Am I missing something?

[bryan35]

In any scientific study of cause and effect you generally need a large sample size ideally over a large time scale. Positive results are always large, clear and repeatable. e.g. there's clear indications that smoking can be demonstrated to cause serious health problems, whereas there's little evidence that mobile phones cause brain tumours. That said some people get telegrams from the Queen having smoked all their lives, and people do get cranial problems where phones are held, but these are hardly the norm.

So I was looking at stats that are available on the net about the dreaded subject of speeding.

http://think.direct.gov.uk/speed.html

This government site says that in 2013 '3,064 people were killed or seriously injured in crashes where speed was a factor'

Fair enough, it's not clear whether these were actual speeding instances, but if we were to just group 'speeders' with people that generally travel too fast for the conditions it'll maybe save time.

So how prevalent is breaking the speed limit?

with reference to this government site...

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploa...


...we see that rather a lot of vehicles break the speed limit. We see numbers as high as 46% and 47% for motorways and built up areas. Lastly, how many miles were actually driven in 2013?

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploa...

the answer is 303700000000 - 303.7 billion.

that's quite a lot of miles driven over the speed limit, maybe 90-100 million when you run the numbers.

dividing this by the KSI number mentioned earlier (3064), statistically you could expect a KSI every 31 million miles of speeding. To put that into perspective, if you drive 10000 miles a year and were to drive all those miles over the speed limit, you could expect a KSI roughly every 3,100 years.


So there it is. Using mobile phones causes brain tumours. - I think.

[bryan35]

well, I remember seeing a publicity photo for Humberside safety camera partnership that had a picture of a speed camera and the slogan 'Catching Killers', plus of course a line from a chief constable saying 'drifting over the speed limit is no different to drifting a knife into someone'. Both specifically say that going over the speed limit IN ITSELF kills. However, considering the colossal number of miles driven over the speed limit (approx 95,000,000,000) it can't just be good luck that the accidents are so incredibly low.

[bryan35]

Maybe drifted off a little. What I was pointing out is the apparent gulf between the amount of speeding and the number of accidents. The amount of speeding is literally astronomic. 95 billion miles is more than 1000 astronomic units - to the sun and back 500 times. It doesn't fit easily into the human mind it's so large. Whereas people in accident would fit in a sports hall, and the number killed in a village hall. Speeding in itself is therefore very very clearly not dangerous in itself otherwise we'd see an absolute massacre on the roads. We don't.

[bryan35]

Esceptico said:

bryan35 said:

Maybe drifted off a little. What I was pointing out is the apparent gulf between the amount of speeding and the number of accidents. The amount of speeding is literally astronomic. 95 billion miles is more than 1000 astronomic units - to the sun and back 500 times. It doesn't fit easily into the human mind it's so large. Whereas people in accident would fit in a sports hall, and the number killed in a village hall. Speeding in itself is therefore very very clearly not dangerous in itself otherwise we'd see an absolute massacre on the roads. We don't.

190'000 people injured last year. Rather more than a sports hall. If you included all the people involved in accidents where no physical injury I suspect it would be many times that figure (someone drove into my car last year and there were 5 of us across two cars but no injuries). Reducing accidents is not just about reducing physical injuries, although that is the most important consideration.

3064 according to government figures, which is more or less a sports hall.
I'm not intending to argue the point either way. All I'm highlighting is the amount of speeding versus the amount of speeding related incidents. But even if you take all accidents and said every one was related to speeding, that's still 1 accident every 500,000 miles of speeding.