How can we improve road safety?

Road safety, responsibility and speed cameras. Is driving safely a matter of personal responsibility or should the government intervene with traffic-calming, police patrols and speed cameras?

And how can we discern what´s fantasy and what´s fiction in an area that stirs strong emotions and people´s beliefs in their fundamental rights.

Paul Smith and Robert Gifford put forward their cases for a successful road safety policy.

Paul Smith
Safe Speed
Paul Smith started the Safe Speed road safety campaign in 2001. With a background as a highly trained driver and as a professional engineer he set about a forensic examination of the government case in support of current road safety policy. See http://www.safespeed.org.uk.

Robert Gifford
PACTS
Robert Gifford is Executive Director of the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety (www.pacts.org.uk). This is a charity advising MPs and Peers on road, rail and air safety issues having regard to key research and policies that will save lives.

Paul
Smith

Policies have diminished driver skills

Road safety has reached an amazing level with 1 death per 100 million miles driven. It works partly because we have created an error tolerant environment, but mainly because our road users manage risk. The potential danger of our roads system is off the scale – but we manage risk well and few deaths result.

In the rush to stamp out speeding, modern policy has neglected individual risk management. The tragic consequence of this is that our drivers simply aren´t as good at staying out of trouble as they used to be.

Proper policy must do two things. Firstly it must use effective roads policing to deal with a small percentage who operate way outside of social norms. These are the drunks, the thrill seeking bikers, the unlicenced hooligans in stolen cars. They are ‘rogue drivers’ and their risks are enormous. Secondly, and this is the missing key, proper policy must help the rest of us to develop our skills in managing risk.

Speed kills policy backed with speed cameras, speed humps and endless speed limit reductions has NOT delivered road safety improvements; neither road deaths nor hospitalisations are falling as expected. These policies have diminished driver attitudes and driver skills. No wonder they haven´t worked.

Robert
Gifford

Policies have succeeded

To reduce crashes and injuries, we need to know who is involved, where and why. To prevent them, we also need a combination of education, engineering and enforcement - each of which will have a part to play and will, in turn, affect the others. We also need accurate data to help us decide which policies to implement where.

Over the last 20 years, we have rightly focused on getting car drivers not to drink and drive, requiring car occupants to wear seat belts, and persuading and forcing (if necessary) those car drivers to slow down so that the vulnerable are less at risk. Tackling alcohol, seat belts and speed have brought and will continue to bring significant contributions to improving safety.

And the policies have succeeded. Drink-drive deaths have fallen from 1700 in 1980 to 560 in 2005. Seat-belts have saved over 50,000 lives since 1983. Reducing speeds in urban areas has helped to cut pedestrian deaths from 1703 in 1987 to 671 in 2005.

Health and safety requires employers to reduce risk to employees and to third parties affected by the undertaking. Effective risk management, therefore, is not just about preventing you from harming yourself but about reducing the harm you may do to another. Reducing speeds lessens your chance of killing yourself or an innocent bystander.

Paul
Smith

Road safety as a system

Robert´s views expressed above typify everything that is wrong with road safety. They fail to characterise – or even understand - road safety as a system and instead concentrate on tiny component parts. The problem is that altering the component parts without regard for the whole system has proved to have horrendous side effects.

Pedestrian deaths in 1972 were 3,083 and fell to 1,241 in 1993 when the first speed cameras were installed. To attribute further falls to ‘reducing speeds’ is pure wishful thinking. Much of the modern gain is due to reduced pedestrian activity which has fallen by 16% in a decade. The growth of the ‘school run’ is one familiar example.

Drink drive is a real concern, but presently appears to be rising not falling. This is likely to be due to reduced police traffic patrols. Many simplistic modern policies ‘move the casualties around’ somewhat, but saving 100 drivers while killing 100 pedestrians - or vice versa - does not indicate a worthwhile road safety policy.

It´s time to cut to the chase. I challenge you, Robert, to produce any evidence at all that speed limit reductions or speed cameras have led to a systematic road safety improvement.

Robert
Gifford

Individuals have to accept an element of restriction

Let us agree about drink driving. I accept the point that police activity has lessened in this area as the figures on numbers of breath tests conducted show. However, the reduction in deaths is certainly substantial over 20 years.

On the other hand you are wrong about pedestrians. Risk of death per billion user kilometres - which takes into account, therefore, activity - has fallen from 57 to 37 in the last decade. In addition, speed of vehicles in free-flowing traffic has also reduced. In the mid 1990s, 70% of drivers did not comply with the 30mph limit. In 2005, that figure had declined to 50%.

The problem that I have with your mindset, Paul, is that it focuses entirely on man´s (and I use the gender deliberately) right to drive where he wants, when he wants and as fast as he thinks fit. Society cannot function like that: we need also to think about all the other atoms bouncing around enjoying their right to movement and look at the greater good of the greatest number. That means, as I repeat, identifying risk to self and risk imposed upon others.

The evidence is there in reduced pedestrian deaths in both hard numbers and in exposure. Sometimes, individuals have to accept an element of restriction.

Paul
Smith

Correlation does not imply causation

You´re claiming that the trend in pedestrian deaths is evidence that a new policy is working. This suggestion is wrong in three ways.

- The correlation isn´t present before 1994, when, according to your logic, pedestrians deaths should NOT have been falling because we DIDN´T have speed cameras.
- Even if the correlation was good, correlation does not imply causation.
- The trend isn´t corroborated. Car occupant deaths are presently rising, and if we were having lower average impact speeds they would be falling.

Certainly the road system and all users of it need rules and controls. Appropriately set speed limits fall into this category. However the modern obsession with speed limits and speed enforcement is having a detrimental effect of driver quality. We´re forcing drivers to adjust their speed for legal reasons when we need to help the responsible majority to adjust their speed for safety reasons.

Adjusting speed to suit the hazard environment is a driver´s primary response to risk. This is fundamental to our amazing safety record (1 death per 100 million miles). Modern policy says ‘drivers can´t be trusted to manage risk’ and the consequence is that road deaths are not falling significantly. Responsible drivers must be trusted. Irresponsible drivers must be caught.

Robert
Gifford

The need to manage speed

Your statement about car occupant deaths is wrong. The 1994-98 average for drivers was 1,128 and for passengers 634. In 2005, the comparable figures were 1,109 and 566. I´m not saying these are acceptable deaths but we have to avoid misleading statements.

To date, I have not mentioned speed cameras. What I have identified is the need to manage speed - both excess (breaking the posted speed limit) and inappropriate (driving too fast for the conditions). Cameras are a part of speed management as are vehicle activated signs, road engineering measures, police officers, advertisements and courses.

Research has defined different attitudes to speed enforcement. There are drivers who are compliers, deterred (fined once and never again), manipulators (slowing down and speeding up) and defiers. The responsible driver is likely to be in the first two categories. Policy has to focus on making those as large as possible.

Fatal car crashes are more likely to involve a male driver breaking the speed limit. That driver is also less likely to be wearing his seat belt, thereby increasing his exposure to risk.

So we have to take a twin-track approach: reminding all of us to comply with the law for our own and everyone else´s good and punishing the serious offender. You can´t do one without the other.

Paul
Smith

Law is a blunt tool

Robert´s colours are showing here. He thinks that road safety is a matter of law and compliance. He´s tragically wrong. The law is far too blunt to tell the difference between safe or unsafe behaviour. Despite universal speeding on our roads only 5% of injury crashes involve any speeding vehicle.

One critical mistake is to roll together ‘speeding’ (a legal issue) with inappropriate speed (a driver quality issue). We´re hammering drivers to be legal, and they are responding by altering their priorities – more legal – less safe. No wonder deaths amongst car occupants aren´t falling as expected. Drivers are getting worse because we´re giving them totally the wrong sorts of targets.

If your speedo breaks it makes no difference to the way you drive, so we know for sure that its messages are pretty insignificant.

Our amazing road safety record isn´t a consequence of ‘safe crashes’ – although it helps. It´s a consequence of an awful lot of human behaviour which is safe enough.

Road safety is (you might say) 99% psychology and 1% physics. That´s why you can´t measure safe driving in miles per hour and why speed cameras and speed limit reductions have failed to deliver any road safety improvement. They simply aren´t good psychology. A decade of bad results proves the point.

Robert
Gifford

A combination of education, engineering and enforcement

What I actually said at the beginning was that road safety is a combination of education, engineering and enforcement. If the law is "too blunt", we would not have a drink-drive limit. We would return to the days of "Why not have another for the road?".

Paul´s views seem to be a set of wholly unsubstantiated assertions. My experience is that if the speedometer breaks you slow down because you do not know the speed at which you are travelling.

In the same vein, what is the evidence for drivers getting worse? Car driver deaths among men are not going down because men are committing both illegal and unsafe acts.

I return to my central point. Road safety is a policy that aims to improve the safety of all road users, whichever their preferred mode of travel. Paul sees the world through the eyes of the driver who must not be restricted in any way. You cannot make policy for one set of road users and let the rest go hang. The roads are complex places with a multiplicity of users and purposes.

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