Speed cameras have no reason to exist: report
New figures show no justification for official road safety policies
Gatso: no justification for existence
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."
Links
For a Minister of Transport to admit that his department has made a ten year mistake in its policies will require courage and common sense and seems unlikely.
I fear nothing much will change.
Chris.
In theory, 'tis the general population who hold those in power responsible, but unfortunately most people don't have a clue what is really going on. Who will govern the government when they are incapable, or uninclined to do it themselves?
For a Minister of Transport to admit that his department has made a ten year mistake in its policies will require courage and common sense and seems unlikely.
I fear nothing much will change.
Chris.
DING... Its all about the money so nothing will change at all.
Yep. Unfortunately, millions of employees got shafted when it fell, and millions of shareholders/customers/suppliers lost out as well.
Meanwhile, those responsible MAY face jail time, but will get to keep their 8- or 9-figure gains (and yes, they really did cream that much money off!!!) from that sorry exercise.
THAT was a private company. Do you think anything even that good is going to happen when it's the UK gov't/civil-service?!?
I think if you look at the graphs on Safespeed and other websites,you'll see that casualties were reducing up until the introduction of Gatso's from when they have stayed relatively flat.So in theory the cameras have halted the downward trend.
I kind of agree with this, what was happening to the level of KSIs before the introduction of the plastic police / Talivans / Scameras? Was the number of injuries rising? Has the "steady number" reported actually been a "levelling off", therfore a reduction?
I'm dead set against cameras, but I'm also quite pro the correct use of stats, and the BMJ does have a record of sometimes not quite getting it right - after all, the people who write in it are mostly doctors, not stats people.
No chance. Your instincts as a driver are correct. Gatsos make you uncomfortable and make you pay too much attention to the wrong safety factor. I'm absolutely certain... And believe me, I've done my homework.
And the Scamera partnerships are far far worse. Whilst I tend to agree (lies, damn lies and statistics and all that) I would be more inclined to go with the BMJ as they dont have a vested interested.
Problem is that those in power havent got what it takes to come clean. I took advise from here several months ago and wrote to my MP about scameras. Surprisingly got a response and even more surprised when the Dft responded, trouble was is was a load of BS usual spin etc and failed to address the points I raised.
The same stats people that somehow forgot about RTTM?
The same stats people that didn’t consider ‘bias on selection’?
The same stats people who are in the employ of the government? At least the doctors are impartial.
This country has become such a mess due to the incompetence and lies of these idiots they must view speed cameras are a long way down the list of things that need fixing.
Plus they make money which this government is rapidly running out of.
Nothing is going to change short of God apearing in front of Blair and telling him to get rid of them.
DFT: Blah, blah, blah saves lives, blah, blah, blah roads safer, blah, blah, blah give us some time to make up some figures to try to prove it, blah, blah, blah most of you are stupid enough to keep us in power so who cares......
I've just downloaded the article. Whilst it's published by the BMJ the paper is written by a cross section of health professionals (some at the University of Oxford) and a computer scientist who did the number crunching for them.
Oxford University would not want to put its name to anything other than rigorous research, especially if that research is contradicting government statistics. I'd say this report is going to be difficult for the government to rubbish. Of course they'll probably just ignore it and let the world cup take the headlines...
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