Posted By John Murgatroyd
"Yes, but when there's an initiative to make offenders (speeders) pay for their own control its seized on by the black & red-tops and the man in the pub as a huge conspiracy against motorists. The idea of CSPs was that people who didn't speed past cameras wouldn't have to pay for them, but once the Daily Wail (which we know has all our interests at its dear black heart) came up with the stealth tax tag that initiative was doomed"


It was doomed the moment the operation was taken out of the hands of the police and put into the hands of the "safety camera partnerships", which is another word for people who would be unemployed except for fate. It was not helped when cameras started arriving at spots that hadn't had an accident for years.
Other minor oddities that helped drive them into disfavour are things like 95% of acidents happening at speeds below the limit at the accident area (the speed of the vehicle MAY have been to high for the conditions, but THAT will not have been captured by the camera anyway)
Speed cameras have NOT reduced accidents, nor will they EVER, because many are the result of one-off conditions. They MAY have reduced accidents at the site of the unit but nobody will ever know for sure because of the one-sided presentation of the statistics by the scps'. Certainly, they have damaged relations between the motoring public and the police (unjustifiably, since they frequently have no say where the cameras are sited)

No, speed cameras have detracted from other ways of reducing accidents and from driver education. And they don't work at reducing accidents, as I have said.

Posted By J Knight
John,

Sorry, absolutely disagree with most of that post; the evidence seems to point in the opposite direction to your assertions. Simply using caps for emphasis won't add to the logic or weight of your statements.

and one of my favourite bugbears is the finding you quote that 95% of accidents happen at 'legal' speeds. Since a) most drivers apparently have no idea what speed they are traveling at since they all know that looking at the speedo is dangerous and b) research into actual speeds on roads consistently indicates that upwards of one half of vehicles (more on some roads) is travelling at more than the limit; we are left with two major objections to the finding. The most important of which is that if around half of cars are driving at above the limit, how come only 5% of those in accidents are above the limit? Does this mean that driving above the speed limit makes a driver 90% less like to have an accident?

On this point, the court in the recent trial of the man who killed the group of cyclists was told that he was not speeding. The source for this argument? The drivers' testimony; see point a) above. Now I don't know whether he was speeding or not, neither does the court, and probably neither does he. The leader of the cycling group thought he was. But this will now go down in the stats as another accident where speed was not involved; even though nobody actually knows for sure and there is some testimony that it was.

And the other anti-camera arguments you quote only serve to enhance the point I was making; they are all taken verbatim from black-top tabloids, and are always piggy-backed onto the stealth tax argument,

John

Posted By John Murgatroyd
"Sorry, absolutely disagree with most of that post; the evidence seems to point in the opposite direction to your assertions. Simply using caps for emphasis won't add to the logic or weight of your statements"

Probably not. But the figures I quote are not mine, not plucked out of a hat and not fiction.
They come from research by the transport research laboratory, analysing accidents over a period of time.
You too can find them by using google, along with a whole load of websites, including various safety camera partnership sites.
I did remember the cyclist accidents, since it was mentioned ad-infinitum on a cycling website, but since the accident involved a death it would have been investigated at length, and in considerable depth, by the police accident investigators.
The facts are this: speed cameras have not reduced accidents overall, and the statistics quoted by the scps' cannot be relied upon, if only because mine cannot either. Speed kills, runs the slogan. Quite right, very few people have been killed by stationary vehicles. However, speed in excess of the speed limits is not responsible for the vast majority of accidents, and as such speed cameras will not reduce those accidents.

Posted By Pete48
Speed Cameras catch people breaking the law which then provides evidence for those people to be punished according to that law. That is all they do-nothing more. They are inanimate objects programmed to carry out that function.
I accept that they are part of modern life but I do not support their use because they are a simple measure designed to make us adopt a certain behaviour in just one area of driving safely at a certain point in time and space. As long as we do not get caught, they do little or nothing to make us adapt our behaviour toward the required standard at all other times. Even when caught, we will return to the same behaviour as soon as the personal threat is removed.
So as for their impact on accidents, it seems logical to me that in some places they will have an impact on accident numbers and/or severity. In others, none whatsoever and quite possibly in others they may cause accidents, so what? Many other road safety measures have similar profiles. (e.g high reflective signs in rural unlit areas that cause excessive glare at night)
How much money is generated-exactly the amount of failure to comply with the required behaviour.
Is it easier to comply or fail? Failure is much easier since there are too many other factors that influence our behaviour away from the desired behaviour. That makes it feel unfair and motivates challenges against a system perceived as penalty without human intervention.
Who gets the money? The state, that is the way that fines work in this country.
Is financial penalty the best way to change behaviour? No of course not, but blame is the name of the game here not corrective action.
Would a "dedicated to road safety" police presence on our roads improve road safety? More likely than not; provided there were enough of them trained and focused on that aspect and not just common user coppers.

Keep dodging!

Posted By Sean Fraser
Since we are starting to quote sources:

http://www.thinkroadsafe...ns/slowdown/slowdown.htm

Says it all really.

Posted By John Murgatroyd
Which makes no difference to me at all.
I drive three vehicles. A van, a car and a motorcycle.
My driving licence is totally point-free and has been for nearly 20 years. Which, bearing in mind a total annual mileage of over 45000 (all three vehicles), is not too bad. Funnily enough, I have to send them a photo of my driving licence every now and then....no points, you see !
The speed cameras don't catch the drivers who don't indicate, they don't catch the drunks, they don't catch the tailgaters, they don't catch those without licences and whose cars are not registered to them, they don't catch the incompetent driver who cannot cope with traffic and they don't catch the nutters or uninsured. They catch those who are going faster than the signed limit. They won't stop the vast majority of accidents because they happen below the speed limit.
Oh, and theme 5/76 is better. Note that road traffic accidents provide the majority of "work related" deaths each year. Note also that rt accident deaths are much higher in the young (16-19) age group as a percentage.
Speeding is not the primary cause of many accidents, excess or inappropriate speed is.