Speed cameras have no reason to exist: report

New figures show no justification for official road safety policies

By PH Staff / Wednesday, 28 June 2006 / Loading comments

Gatso: no justification for existence

A new study by the prestigious British Medical Journal has shown that official casualty figures are deeply flawed, and its road safety policies -- including speed cameras -- are based on false information. That's the analysis by road safety campaign Safe Speed.

In the current issue of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) is an article comparing DfT statistics for serious road injuries with hospital statistics for serious road injuries. The DfT statistics show a substantial year on year improvement but hospital figures show no such improvement.

Research from Oxford University, published in the British Medical Journal (see link below), has found that hospital admission statistics for road crash victims have remained at the same level since 1996. It concludes that: "The overall fall seen in police statistics for non-fatal road traffic injuries probably represents a fall in completeness of reporting of these injuries."

In contrast, DfT statistics have shown annual reductions in Killed and Seriously Injured (KSI) road casualties. KSI is dominated by the serious injury statistics because the number of serious is around ten times greater than the numbers killed. DfT policies and DfT targets are set and measured in KSI.

The DfT has used KSI figures for:

Setting road safety targets
Measuring achievements against targets
Evaluating interventions including speed cameras

While the DfT's figures are falling, they do not represent a genuine improvement in road safety, according to Safe Speed. Instead the changes in the figures are caused by variations in the degree of underreporting. Hospital figures are far more robust, with each entry the result of a medical decision about patient treatment, said the campaign. So the DfT targets and policies are founded on figures that are unreliable, while the BMJ's independent figures show no improvement, according to Safe Speed.

Safe Speed said this means the basis for DfT policy and target evaluation is flawed. In other words, after ten years of increasingly draconian policy, the roads have become no safer. Safe Speed said it predicted this finding by analysing road crash statistics published in early 2004.

Now we know that we have seen no reduction in hospital admissions and only very slight falls in road deaths since 1996, said the campaign, adding: "Far from making the roads safer, DfT policies have misunderstood the nature of road safety and have made the situation considerably worse."

The DfT came close to admitting this in its 2004 Transport Statistics Bulletin on road casualties (see link below): "Research conducted in the 1990s has shown that many non-fatal injury accidents are not reported to the police. In addition some casualties reported to the police are not recorded and the severity of injury tends to be underestimated.

"The combined effect of under-reporting, under-recording and misclassification suggests that there may be 2.76 times as many seriously injured casualties than are recorded in the national casualty figures and 1.70 slight casualties, according to TRL Report 173 Comparison of hospital and police casualty data: a national study by H F Simpson. The Department is undertaking further research to investigate whether the level of under-reporting has changed."

Safety improvements

Safe Speed reckoned that this not the end of the story, because other changes are continuing to deliver improved safety. These include:

Ongoing improvements in vehicle safety, with over two million safer vehicles replacing old ones in the national vehicle fleet every year.
Ongoing improvements in road engineering safety, including new bypasses, black spot treatments and the transfer of vehicles to safer roads such as motorways.
Ongoing improvements in post crash emergency care.

These three drivers alone are sufficiently large and important to result in reductions in deaths and serious injuries of around five per cent per annum after taking full account of the growth in traffic.

Paul Smith, founder of Safe Speed, said: "Department for Transport (DfT) has a dangerously oversimplified view of road safety. Despite over a decade of ever-increasing speed controls the roads have not got safer. My extensive research reveals that DfT policy is making drivers worse. We're spending far too much time concentrating on the wrong safety factors -- and DfT is responsible.

"I've known for three years that the serious injury statistics were behaving very strangely in relation to other road safety indicators. The only possible conclusion was that changes in the figures were an artefact of the reporting process. The new BMJ paper provides very strong additional evidence.

"If road safety had continued to improve at the previous rate (before 'speed kills' road safety policy, national road deaths would be down to about 2,000 per annum by now. We're 1,200 live a year behind target and I am certain that bad policy is responsible.

"Department for Transport road safety is not fit for purpose."