Thursday 21st December 2006

30mph safer than 20mph: campaign

Stats prove slower is not always safer

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Could be safer than 20mph?

Safe Speed has today criticised the Department for Transport and the Scottish Executive for failing to consider figures that show 20mph speed limit zones have crashes which it said are, on average, more dangerous than those in 30mph zones.

According to Safe Speed, official figures show that the likelihood of a casualty being fatally or seriously injured in 2005 was:

• 11.85 per cent in 20mph zones
• 10.26 per cent in 30mph zones

According to Safe Speed, there's a range of possible explanations including:

• A greater proportion of 20mph zone crashes include vulnerable road users
• 20mph zones are created in places where dangers are greatest
• 20mph zones create an illusion of safety, where people take less care
• Some drivers in 20mph zones are so busy attempting to maintain 20mph that they simply don't brake before impact, possibly because they are looking at their speedos when something goes wrong.
• 20mph zones encourage drivers to actually travel at 20mph when 10 or 15mph may have been a better choice.

Campaign founder Paul Smith said: "It isn't safe to continue to roll out 20mph zones willy-nilly until we have a proper understanding of the higher average crash severity that they are associated with. As is common with modern road safety interventions this has not been investigated - they do it because they believe it should work.

"At first 20mph had to be 'self enforcing' with traffic calming measures used to create an environment in which 20mph seemed like a natural speed. But since then there has been 'mission creep' and 20mph zones are being installed widely without such features.

"If drug companies behaved like this there would be a national outcry, but with road safety everyone has an opinion. Far too often they claim that 'it's obvious' that a given intervention should work. This cavalier attitude has taken us from being the fastest improving country in Europe to the slowest (in the EU15). Like drugs, road safety interventions come with side effects and unintended consequences.

"The authorities continue to treat road safety as a problem of vehicle physics when in fact it is a complex problem of human psychology. It's all very well citing examples of 'model' schemes, but with serious anomalies appearing, the need for properly conducted randomised trials has never been clearer.

"There's no indication that any of the 'speed kills' policies have made our roads safer. Speed cameras, traffic calming, speed limit reductions and so on have all been rolled out across the country with no significant reduction in road deaths or road crash hospitalisations."

• www.safespeed.org.uk

[andyps]

The research done into "open space" roads where there is no discrimination between pedestrian and car areas seems to highlight greater success in accident reduction than this latest well considered and worded research from safe speeds. The open spaces make sense to me as they force car drivers to consider the totality of the surroundings, without some arbitrary speed limit which requires massive concentration on the speedo to achieve. I have often driven through traffic calmed areas and realised that I am spending all my time looking for the next chicane or speed hump whilst checking my speedo and not paying enough attention to what is going on on the pavement - I hope I have never created any danger to anyone, but it would be easy to miss a developing situation because of other things.