Welcome to Safe Speed (original) (raw)

Over 28,000 signed our official Scrap Speed Cameras petition on the 10 Downing Street Web site

The Editor of The Observer wrote (17th July 2005): "Last week, the government announced a three-month moratorium on further speed cameras. This was partly in response to the work of engineer Paul Smith [Safe Speed's founder], who has spent 5,000 hours finding out why, though the number of cameras has risen exponentially, there has been no corresponding reduction in traffic fatalities. He concludes that, far from acting as a deterrent, speed cameras take responsibility for safe speed away from drivers, and their concentration from the road. Cameras are as likely to cause an accident as to prevent one." (link) The retiring editor (Peter Tomalin) of Evo Magazine wrote (July 2005 cover date): "While I still have this little soapbox, I would like to urge all of you to throw your weight behind two organisations: The Association of British Drivers (www.abd.org.uk) and Safe Speed. They talk an awful lot of common sense, and heaven knows we need a voice right now." North Wales Daily Post (September 2006): Supporters of speed cameras will say that even 5% justifies their existence. But critics, including the Safe Speed Campaign and this newspaper, who believed the government's simplistic single-solution approach to road safety was actually counter-productive, have also been insisting for years that cameras could themselves be a contributory cause of accidents by distracting drivers. This view also now seems to have been largely vindicated by the DoT's findings. Everyone concerned - not least this newspaper - wants to see road deaths reduced as far as is humanly possible, but the argument has always been how best to achieve this. By insisting that "speed" is the main culprit which can safely be left to cameras to enforce, many police forces until now have taken resources away from patrolling roads looking for bad, incompetent and dangerous driving. Other more effective and cheaper (but non-revenue raising) calming methods have also been dismissed. No, we were told, speed kills regardless of road or weather conditions or the competence of the driver. (link)	Road Safety Road safety is complex, subtle and sensitive like a precision built clock. After over 100 years of living with motor transport we have learned much about how to manage enormous potential danger on our roads. We have learned as individuals, we have learned as engineers and we have learned as a society. Road safety is finely tuned and balanced and for the most part works very well indeed. Road safety is primarily a matter of psychology. Speed Camera A speed camera is a blunt and heavy instrument, like a hammer. It has far reaching effects. It changes driver behaviour. It changes everyone's safety priorities. It changes the way the roads are policed. It has done immeasurable damage to the police / public relationship. Far from being a precision tool, it's the equivalent of a rather heavy and badly aimed hammer. Speed cameras are obviously bad psychology. Would you use a hammer to fix a clock? Would you use a speed camera to improve road safety? Neither would we. They are both the wrong tool for the job. But with the hammer it's easy to see the damage. new: Recent media coverage of the Safe Speed campaign See our busy forum system The campaign needs your support See recent press releases visit main web site	Professor Mervyn Stone, hired by Radio Four to examine the Safe Speed case wrote (June 2004): �_Turning now to the written statement of Mr Smith, the reader should know that I have downloaded most of the files, acquired most of the papers to which he referred, and gone through them with as much care and attention as I could summon. In itself, an achievement of sorts - but paling into insignificance compared with that of Mr Smith himself. He has single-handedly taken on the road safety establishment. He has brought to the fore hitherto neglected questions with admirable forensic skill and logic. He is a gad fly par excellence whose bite must have already irritated many in the road safety world who prefer a quieter way of dealing with issues. His piece is a powerful polemic attacking the interpretation that others have placed on the body of evidence about the relationship between speed cameras and accidents._� (link) new:Sunday Telegraph: Christopher Booker's Notebook (October 2006): Slowly the facts about speed emerge 'We're here to save lives." No one can use Bath station without seeing this slogan blazoned everywhere over the floors, advertising something called the Avon & Somerset Safety Camera Partnership. A year ago I reported here on attending one of its "Speed Camera Workshops". The message dinned into us for three hours was that "speed" is responsible for a third of all traffic accidents; that the definition of "speeding" is breaking a speed limit; and that, therefore, by stopping drivers speeding, speed cameras were saving large numbers of lives. Fortunately, thanks to a detailed brief from Paul Smith, the road safety expert who runs www.safespeed.org.uk, I was able to show how every single statistic used to support this case was wrong. And now the Department for Transport (DfT) has finally published new figures that support Mr Smith, and show that the number of accidents involving motorists breaking a speed limit is only 5 per cent. Mr Smith's general point is that, for 30 years, Britain enjoyed the safest roads in Europe, with road accident figures in continuous decline. Only in 1994 did that rate of decline markedly diminish, when the government put speed cameras at the centre of its road safety policy. This, he argues, was a disastrous misjudgment, only justified by massaging the statistics, which the DfT has at last done something to rectify. (link)

You can't measure safe driving in miles per hour.