Swindon is the town that, you may recall, caused a fuss by deciding to switch off all its "safety" cameras (speed cameras to you & me). Now, these "safety" cameras are there to make the roads safer, right? So by switching them off, Swindon will have made its roads more dangerous, right? So there will have been more accidents since they turned them off than there were before, right?
A Wiltshire town that elected to get rid of its speed cameras has the safest roads in Britain, a report has revealed.
Ooops.
Swindon, which scrapped its speed cameras in July 2009 to save on council costs and trial other traffic calming measures, has just two accidents per thousand registered vehicles on it roads - the lowest rate in the UK. The town became the first English local authority to decommission fixed cameras, although it decided to maintain mobile cameras used by police.
I seem to remember writing a post a few short days ago bemoaning the willingness of the BBC to over-interpret some completely unreliable data from Oxfordshire's Safety Camera Partnership.
I may have made a silly mistake. I assumed that the data, although obviously unreliable as it was based on a hopelessly small sample, was true. I assumed that the Safety Camera Partnership was staffed by honest civil servants doing what they genuinely believed to be the best course of action for road safety. I assumed that the SCP staff were not lying spin doctors peddling untruths in order to whip up public sentiment in a desperate attempt to regain their budget and line their pockets at the expense of taxpayers.
My assumptions may have been right. However, consider this. When the local rag asked for the data underlying the claims of rising numbers of speeding drivers, the SCP said that
"those figures were not readily to hand"
which is, of course, odd given that a few days earlier the SCP had issued a press release that relied on them.
The reporters did manage to get hold of them, though, which is even odder when you consider that the figures were "not to hand". In the case of the camera at which the SCP said speeding offences had risen 18%,
speed offences actually fell by four per cent [...] during five days of monitoring since the switch-off on August 1, compared to offences committed between 2008 and 2009.
On the M40 this morning, who do we see? Why, it is the boys in blue, upholders of our laws and preserver of our safety on the roads.
But, I fear, an accident is about to happen? My speedometer seems to be indicating 90-ish. Surely I must be about to ram this conveyance of all that is legal, for they will not be exceeding the 70 limit?
Err, no; here we see the situation a moment later:
I seem to be still behind them. How can that be? Let us watch, and wait:
Yep, still behind them, still at about 90. Gosh, the police van must be doing 90mph?!
I plan to keep these photos on my phone in case a police officer gets shirty and tells me that speed kills, that exceeding a speed limit places you and all around you in danger. Feel free to do the same. Because the thing is, he was perfectly safe; his driving was polite and considerate, and I did (indeed) felt sufficiently safe around him to whip out the iPhone....
I have been mulling this one one for a while. This is quite a bold claim, I realise, but if we press ahead with the reduction in the National Speed Limit (NSL) to 50mph then people are going to die as a result.
In case anyone needs clarification, the NSL is a default speed limit. Unless some other rule applies, then the limit is the NSL - currently 60mph. A different limit of 50, 40, 30 or 20 can be signposted, or a 30 limit can be assumed from the presence of lamp-posts, or a 70 limit can be assumed when on a motorway. In all other locations, the NSL applies.
So the discussion is clearly limited to non-urban roads; urban streets will default to 30 unless signed otherwise. Non-urban roads will typically be very variable, but generally break down into three types. The most common type is fairly straight, not so straight that you see to safely overtake, but not so bendy so as to cause concern. These sections are typically interspersed with shorter sections that either require a much slower speed to negotiate, or which offer an excellent view and allow an overtake if the vehicle in front is not making progress.
First, let's deal with the slow bits - the danger points. At the moment, these are marked. Some will have 30 or 40 limits posted, some will have other signposts. Many, however, have signs indicating a 50 limit. All of these signs will, over time, be removed. This means, in effect, that less warning will be given to drivers of the forthcoming hazard. Drivers will receive information from officialdom that the forthcoming stretch is no more dangerous than the one they have been negotiating for the last few minutes; this information will be false. There will be accidents as a result.
If you have a hazard ahead, it is not difficult to realise that reducing the palette of information for drivers is not going to help.
Then there is the question of the quick bits - the overtaking sections. Human nature is such that drivers who have been negotiating these same roads for years (decades, even) at 60 will not be pleased to be stuck behind someone firmly sticking to an indicated 50mph - often equal to an actual 45mph*. So they will be keener to overtake. When an overtaking section arrives, there will be more pressure to go for it. I have also observed that there is a class of driver who always drives at "limit minus x". Their speed on NSL roads seems to drop from 45-50 to 35-40 when the limit drops from 60-40. This is frankly ridiculous; a road section that is objectively safe at 60 then has a queue sitting at 35 - this is often the source of a perfectly reasonable desire to overtake. I have, in fact, noticed more overtaking manoeuvres now that many formerly NSL roads have a 50 limit. There will also be some drivers that will accept more marginal overtaking locations; create a slow-moving roadblock and you create a queue of people who want to get past. Not all of them will have time to do so at the safe spots.
Overtaking can be safe, and can be wise. It can also be very dangerous. It is not difficult to realise that placing more pressure on some drivers to get past is not going to help.
I'm not making this up, either. A long open road near to me used to be NSL, but about three years ago - upset at the rate of deaths on the road - they put up a big yellow sign telling us to be careful because 60 people died or were serously injured over the 5 mile stretch over the previous 3 years. They also dropped the limit to 50. The sign has just been updated again. 93 died or were seriously injured** over the last 3 years. That is, roughly speaking, an additional death (or serious injury) every month or so.
I'll just repeat that, because it frightened me. An additional death (or serious injury) every month or so. Somehow, I don't think it was the big yellow sign that caused this.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------- *Speedometers are allowed to be up to 10% optimistic, but must not under-read. Engineering-led manufacturers therefore set them to over-read by 5%. Marketing-led manufacturers set them to over-read by 10%.
**The original version of this post simply said "died"; Steve Jones commented that this would be very surprising and, on that point, I have to agree with him. I'll go back and check; the sign may well have said deaths or serious injuries, rather than just deaths. In my defence, I was driving past (!) and therefore my attention was (and needed to be) elsewhere. Nevertheless, I should have spotted that. Until I can check it, I think it would be best if the post referred to the more likely of the two possibilities.
At the secondary school that I attended, there was a very large rule book. So large, in fact, that after Her Majesty's Inspectors visited, they reported that discipline was too strict and that the boys should be allowed to relax more. According to legend, the Head put the report in the bin, and academic standards remained high until his retirement.
Anyway, one of those many rules was that although boys could use the classrooms during breaks, these were to be quiet areas in which boys were to remain seated. Effectively, we were not allowed to be standing in classrooms during breaks. This seemed most unfair to me while I was younger, but when I became a prefect I realised just how very useful this rule was. There would be many times when, as a prefect, you would walk into a classroom having heard the unmistakable sounds of commotion or bullying going on inside. Naturally, this would come to an abrupt halt when you walked in, but it was always obvious who was culpable. The problem would lie in determining exactly what they were culpable of, in a way that would stand up to subsequent discussion with the deputy head if the lines that you issued were called into question. What would not be denied, however, was that they were standing up. It is very difficut to punch someone if they are sitting a desk that is just out of arms length. Not impossible, I admit, but more effort than the average bully will make.
So, as a rule it was extremely useful and allowed us to do a lot of good. By the time I left that school, I had changed my mind completely and thought it was a good rule.
Since then, I have changed my mind again and have concluded that it was a very bad rule. Less scrupulous prefects could easily use as an instrument of oppression, because you could "do" almost anyone for it if you tried hard enough. It is, after all, somewhat of a challenge to enter or leave a room via a door, whilst remaining seated. It was a rule that had to be enforced with tact and discretion; done so, the results were very good. Without those key features, it engendered a feeling that authority was there to give the prefects something fun to do, something to allow them to express their inner Adolf - and that could be very corrosive and (in the end) counterproductive.
Which brings me to the subject of speed cameras. Speed limits are necessarily arbitrary; it is trite to point out that a speed which is safe on a dry clear day is wholly unsafe on a foggy icy night, but that the speed limit remains the same. Nevertheless, a good traffic officer can usually spot a bad driver, and those driving badly also often exceed a speed limit at some point. So an officer can ticket or arrest for speeding where he can see a bad driver, avoiding the need to prove dangerous driving.
Again, this is a rule which can do a lot of good when enforced with tact and discretion. The problem is that we forgot that aspect of speed limits when we introduced speed cameras. We forgot that speed cameras enforce the rule mechanically, catching all and sundry.
Now, I'm not condoning speeding, nor am I condoning a pick-and-mix approach to the law - abiding by the ones you like and ignoring the rest. Nor, however, am I going to be all holier than thou and suggest that I would not exceed any speed limit; no safe driver that I know abides by each and every limit at all times. The difference between them and a dangerous driver is which limits they exceed, when they exceed them, and by how much. The drivers that I see who will clearly never exceed a limit tend to be pootling along at 30 on NSL roads with no awareness of who or what is around them, no feeling for the dynamic qualities of their car, and no real degree of control over their car. To me, they seem very dangerous indeed (feel free to disagree with me, but that is my opinion).
Nor do I think that all speed cameras are bad. Where the necessary discretion can be exercised fully in the decision to place the camera at the location concerned, then there does not seem to be a problem. Put in other words, if the location is one where only idiots would exceed the limit, then the camera will only catch idiots. Some camera locations meet this requirement, and (in my opinon) are a positive contribution to safety. Most do not. Even for those that do, though, they are not a replacement for all enforcement as there will be icy, foggy nights when idiots will abide by the limit and need to be caught by other means.
The majority of cameras do, I think, make our roads less safe. Just as with the "no standing" rule, I have noticed a steady loss of respect for all motoring laws over the last decade. People no longer think that points on their licence mean they are a bad driver, merely that they were unlucky and were caught. A letter from a Safety Camera Partnership is seen as a tax demand, not a wake-up call to improve your driving. This loss of respect, which I think is the result of the mechanical enforcement of speed limits, leads to a standard of driving that is less careful and less safe. Our driving might be slower, but it is not safer.
I think that the reason behind this (admittedly counter-inutuitive) conclusion is that the purpose of the law is make roads safe, but the mechanism is to measure a driver's speed. There is a correlation between these, but not a perfect one. So when the law was enforced with discretion, other factors were brought in and improved that correlation. By enforcing speed limits in a mechanical manner, we manage to "institutionally forget" what the original purpose was and effectively enforce speed limits for their own sake - while claiming (falsely) that we are improving road safety.
Richard Hammond has an interesting take on the subject. Here he is, interviewed on Five Live, trying to move the issue away from speed limits per se and back onto simple road safety:
