New speeding fines announced

[0000]

Yeah, with an inverse relationship. Larger fine for nailing it in a Ford Escort than a new Porsche.

[speedking31]

Maybe instead of a camera they should throw a sack of potatoes into the road at the stopping distance ahead of your vehicle. If you're not paying attention, or have poor brakes or tyres and hit the potatoes, then you have to pay a fine. Avoid them and no penalty

[0000]

No money in chucking potatoes off a bridge half a mile in advance I suspect.

[Moonhawk]

Munter said:

You for a start. You pulled up the stat, to try and say 15% of fatalities have speeding as one of the causes. But that's wrong. 15% of accidents, that happen to be fatal, have speed as part of the cause of the accident.

No - I stated that the DFT report cites speeding as one of the contributory factors in 15% of fatal accidents.

Whether speeding contributed to the accident occurring in the first place or whether speeding contributed to the fact it was a fatal accident cannot be stated from the data given - but it did contribute to the overall outcome.

Munter said:

Nothing to do with the fatality. You agree to the disconnect. Therefore you agree you can't use that stat when deciding if speeding causes x number of fatalities. We do not know that number from what you are saying.

Why do the DFT separate contributory factors based on the severity of the accident then? They quote the percentage that the contributory factors make to fatal accidents separately from those of serious injuries and minor injuries.

It's entirely reasonable for me to use the stats in the way I have. Speeding is one of the contributory factors to an accident being a fatal one - even if we cannot separate out whether speeding was what lead to the accident occurring or lead to the fatality.

Munter said:

Yet all over PH people will spout that 15% incorrectly, as an argument against "speed kills" and the suggestion that reducing speeds, by enforcing the limits better, could save a few lives. Which is easy, simple, and cost effective.

Reducing speeds may save lives - but like I already said - it's an open ended argument. People who use the "speed kills" argument are never prepared to qualify that argument.

The number of deaths on the road will only tend to zero as speed approaches zero - so the question has to be asked - where does the balance lie?

Also - at what point does the effort put into speed enforcement outweigh the benefit? Could the time, effort and money spent on speed enforcement have more impact on accident stats if it were spent in other areas?

I'm neither arguing against speed limits nor speed enforcement as concepts - both should form part of an overall road safety strategy - but I do think the focus has shifted far too much onto speed, especially considering the impact speeding appears to have on accident stats according to the DFT report.

Edited by Moonhawk on Thursday 26th January 12:59

[Munter]

Moonhawk said:

It's entirely reasonable for me to use the stats in the way I have. Speeding is one of the contributory factors to an accident being a fatal one - even if we cannot separate out whether speeding was what lead to the accident occurring or lead to the fatality.

Those 2 sentences contradict themselves.

If you "cannot separate out whether speeding was what lead to the accident occurring or lead to the fatality." Then you can't be using the stat to support or deny any position on speeding being able to increase or decrease the number of fatalities.

You can't see that for some reason that I can't explain.

[sidicks]

Munter said:

Those 2 sentences contradict themselves.

If you "cannot separate out whether speeding was what lead to the accident occurring or lead to the fatality." Then you can't be using the stat to support or deny any position on speeding being able to increase or decrease the number of fatalities.

You can't see that for some reason that I can't explain.

You're missing the point.

The statistics suggest that only a small number of accidents have speed as a cause or contributory factor. Note that speed and speeding are quite different.

Implicitly therefore we know that for the vast majority of accidents, speeding was NOT the problem.

For those cases where it was a contributory factor, we do not know how important it was.

[Type R Tom]

sidicks said:

You're missing the point.

The statistics suggest that only a small number of accidents have speed as a cause or contributory factor. Note that speed and speeding are quite different.

Implicitly therefore we know that for the vast majority of accidents, speeding was NOT the problem.

For those cases where it was a contributory factor, we do not know how important it was.

That's not necessarily the case, although speed may not be logged on the STATS19 information you can usually tell from the description of the accident whether speed could have been an issue. Unless an accident is fatal or looking like it could be, you don't get the level of detail required to judge, especially as the information isn't necessarily gathered by someone qualified to judge.

STATS19 is far from perfect but it's still better than a lot of other countries systems.

[Robertj21a]

Munter said:

If you can't argue with the concept of "Speed Kills". Why are there so many threads trying to do that?
If it's not possible to pick a collision apart. How can you/they know the last 4 words in your post?

So far as I can see the conversation is:
Plod/Others: Speed Kills. Lower speeds mean less dead people when collisions happen.
PH: Probably. But we don't want to have to obey that law.
Plod/Others: We don't "want" to have to obey lots of laws, but they make this place a reasonable part of the world so we accept them and carry on, or successfully campaign to have them changed for a reason. What's your reason?
PH: Collisions will still happen.
Plod/Others: Yeah...and...as you accepted, going slower when crashing will mean less are fatal. Plus it's easy to explain, and easy for people to do, cheap to enforce and not breaking the limit has no significant detrimental impact on anybody.
PH: Collisions will still happen.
Plod/Others: Yeah. We're not trying to stop them all. Just reduce the number of deaths a bit in a simple way.
PH: Collisions will still happen.
Plod/Others: Right, we'll go over here, and leave you to form a cohesive argument. Get back to us if you manage it.

Thank you, I like that, a good summary.

As far as I can see 'Speed kills' should just be replaced with 'Poor drivers kill'.........

[Moonhawk]

Type R Tom said:

That's not necessarily the case, although speed may not be logged on the STATS19 information you can usually tell from the description of the accident whether speed could have been an issue. Unless an accident is fatal or looking like it could be, you don't get the level of detail required to judge, especially as the information isn't necessarily gathered by someone qualified to judge.

STATS19 is far from perfect but it's still better than a lot of other countries systems.

But we are talking about speed-ing, not speed.

Speed is a factor in all accidents. Speeding is only a factor in a small subset of accidents according to the DFT statistics.

Could there be accidents where speeding was not identified as a contributing factor when it in fact was - of course, however the reverse is also true. It's likely that on balance these two types of error counteract themselves for the most part.

You seem to be implying that there are a lot of accidents where from the description of the accident - it is obvious that one or more vehicle was speeding - but where "exceeding the speed limit" is not recorded as a contributory factor. If true - what is this based on?

Given the focus speeding has received in road safety campaigns over the past decade or so - I would be very surprised if police forces were massively underreporting "exceeding the speed limit" as a contributory factor, especially in fatal accidents.

[Moonhawk]

Robertj21a said:

As far as I can see 'Speed kills' should just be replaced with 'Poor drivers kill'.........

Yep - this is exactly the point.

Road safety should start to focus on trying to prevent the collisions happening in the first place - rather than largely ignoring that aspect and simply looking to reduce the severity through reducing speed. I think most of the gains that may have been possible through reducing and enforcing limits have already been realised and we are well into the realms of 'diminishing returns' from that particular aspect.

By far the largest contribution to accident statistics today is poor observation.

Perhaps more effort should be focussed on educating drivers (and pedestrians) as to the importance of maintaining awareness and good observation.

Edited by Moonhawk on Thursday 26th January 16:47

[sidicks]

Type R Tom said:

That's not necessarily the case, although speed may not be logged on the STATS19 information you can usually tell from the description of the accident whether speed could have been an issue. Unless an accident is fatal or looking like it could be, you don't get the level of detail required to judge, especially as the information isn't necessarily gathered by someone qualified to judge.

STATS19 is far from perfect but it's still better than a lot of other countries systems.

1. You're confusing speeding and speed.
2. How can you 'usually tell' from 'the description of the accident' that speed was an issue, yet the person filling out the form could not (or indeed, could, and yet decided that it was clearly NOT a factor and hence it did not need to be recorded as such)?

[Moonhawk]

Munter said:

Those 2 sentences contradict themselves.

If you "cannot separate out whether speeding was what lead to the accident occurring or lead to the fatality." Then you can't be using the stat to support or deny any position on speeding being able to increase or decrease the number of fatalities.

You can't see that for some reason that I can't explain.

You can make a reasonable deduction based on the available data.

If we acknowledge that the risk of death or serious injury increases with increasing speed.....and by definition, for a given road and vehicle type, a vehicle that is speeding will be travelling at a faster speed than one that is not - then we can propose the following scenario:

If you have 100 fatal accidents that have speeding as one of their contributory factors - then it stands to reason that if those 100 vehicles had not been speeding:

A) Fewer accidents may have occurred - as those in which speeding was the root cause of the accident will have been avoided entirely.

B) Fewer fatalities may have occurred - as those accidents in which speeding was not the root cause of the accident, but where the fatality was caused by the fact that the vehicle was speeding, will no longer result in a fatality.

C) Some of the accidents in which speeding was a contributory factor would have still occurred and some will still result in a fatality even if the vehicle in question was travelling below the limit.

So assuming the contributory factors have been accurately recorded (a reasonable assumption I would say) - it is reasonable to deduct that if speeding were stopped overnight - the number of fatalities would be expected to drop. However due to the complexity of collisions - we can't pin an exact figure on what this reduction might be.

If most accidents fall into category C above, then we would expect the drop to be relatively small (perhaps a couple of percent), whereas if most of the accidents fell into either category A or B, then we would expect the drop to be closer to the total number of fatal accidents that cite speeding as a contributing factor (i.e. 15%).

In reality - it's likely to lie somewhere between the two scenarios - however the point of all of this is that even if the reduction lay at the top end, it's still a relatively modest reduction, given the time and effort it would take to completely eliminate speeding.

I therefore posit that reductions of similar magnitude could be made by targeting some of the contributory factors that are much more likely to be a contributory factor in an accident (e.g. not looking properly).

Edited by Moonhawk on Thursday 26th January 20:28

[Type R Tom]

sidicks said:

1. You're confusing speeding and speed.
2. How can you 'usually tell' from 'the description of the accident' that speed was an issue, yet the person filling out the form could not (or indeed, could, and yet decided that it was clearly NOT a factor and hence it did not need to be recorded as such)?

It's more of an issue with slights than KSI's as they have more "professional" investigation by trained officers, some STATS19 information comes in with directions vehicles are travelling wrong, N,S,E,W wrong all sorts as they are filled out by a regular officer quickly. It is well know that the information isn't that accurate but it's all we've got

Here is an example of a serious collision or KSI, this driver hit a parked car sufficiently hard as to seriously injure one passengers and slightly injure the second. It says driving too fast for the conditions, not speeding. Now I’ve removed the locations but I know this is a residential 20mph street, lined with trees and parked cars. Now look at the time, 0530 on a Saturday morning in August, was he drunk? Did he fall asleep? We don’t know. It is pretty suspicious but according to the Police report exceeding the speed limit wasn't a factor just driving too fast for the conditions and lost control all on a fine, dry, quiet August morning in a 20mph road. It sounds like he was probably doing more than 20mph to me or he could be drunk. It will go down as neither and we will never know! (Of course driving too fast for the conditions doesn’t necessarily mean breaking the speed limit, 50 on a single track NSL would be the same).



My point is not everything is recorded correctly, if you are just looking for the number of accidents that state code 306 only (exceeding speed limit) you will get different answer to checking the circumstance around every collision and analysing the data available – which is pretty much what every RS engineer will do when working on a scheme.

[Moonhawk]

Why have you removed the location? Also - the date (year) is also obscured.

This is a single example - but as has already been acknowledged, even if this is a genuine error - they are expected to occur from time to time - these forms are filled in by humans afterall.

There could easily be reports where speeding has been cited but where it is not a contributory factor - so to some extent it is swings and roundabouts.

The data set is large enough that unless speeding is systematically under or over reported across all forces - the figures quoted in the DFT report will be broadly accurate.

Edited by Moonhawk on Thursday 26th January 20:51

[smashy]

so 31-40 in a 30 is now 50% of your salary ,,,,,,,,,so go past a camera at 31 and thats your lot..I drive about 700 miles a week its just nervous tension all the while trying to drive at speeds that many times just do not feel ""natural " and becomes stressful. After 8 years no points done 38 in a 30 a month ago on the ealing part of the N Circular passed that camera thousands of times ,we are not machines.

[Sylvaforever]

Yes but an awesome money stream...

Mind you..

http://www.accountingweb.co.uk/tax/hmrc-policy/hmr...

"The reason HMRC don't want to deal with us is because we know what we are talking about and can challenge them when they are wrong, whilst the average taxpayer in the street doesn't have the knowledge to know a challenge is in order.

More dosh for the Treasury, even if it's not collected legally. Hmmm. Should we be filing MLR reports against HMRC/HM Treasury?"

Edited by Sylvaforever on Tuesday 25th April 22:11

[SS2.]

smashy said:

so 31-40 in a 30 is now 50% of your salary..

Only if you have less than 9 points and earn £200 per week.

smashy said:

so go past a camera at 31 and thats your lot.

What do you think will happen if you drive past a speed camera at 31mph in a 30mph limit ?

[anonymous-user]

Excellent. What is the maximum fine for someone with zero income?

[vournikas]

Fun with stats:-

Consider a draconian camera partnership decides to nick me doing 31 on a 30. Under the new guidelines, that triggers a fine of 25% of my weekly salary.

So.

My weekly income is docked 25% for

An offence that may (or may not) be the sole contributory factor in 12% of road deaths (based on the widely reported figure of 244 deaths per year compared to - say - 2,000 KSI incidents), where

I exceeded the posted speed limit by 3%

Seems harsh to me, but then again there are a couple of deadheads on the estate who think it's kewl to do full bore accelerations through 1st and 2nd on roads where usually - at best - 25 max is more than prudent.

[SS2.]

vournikas said:

Fun with stats:-

Consider a draconian camera partnership decides to nick me doing 31 on a 30. Under the new guidelines, that triggers a fine of 25% of my weekly salary.

I'm not sure the new guidelines are what you think they are.

In fairness, the reporting of such in the press has been widely misleading.