Safety vanishes in a flash with cameras

SPEED cameras make me angry. It wasn't always that way, and I've never been caught by one. Now, though, I campaign full time to get them removed from our roads because they damage core road safety values and have replaced genuine life-saving policies. In short, the infernal things are killing us.

Between 2001 and 2003, I spent 5000 hours examining the road safety system and the claims made in support of speed cameras. All I found was false assumptions, errors and misunderstandings.

Earlier this week, a 650,000 campaign was launched, in the vain hope of improving public acceptance of speed cameras.

This is extremely bad news because the campaign itself will cause further subtle distortions of essential road safety priorities.

The case for speed cameras isn't built on evidence, but on faith - faith that slower is safer, faith that cameras make everyone drive slower and faith that speed cameras reduce accidents.

But the evidence says something different. Road deaths are not falling as expected. Crashes with "excessive speed" recorded as a contributory factor are increasing and figures that claim "crashes down at cameras sites" are dominated by a well-known statistical error.

If cameras worked, we'd expect road deaths to be falling faster than before. But that's not the case. After 30 years of regular reduction, road deaths have stopped falling. Yet the factors that gave us those improvements are still present. We're still making safer cars, still treating black spots and still getting better at treating roadside casualties. These factors outweigh the growth in traffic and should be delivering reductions in road deaths.

Something nasty is going on. This is well known in road safety circles and Department for Transport asked the Transport Research Laboratory to look into it. The findings were published in spring 2005 and basically state that road deaths are not falling because drivers are getting worse.

It's no surprise that drivers are getting worse. A major cause is speed cameras, both directly and indirectly. Speed cameras come with side effects. They change our priorities. They change the things we pay attention to and the way we drive. I can list 29 side effects of speed cameras. There isn't space here to go into them all, so let's examine three important ones.

Speed cameras encourage us to believe that the speed limit defines a safe speed. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even 30mph - our lowest widespread speed limit - is a deadly speed. We need drivers to adapt their speed to the conditions, yet speed cameras encourage the belief that the speed limit defines safety.

Speed cameras damage the police/public relationship. The Police Federation are up in arms about it. It's a serious matter because we depend on faith in the police to get important messages across. And, of course, there are serious implications for wider society.

Speed cameras make us pay too much attention to speed limits, the speedometer and the risk of enforcement. Drivers have finite attention to give and this means they give less attention to hazards on the road ahead. Driver inattention is the number one cause of crashes so it's obvious that reducing driver attention on the road ahead is extremely dangerous.

Accidents are rare events because we're all continuously trying not to crash. We don't have driverless cars crashing into mindless skittles. What we do have is human behaviour - 32 million licensed drivers involved in about 214,000 injury crashes per year. If one of those drivers causes each crash, the average driver goes 150 years before they cause one. Road safety is primarily about the human behaviour that, on average, enables us to avoid causing an injury crash for 150 years.

Perhaps you think "speed" might not influence crash frequency, but it must influence crash severity. Wrong. Look at child pedestrian fatalities. We've all seen the claims - 20 per cent die in 30mph impacts; 80 per cent die in 40mph impacts. We know from surveys that most vehicles are "speeding" in 30mph zones. So are more than 20 per cent of child pedestrian injuries fatal? In 2004 in built-up areas (30 and 40mph speed limits) 11,999 child pedestrians were injured and 58 died. The proportion that died was 0.4 per cent. The reason that we didn't kill more than 2400 (20 per cent) was because drivers slow down in areas of danger and brake before impact. These behaviours are major factors in mitigating impact speeds.

Sustainable road safety requires psychologically effective policies. Speed cameras are bad psychology and are doomed to fail. Slower is only safer when it refers to the speed at impact and impact speeds are dictated by driver responses.

Speed cameras are to road safety what a hammer is to clock repair. Used with care, it might work sometimes but most of the time it just makes an ugly mess. That's the real penalty of speed cameras. More dead people because they are the wrong tool for the job.

Paul Smith is a road safety campaigner with Safe Speed. Visit www.safespeed.org.uk for more information

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