Camera road safety claims criticised.
Motoring groups have reacted angrily to the recent news that the Department of Transport plans to allow more than 200 new speed cameras to be erected across the country, claiming that this is not the best approach to improve road safety.
The Association of British Drivers (ABD) argues that the decision indicates that the department is failing to understand the true nature of road safety, calling instead for a move away from a reliance on speed cameras, accompanied by what it calls the "increasingly hard line" enforcement of fixed speed limits.
ABD director of policy Mark McArthur-Christie claimed that road safety is failing to improve under current initiatives, pointing to a "desperate" need to "move away from this one-track road safety policy."
"We have a system which appears to believe a new speed limit enforced by a camera is the answer to all our road safety problems. I only wish it was that simple — the causes of crashes certainly aren't," he said.
Instead, the ABD has consistently lobbied for an enhanced focus on driver training, claiming that better educating drivers about road safety and safe driving practice is the key to improving driving standards.
The ABD is sceptical of the evidence that speed cameras are working to improve road safety. This week it hit out at claims by the Wiltshire and Swindon Speed Camera Partnership that installing speed cameras along the M4 had helped to significantly reduce serious accidents on a notorious stretch of the motorway.
The partnership claims that installing the cameras reduced crashes by 44 to 57 per cent. However, the ABD claims that previous research indicated that only 15 per cent of crashes on the road were caused by speeding, with drivers' failure to judge other vehicles' speeds and poor attention when changing lanes implicated in more cases. Consequently the ABD is questioning how targeting a supposed minority cause of accidents could have cut crashes by half.
However, the ABD's claim that speeding is not the leading cause of serious accidents is hotly contested, not least by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (Rospa). It claims that driving too fast for the road's conditions is the leading cause of road accidents, contributing to the death of 1,000 people and seriously injuring 6,000 every year.
Moreover, Rospa claims that speed cameras are a "very effective" way of persuading motorists not to speed, with a knock on effect of reducing accidents. It cites independent research conducted by University College London, published in December 2005, which claimed speed cameras had saved 100 lives over a few years. The researchers surveyed over 4,000 camera sites over a four-year period, concluding that the cameras had "significantly" reduced speeding and collisions, resulting in a fall in the number of deaths and serious injuries at the sites by 42 per cent.
Nevertheless, it can be assumed that many motoring groups will continue to oppose cameras, complaining that they fail to distinguish between speeding and unsafe driving. Even Rospa's research implicates motorists "driving too fast for the conditions" rather than speeding per se, with many drivers complaining that speed limits are unrealistic, particularly on motorways. Moreover, it can be claimed that speed cameras will never be the ultimate answer to road safety, failing to detect other dangerous habits such as driving under the influence or without insurance. |
