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Thursday 7 January 2010

Lincolnshire Partnership selective crowing?

Dear Target,

Brian Burns is a paid employee of the Lincolnshire Road Safety Partnership
and has a vested interest in the portrayal of accident results. 6th January.
He rightly suggests that this is about people's lives and because it is a
life and death matter conclusions should not be left to vested interest
groups like Road Safety Partnerships. There should be balance on such a
serious matter so let's look at Mr Burns recollections to see if they are
selective.

He says the year before the partnership was formed, 1999 road death was 104.
Well 2000 was bound to be better than that but he did not mention that 2003
was at 104 too. 1993 was only 76 and 1997 was 77. He insists on using
seriously injured' but A&E figures, the people who actually deal with the
casualties,do not accept those figures. But there are other contributory
factors for the success. Since 1993, there have been vast improvements in
vehicles, roads, emergency services and A&E but the most significant factor
was the massive hike in fuel costs during 2008 to give the 51 figure which I
had predicted would be low as early as January 2008. 2009 started very badly
because fuel cost had come down again and by March The Partnership were
warning us to expect a bad 2009. They had failed to notice, as I had, that
fuel cost was rising though and so I was predicting another low year and so
it has proven to be. But the activities of our expensive Road Safety
Industry Initiatives also kill people too. What is the economic cost to the
country for every 1 MPH that traffic is slowed by them? By slowing goods
vehicles to 40 MPH? Of 40 Road Safety Partnerships up and down the country
just to be saying the same thing? And everything lost to the economy kills
people too. We should also know these figures before making a value
judgement on the success of The Industry. If all these people were really in
it to save life, why do they all make money from it?

There are less people killed on our roads, from any cause, than from
accident in the home, far less than from smoking, eating too much salt,
asbestosis and so on, so what is all this really all about? It is about an
insatiable profitable industry and nothing to do with saving lives at all.
Brian Burns is in it for the money.

I don't suppose this will be published but please do contact me for an
unbiased, altruistic and independent comment on this life and death matter.

Regards

2 comments:

  1. Keith
    Suggesting Bob Burns is "in it for the money" and has no interest in saving lives is disingenuous and does your credibility no favours.
    The A&E figures are not the same as the police figures for obvious reasons however it should be remembered that all of the figures for many 10's of years have been collected and counted in a consistent way so trends are reliable.
    Examination of your blog shows you have an obvious agenda and the bias is doing you and the ABD no good whatsoever.
    Your basis for your discussions seems to be at a similar depth to the BNP and as such will be grouped with the same sort of single issue cranky organisations.
    Cheers
    BB

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  2. Well his Press remarks were selective and misleading the public Bob and he is in it for the money isn't he?

    Don't let's have all this piety from people who are really making money from saving lives and then being selective about their public anouncements Bob. This is supposed to be about public safety isn't it? This is not a popularity contest Bob. This is about telling the truth on a serious issue.

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