Speed or greed?

September 18th, 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.

Entry Filed under: speeding, traffic, cars