Fight! Road marking contractors have challenged evidence showing that removing white lines from the centre of roads has cut both speeds and casualties. The Road Safety Markings Association (what do you mean you never heard of them?) is accusing Wiltshire County Council -- which reported a 35 per cent reduction in casualties at 12 sites -- of using statistically weak data. It also claims the authority ignored one site where there had been no accidents for three years -- until the centre line's removal.
Wiltshire failed to supply most of the information that RSMA required to assess the safety initiative, according to its national director George Lee. "If you're going to make bold claims you need to be able to substantiate them in a more robust and open manner,' he said in the association's Surveyor magazine.
But Wiltshire's traffic and road safety manager Andrew Wyatt, who reported the 35 per cent casualty savings, defended his authority's policy, stressing that Wiltshire was not alone in pursuing lane-marking removal.