Posts filed under 'traffic'
Recent research from swiftcover.com found that 80% of drivers want the new government to cut tax on petrol, improve congestion and help the environment, however not many believe that any of the parties will make a positive difference for drivers. Here are a few interesting statistics which they found:
• 50% of drivers don’t know which party would be best
• 11% of drivers believe a Conservative Government would be best for motorists
• 6% say a Labour Government would be best
• 3% feel the Liberal Democrats would be best for drivers
• 2% say the Green Party would be best
The survey also showed how strongly drivers feel about change:
• 80% of drivers want the tax on petrol cut
• 43% want a reduction in road tax
• 61% want the government to get tougher on uninsured drivers
• 43% want greater action to punish dangerous drivers
Hopefully the new government will start to take more interest in motorists concerns and start taking positive action for drivers.
May 7th, 2010
For all those speed camera haters it brings me great pleasure to announce that more of the dreaded Yellow boxes could be switched off - Bournemouth are considering following in Swindon’s footsteps and removing its fixed speed cameras according to a recent report by the Bournemouth Daily Echo.
A committee has been set up to discuss the necessity of the cameras just two weeks after Swindon became the first town in the UK to turn off five of them because the council claimed the £320,000 maintenance bill was too high.
There are 20 speed cameras in the south coast town of Bournemouth - which has a Conservative council - and the committee are said to be investigating whether or not the cameras actually help prevent accidents or reduce car speeds.
So it could only be a matter of time before Bournemouth’s motorists start celebrating the demise of the speed camera.
August 18th, 2009
Last year the Department for Transport announced that some 3,000 people were still being killed on roads in Britain and a further 28,000 seriously injured.
In a bid to reduce the number of accidents on our roads the government looks set to reduce the national speed limit from 60mph to 50mph on many of our roads. Jim Fitzpatrick, the roads minister, is quoted in The Times as saying:
There will be some in the driving lobby who think this is a further attack and a restriction on people’s freedom,” he said. “But when you compare that to the fact we are killing 3,000 people a year on our roads, it would be irresponsible not to do something about it. I’m sure that the vast majority of motorists would support the proposals.
Other measures that the goverment is also looking at include imposing six penalty points on motorists who break speed limits ‘excessively’ and punishments for those who use their mobile phone while driving. The Daily Mail also reports that as a fifth of all road deaths are caused by drivers on illegal substances, there is also the suggestion that a ‘drug-drive limit’ may be introduced.
March 11th, 2009
Over a year ago Swiftcover were openly supporting Peter Roberts’, a member of the Association of British Drivers, petition to scrap the vehicle tracking and road pricing policy that was being proposed. Nearly two million people felt strongly enough to sign an online petition at Downing Street. The good news is that in Ruth Kelly’s announcement on road charging on the 4th March there was no mention on this policy so the petition appears to have had the desired effect.
But there is still the very real, troubling and frustrating problem of congestion on our roads. So what have Ruth Kelly and her team come up with? Well the solution appears to lie in the United States. Ruth Kelly announced that drivers are going to be given the option of paying to use a faster lane and thus avoiding the traffic congestion in the other lanes. The plan is to either use the hard shoulder at peak commuter times or add more lanes to our motorways. The cost of building the extra lanes would be considerable, disruptive and take a long time so the use of the hard shoulder is the cheaper and quicker option. Ruth Kelly described this solution as “a nifty over-taking manoeuvre past stationary traffic”. The Times reports that in America they have similar lanes which are dubbed ‘Lexus Lanes’ as they are perceived to only be affordable to the wealthier driver.
According to BBC News, sensors will detect the traffic build up which will then trigger signs telling the drivers to slow down and use the extra lane. The natural concern would be emergency services getting through to accidents so emergency refuges would be set up at 500m intervals.
The other solution is to have car sharing lanes. The Daily Mail reports that special cameras will be installed which can monitor the number of people travelling in a vehicle. If someone is travelling on their own in their car, they will have to pay to use a lane that is reserved for vehicles with two or more occupants.
Miss Kelly defended her new policy, “There is a compelling argument for car-share or charged lanes, which have been used for some time in the U.S. In order to get maximum benefit, access to car-share lanes is limited to vehicles carrying passengers, or single drivers willing to pay a toll. I intend to explore the possibility for taking a similar approach here where we are adding new capacity”.
March 5th, 2008
The government has recently announced that they are going to roll out the use of the hard-shoulder on motorways at peak driving times. After a year of testing on the M42 the scheme is going to be soon extended to other motorways including the M1, M4, M6, M25 and M40.
The announcement raises a few questions
including whether the use of these previously empty lanes will hinder the work of the emergency services (although The Highways Agency insists it won’t) and, as claimed by Friends of the Earth, whether this “motorway widening by stealth” will simply attract more cars and cause even more carbon dioxide emissions.
Can the two battles - one against gridlock, the other against environmental damage - both be won? And will lives be lost if, say, ambulances or helicopters aren’t able to reach an accident scene because of a blocked hard shoulder.
Whatever the government’s priorities one thing is for sure: allowing us to use the hard shoulder is a less expensive option than stumping up the money to add an extra new lane….
November 2nd, 2007
There’s been a lot of talk recently about the speed limit on residential roads. First, the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety (PACTS) came out last week and said they were in favour of dropping the speed limit from 30mph to 20mph, and that this would halve the number of road deaths.
Then London Mayor Ken Livingstone reiterated that he would like to see 20mph limit introduced in every residential street in London - and said that trials would begin next year using wireless cameras - a move that will mean less time and money spent on road humps. Money aside, there are other potential benefits too, since roads should be safer for pedestrians and cyclists.
So far so good, unless you are the Association of British Drivers (ABD) who claim that 20mph will see more accidents.
The reason? Well, according to Nigel Humphries, ABD spokesperson: “Concentration, alertness, and observation are fundamental factors required for safe driving, which are maximised by the driver setting a speed appropriate for the prevailing road conditions. Forcing drivers to travel below an appropriate speed is therefore detrimental to road safety.” Apparently, the concern is that drivers will spend so much more time reading their speedometer to ensure that they are not breaking the 20mph limit that they will be more likely to not be looking at the road ahead.
Opposing these views, some might argue that drivers get a feel for the speed they are travelling at and will quickly know what 20mph feels like or that it only takes a fraction of a second to glance at one’s speed. Others might argue that the ticketing process can allow for a 2-3mph margin of error, and that in any case statistics show that at 20mph, the results of being hit by a car are far less likely to be serious as at 30mph (serious injury likely) or 40mph (death likely). Yet then, ABD come back with more concerns namely that “a 20 mph speed limit will cause more congestion and increase vehicle emissions” and that (anti-speed cam lobbyists) “Safe Speed has already pointed out that DfT figures for 2006 show that there were more killed or seriously injured casualties in 20 mph zones than in 30 mph zones.”
They say that in war, the first casualty is the truth - and as the residential speed limit debate rages it will be interesting to see what issues are drawn into the battleground. Saving lives and money sounds good, but will this be at the expense of the environment? Doubtless we are likely to see all manner of statistics bandied about in the coming months. Before it gets too out of hand though, it might be worth noting that average car speeds in the UK have just been are reported to be amongst the slowest in Europe (London at 11.8mph is the slowest with Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Bristol and Belfast all averaging under 20mph).
In this scenario, you have to wonder whether an official reduction from 30 to 20mph would actually make much difference!
October 25th, 2007
An interesting post on the Telegraph website by their Transport Editor, David Millward. He reports that Government’s speed camera programme could be in jeopardy because its casualty calculations could be flawed.
It seems the Department for Transport (DfT) is going to look again at how it works out the number of serious road injuries because of a huge difference between the statistics over the period 1996-2004 from the police (a large drop, down 32%) and those from hospitals (a slight increase, around 1%).
So which is it? More or less?
Well, no-one seems quite sure because whilst the police record their statistics using individual judgement (without knowing the extent of any injuries or indeed whether a person is admitted to hospital), hospital figures are, by contrast, just based on numbers of patients admitted into wards. Later this month then, the DfT will reveal whether or not they will switch to hospital figures.
Now, if they do decide to do this, this may well influence road safety policy and the use of speed cameras since, as a former Met. Police head of traffic notes, in Millward’s article:
“We have put our entire road safety programme into a box marked speed cameras…the figures were the justification for the policy and if they are called into doubt the whole thing is undermined.”
This news may well cheer many of the millions of motorists who have been caught by speed cameras and who are collectively paying out more around £114m a year in fines.
Whilst for some this might sound like a positive thing - y’know, lots of people drove too fast and were lucky enough to perhaps only have to pay a small financial price rather than the higher price of injuring or killing themselves or others through dangerous driving - many other people regard speed cameras as being little more than a money-making exercise with cameras not only sited at ‘dangerous hot-spots’ but just about anywhere and everywhere the authorities can put them.
Furthermore, according to the Safe Speed campaign, speed cameras actually promote dangerous driving, due to the stop-start braking and acclerating patterns they cause and their view is that Government policy on road safety would be better directed elsewhere. On the site, founder Paul Smith says “Cameras give us legal compliance targets, not safety targets. We now have a nation of drivers concentrating on compliance rather than safety.”
Well, we’ll have to wait and see what happens regarding the re-evaluation of the official figures and what that will mean. It is a difficult area for sure: despite the grey area over injuries, the DfT says that independent research shows safety cameras help to save around 100 lives per year and that - serious injuries aside - the actual number of road fatalities has fallen by 11% since the mid 1990s.
It seems Safe Speed and the Government will have to agree to disagree, but I do applaud their challenge on assumed wisdom regarding speed cameras. We all want safer driving and the more thinking that goes into helping bring this about the better.
September 18th, 2007
This week the Campaign for Better Transport highlighted figures from the Department of Transport which predicted by 2031 there will be some 5.7m more cars on the road than there are now. That’s 21% more or, apparently, enough cars parked end-to-end to fill a 52 lane motorway between London and Edinburgh. That’s quite a traffic jam…
…and it’s quite an apposite image because other forecasts predict that traffic overall will actually increase at an even greater rate, rising by 31% by 2025 alone.
If you’ve not heard of the Campaign for Better Transport, you won’t be too surprised to learn that it is a campaigning organisation that aims to not just improve public transport, but also reduce traffic and tackle climate change. You can read more about their campaigns on their site . It may seem odd that Swiftcover.com would promote these given that more drivers might mean more car insurance policies, but since it also follows that more cars and more traffic also mean more jams, longer journeys, more stress and more environmental damage, you can’t really quibble with their aims. Indeed, you might want to support them!
You may also like to visit www.travelometer.co.uk - a simple website powered by Swiftcover.com which will help you discover whether or not depending on where you live, you really could give up your car and rely on the public transport in your area. It might seem fanciful to leave the car at home for some journeys, but of course it can be quicker and less stressful sometimes to do so.
September 12th, 2007
