mighty big contributor to the severity of the collision.

So be very careful of using the 7% figure to say controlling speeding is not that important - like Hammond. The man whom logic passed by ... at very excessive speed!

 

[turnout]

There is a big difference between in excessive speed being a contributory cause to a collision and the effect of speed on KSI.

If you reduce maximum speed limit from 30 to 20 in London residential areas then the best figure we have is 40% reduction in KSI.

That's a pretty robust rule:

Typically within Hull, 20 mph zones have achieved reductions in injury accidents of:

• — Total accidents -56 per cent

• — Killed & seriously injured accidents -90 per cent

• — Accidents involving child casualties -64 per cent

• — All pedestrian accidents -54 per cent

• — Child pedestrian accidents -74 per cent.

http://www.publicati...557/557ap80.htm

 

[summerdays]

If some people are anti speed camera then I propose the alternative - increase the fine if you are caught speeding 4 fold (or what ever figure is appropriate), and use it to fund traffic police directly so that it is sufficient to become entirely self financing with the money ring fenced for further traffic police or other schemes relating to improving safety on the road. (And still keep the points system etc).