Transport Crucible . com

Revelations by the Audit Office add fuel to an increasingly heated debate about the value of speed cameras and lower limits to the critical task of cutting UK road casualties. Latest figures show that the Treasury gains £10,000 per hour everyday from speed camera PCNs, and that the number of cameras in Britain has trebled in six years. Nevertheless, during that time the UK’s place in casualty reduction tables has slumped from near the top to 11th out of 23 other countries for pedestrian deaths. Meanwhile, DFT figures show that top causal factor for casualties is not speeding, but “driver error/reaction”, which is attributed to 60% of all accidents and includes ‘failing to look properly’ and ‘misjudging a turn’ and not speed. These figures also show that only 5% of all accidents and 15% of fatal crashes are caused by ‘exceeding the speed limit’. Critics of current plans include a rising number of road safety campaigners who suggest that cameras are not the answer. Nevertheless Government plans to expand the number of UK roads ‘policed’ in this way. The latest plans include 19 sets of cameras above a six-mile section of the M20 and M25. In theory, according to the Highways Agency, this is to help ‘regulate’ traffic flow. But TC notes that motorways remain by far the safest roads in Britain in terms of casualty rates, and that links between exceeding speed limits on urban roads and evidence of corresponding casualty problems are not always as clear as protagonists of greater enforcement suggest. For example TC sees that the Police in Cambridge clocked 32,000 drivers exceeding a 30 mph speed limit in one week on a single city centre road – which amounted to 75% of all drivers during that week. Predictably this prompted calls for urgent steps – and yet no account was mentioned in this report of the salient fact that not one accident or casualty of any severity occurred as a result of the 32,000 instances of speed limit excess. Doubtless this debate will continue raging on…