Bad roads policy causes deaths

Cameras aren't improving road safety: EU report

By PH Staff / Monday, 27 February 2006 / Loading comments

Cameras haven't worked

New official EU road safety figures (see link to report, below) show that Britain is now the poor man of Europe in terms of road death reduction.

Safe Speed campaign founder Paul Smith said that, although Britain's roads are safer than most of our European neighbours, this has been inherited by modern policy, and that policy "is failing to deliver improvements. So we have safe roads and bad policy. In fact we have gone from hero to zero in about a decade."

Between 1994 and 2004, the EU 15 countries cut road deaths by 39 per cent, with Britain lagging behind, 13th out of 14 countries with figures available. If we had done as well as --say -- Germany, Smith said that British annual road deaths would be down to 2,266 instead of 3,368.

"We're over 1,000 lives a year behind schedule. This estimate is echoed by an extrapolation of our own earlier trend in fatality rate reduction, and is a serious failure that Safe Speed has long been highlighting.

"In the last four years (2001-2004) we have reduced road deaths by only six per cent against an EU average of 14 per cent. We're dead last -- 14th out of 14 countries (who have figures available)."

Smith said: "When will Department for Transport wake up and admit that their policies aren't working? All their talk about road safety targets amounts to nothing more than hot air. Lives are not being saved.

"I am absolutely certain, having spent thousands of hours examining road safety data, that our poor performance is due to bad policy, and that the bad policy is founded on 'speed kills' and speed cameras. There is so much more to road safety than numerical vehicle speed.

"The knowledge and the cultural values that gave us the safest roads in the world are being lost. We must urgently scrap speed cameras and return to psychologically sound policies based on skills, attitudes and responsibilities."

Reductions in road fatalities from 1994 to 2004:

Country	Reduction
Portugal	48%
Germany	40%
France	39%
The Netherlands	38%
Austria	34%
Denmark	32%
Greece	28%
Luxembourg	25%
Finland	22%
Italy	21%
Sweden	19%
Spain	15%
United Kingdom	12%
Ireland	6%
Belgium	NA
EU15	39%

Reductions in road fatalities from 2001 to 2004:

Country	Reduction
France	32%
Luxembourg	30%
Portugal	23%
The Netherlands	19%
Sweden	18%
Germany	16%
Italy	16%
Denmark	14%
Spain	14%
Greece	14%
Finland	13%
Austria	8%
Ireland	8%
UK	6%
Belgium	NA
EU15	14%

Almost all of France's creditable improvements came before the first speed cameras were installed on French roads in November 2003. An increase in police traffic patrols and an emphasis on drunk driving are thought to be leading contributors. Germany's policy statement in the EU report specifically mentions management of road safety culture.

The British policy statement does not mention speed cameras or speed enforcement, which is strange because the average British motorist experiences very little else from road safety policy yet there sometimes seems to be a speed camera on every other street.

Safe Speed believes that road safety culture management is the single most important road safety policy device available.