Safe Speed presents...

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Safe Speed presents...

• The truth about speed and safety

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This short talk

• Road safety is a vast and subtle subject
• Well cover just a percent or two
• Current policy is based on
• several key false assumptions - but even one of
  those could easily take the whole talk
• an oversimplified dogma with no proper basis in
  science.
• But weve done our homework properly and
  welcome any questions

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Introduction

• Speed camera fines are doubling every three years
• Our roads are getting more dangerous - deaths are
  UP
• Road safety policy has failed
• Good people are losing their livelihoods
• The Police public relationship is being gradually
  destroyed
• Bold changes are long overdue

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The law

• Almost all drivers exceed the speed limit from
  time to time
• When our speeding laws were conceived digital
  enforcement and fixed penalties were not even
  imagined
• Dangerous drivers are not identified
• The competent and careful actions of a majority
  of responsible people should obviously be
  considered legal

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A fine road safety system

• UK roads are the safest in the world
• We achieved that long before we changed policy
  and introduced speed cameras
• But we are fast losing our world lead. In fact we
  are now the slowest improving country in Europe.
• What went wrong?

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Excessive Speed crashes

• 11 of injury crashes and 28 of fatal crashes
  have excessive speed recorded as a contributory
  factor.
• Are these crashes caused by otherwise responsible
  motorists exceeding a speed limit?
• No - we have to look inside the figures

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Excessive speed problem 1

• Excessive Speed is defined as speed
  inappropriate for the conditions or in excess of
  a speed limit.
• Sample data from Avon and Somerset, Durham and
  Canada all suggests the same split - 70
  inappropriate and 30 in excess of a speed limit.
• So the DfTs 11 immediately becomes 3.3.

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Excessive Speed problem 2

• The coding system in use allowed contributory
  factors to be recorded as possible, probable,
  or definite.
• TRL323 gave us these figures
• definite 30, probable 38, possible 16 and
  confidence not recorded 16
• So within our remaining 3.3, a significant
  percentage werent excessive speed at all!

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Excessive speed problem 3

• Many dangerous high speed crashes are caused by
  people acting far outside normal responsible
  behaviour.
• Joyriders in stolen cars, unlicenced and underage
  drivers, drunk drivers, Police drivers in an
  emergency response situation, escaping criminals,
  motor racing on the highway and so on.

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What is speed?

• Speed is measured in miles per hour.
• You cant measure danger in miles per hour unless
  you have fixed conditions.
• But there are no fixed conditions.
• Speed can be judged to be appropriate or
  inappropriate.
• You cant tell if a speed is safe or appropriate
  if you only know it in miles per hour.

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Conditions

• Road type, road width, road surface, parked
  vehicles, vehicle type, presence of other road
  users, behaviour of other road users, dry road /
  wet road, driver experience, road features (bend,
  junction, traffic lights etc), visibility, night
  / day, other hazards, etc, and especially
• distance known to be clear.

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What is speed? 2

• Appropriate speed and Numerical speed are very
  different but they are frequently confused
• You can drive perfectly safely for years on end
  without a working speedo
• So how important can the number on the speedo be?
• You cant measure safe driving in miles per hour

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The truth about speed and accidents

• Very few accidents are caused or contributed to
  by normal responsible motorists exceeding a speed
  limit. We estimate around 1.
• Many high profile high speed crashes do not
  involve normal responsible motorists
• Most excessive speed crashes do not involve
  exceeding a speed limit

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The Supposed speed / accident relationship

• Its true that if you drive too fast you have a
  greatly increased risk of crashing.
• A driver at exactly 30mph will soon crash if he
  does not adjust his speed to the conditions.
• A driver who properly varies his speed to take
  account of the conditions will not crash.

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Time to react

• Its often claimed that reduced vehicle speeds
  would give more time to react
• But time to react is delivered routinely and
  continuously by observation, anticipation and
  planning (OAP)
• OAP are core driver skills
• Nothing happens suddenly - unless you failed to
  see it coming

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False and misleading data

• Many of the modern claims in road safety are
  false, inaccurate or misleading in some way.
• Take nothing on trust!
• Examine claims and assumptions carefully
• Well look at two key examples...

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Crashes down 40 at speed camera sites

• It is true? Yes.
• Did the camera cause the reduction? No.
• Amazingly this is a constantly repeated
  deception.
• Frequently it is quite deliberate.
• How does it work?

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Regression to the mean
Important! Virtually all claims of crash
reductions at camera sites depend on this error.
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Pedestrian impact speed data

• The government and the camera partnerships
  frequently quote
• At 40mph impact 90 die
• At 30mph impact 50 die
• At 20mph impact 10 die
• How do these figures fit into the real world?

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The Ashton Mackay graph
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Official figures

• In 2002, in built up areas (30 and 40mph limits),
  the following figures apply to child pedestrians
• Fatalities 58
• Injuries 13,937
• Proportion of fatalities 0.42
• What was the average impact speed?

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The Ashton Mackay graph
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Road user response

• Theres a massive gap between expected
  pedestrian fatalities and real pedestrian
  fatalities
• The gap is road user response
• Drivers slow in areas of danger and brake before
  impact
• Road user response is at least 500 times more
  important to accident outcomes than free
  travelling speed

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Accident frequency data

• With 32 million drivers and 214,000 injury
  accidents each year, the average driver goes 150
  years between causing injury accidents.
• Much of the time, our average driver will be
  exceeding the speed limit.
• The DfT said recently that 12.5 of crashes
  involved excessive speed.

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Speeding and accident frequency

• If 1 in 8 injury accidents involve excessive
  speed then the average driver has an excessive
  speed injury accident once in 1,200 years.
• Speeding behaviour present every day is extremely
  unlikely to distinguish an event that takes place
  once in twelve hundred years.

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Road safety fundamentals

• Road safety isnt primarily an issue of physics
  or mechanics
• Accidents happen when road users make mistakes
• Most mistakes are carelessness or inattention
• Road safety is mainly an issue of psychology

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Road safety fundamentals 2

• We earned the safest roads in the World long
  before speed cameras
• We didnt do it by accident or luck
• We used the right experts, asked the right
  questions and created the right safety culture
• Safety culture is the key to road safety

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Speed camera effects

• Speed cameras dont slow us down (except at speed
  camera sites)
• But they do change the things we pay attention to
• And they do alter the way we think
• And they do alter our safety priorities
• We need to examine the side effects of speed
  cameras

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The Speedo

• How many times would you check yours?

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Speedo checks

• 30 of drivers give up more than half of their
  attention near a speed camera
• 70 of drivers give up 40 or more of their
  attention near a speed camera

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These side effects seriously undermine road
safety.
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They have not been officially studied.
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Weapons of mass distraction
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Whats the answer?

• We need to scrap speed cameras - they are just a
  huge distraction -
• We need to identify and deal with the worst
  drivers
• We need to encourage the rest to improve
• We must get back to the policies (and the
  experts) that gave us the safest roads in the
  World in the first place

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• Skills
• Attitudes
• Responsibilities
• Engineering
• Enforcement
• Safety culture

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Safe Speed

• Intelligent road safety
• http//www.safespeed.org.uk

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Paul Smith

• Founder of the Safe Speed road safety campaign
• More than 7,000 hours investigating and analysing
  the overall effects of speed cameras on UK road
  safety
• A life long interest in understanding how road
  accidents are avoided

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Safe Speed is...

• A serious road safety campaign
• A web site
• A leading source of road safety analysis
• A meeting point for advanced system level road
  safety ideas
• Not afraid to challenge conventional thinking

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Oversimplified thinking

• The faster you go the harder you crash
• Its simple physics
• The faster you go the less time you have to
  react
• These views dont describe road safety reality.
• Road safety isnt physics or mechanics. Its
  psychology.

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Examples

• Crash severity scales
• International accident comparisons
• UK History
• Crash frequency

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The real world

• Non-injury and unreported accidents x2
• Near misses x5
• 14,000 x 2 x 5 140,000 incidents
• 59 of drivers speeding in 30mph zones at sample
  sites
• In the majority of incidents, drivers would have
  been speeding in good conditions before the
  incident

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And now for the proof

• 59 of 140,000 is 82,600 speeding drivers in
  incidents
• Ascribe all the 58 deaths to speeding drivers
• We have left over 82,542 drivers who would have
  been speeding in suitable conditions before the
  incident who all managed to avoid killing

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Speeding kills?

• 58 / 82,600 fatalities 0.07
• Or 99.93 of speeding drivers managed to avoid
  killing the child pedestrian.
• If 99.97 of speeding drivers didnt kill because
  of their speed, what saved the children?

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The Risk Triangle

• Approximate annual figures
• 3,500 killed
• 30,000 seriously injured
• 300,000 slightly injured
• 3,000,000 damage only accidents
• 30,000,000 near misses
• You cant create this pattern with any physics
  model - you need a psychological model instead

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Making a difference

• Road user response is clearly our most precious
  road safety asset
• It comes from training, attention, and
  importantly road safety culture.
• If speed enforcement dulls driver responses by a
  fraction of 1 the entire benefit of lower
  speeds will be swamped.

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Conclusions

• Crashes happen when road users make mistakes
• If we are to reduce crashes, policy must
  concentrate on the causes of those mistakes
• Road safety policy should positively address road
  user psychology
• Safety culture is the key

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Speed cameras

• Speed cameras are bad psychology
• They have dangerous side effects
• drivers attention is diverted
• drivers concentration is reduced
• and they undermine the safety culture
• There is no valid basis for expecting speed
  cameras to improve road safety
• every single claim can be easily dismissed

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Bad driving kills

• Speeding alone does not