Road marking removal evidence challenged
Removing road centre lines bad for safety, say officials
Fight! Road marking contractors have challenged evidence showing that removing white lines from the centre of roads has cut both speeds and casualties. The Road Safety Markings Association (what do you mean you never heard of them?) is accusing Wiltshire County Council -- which reported a 35 per cent reduction in casualties at 12 sites -- of using statistically weak data. It also claims the authority ignored one site where there had been no accidents for three years -- until the centre line's removal.
Wiltshire failed to supply most of the information that RSMA required to assess the safety initiative, according to its national director George Lee. "If you're going to make bold claims you need to be able to substantiate them in a more robust and open manner,' he said in the association's Surveyor magazine.
But Wiltshire's traffic and road safety manager Andrew Wyatt, who reported the 35 per cent casualty savings, defended his authority's policy, stressing that Wiltshire was not alone in pursuing lane-marking removal.
and i'd actually be inclined to believe them that it is an effective way to slow people down and force them to me more aware of the surroundings, than blindly following the lines..
an example of this is a junction..
if you come to a heavily signed and marked junction that shows you have right of way, i bet most people barely glance at the incoming road.
however if there are no marking on the junction, it forces you to check..
imho
G
I had a v-e-r-y near miss last year driving through one of them at night in the wet last year, when a numpty in a Cavalier came at me on my side of the road. We almost had a head-on.
I like to think that I am attentive enough to drive to the conditions, and make sure my road position is correct even when the lines are removed, but there are lots of drivers out there who are dependant on the centre line.
What appalls me is that Wilts Council seem more than happy for innocent drivers like me to risk becoming an accident statistic just so they can "experiment" with unresearched schemes like this.
John
one of the reasons we have very safe roads in the UK is because we make things extremely clear. lane markings is one of those little things.
road markings are priceless when road conditions are very bad especially at night.
this proposal is more about a lack of funds on the part of the council and finding silly cost cutting measures.
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