Driver's Retail embargo protest.

Complete the survey (Right).

Would you consider selective use of your car for three days if it didn't inconvenience you at all?

It is about time that our 30,million drivers demonstrated their power. Truth is if we all stopped doing it the economy would collapse and thousands more would die than are from any driving cause.

We are being mercilessly criminalised, over taxed, hampered and slowed by officialdom on the behest of profit and gain and to feed the public transport lobby too. Why? Because they pretend they are doing us a favour and not the other way around.

Perhaps it is time we showed how vital we all are!

Would you consider selective use of your car for three days if it didn't inconvenience you at all?

Excluding all those who drive for their profession for obvious reasons, I think we can still make an impact by avoiding use of our cars and motor vehicles where it would impact most. Retail parks, or Hypermarkets or filling up and non urgent garage servicing during those three days. Re-arranging our routine around the three days and avoiding the theatre or cinema or favourite restaurants etc.

By shopping locally and avoiding out of town precincts and retail centres which rely on the car during that three days.

Limited only by our imagination, we, as private drivers, could show what impact the driver can have without even using the professional wing of the driver army.

I am running a survey, (right) for a month to see if there is the will and the interest for it.

Keep an eye on how it is going and if it takes off, we will set the three days to run it.

Pass this on.

Road safety bad for health

First we have Bob Gifford of PACTS writing to the Health Minister (click here): And for those of you who do not know PACTS, (Parliamentary Advisory Committee on Transport Safety), sounding very important and official, is nothing but a private lobby group of non-experts, and is overloaded by vested interest groups, from public transport, insurance, speed camera manufacturers and so on.

Then here is my letter to the same minister:

3^rd June 10

Dear Mrs Milton,

False road safety policy affects public health.

I congratulate you on your appointment as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Public Health.

I am writing as an ex traffic officer, who has dealt with road accidents, compiled the statistics, prosecuted traffic law, prepared accident abstracts for the legal profession, a class 1 advanced police driver and motor cyclist, and my trade was motor engineer. I think I can claim to be an expert driver and an expert in road safety.

Unfortunately nearly all those who will advise you on healthy transport will not be experts at all and in most cases have a vested interest and another agenda. I do not. I am totally altruistic in my work and my concern is in three basic areas:

1. We fail to address real accident causes. A subsequent health issue.

2. We criminalise drivers needlessly. This causes stress.

3. The cost of the massive and profitable Road Safety Industry to the economy means that there is less money for health and thus people die.

You would never imagine, from the publicity and promotions that since 1993 road casualties were dropping massively before expensive Road Safety Partnerships and their cameras and in fact have flat lined since. Do you appreciate that, after about 300,000,000,000 driver miles per year, there is less death on the road from any cause than by accidents in the home? About 4 times more for breast cancer and about 4 times more for asbestos related illness and about 6 times more from NHS failings?

So the Road Safety Industry, represented by a private Parliamentary lobby Group and several other charities and foundations it sponsors, tend to overstate the negatives of the private car owner and road transport too. This is always in favour of the public transport operators and operators and manufacturers in The Road Safety Industry.

That this is a multi billion pound industry, where no-one in it is so for altruistic reasons,(Why not if it is about the good cause of human safety and life or death?), can be judged simply from the very costly equipment that is now required, from crash helmets and seat belts to booster seats, air bags etc., that apart from the profit motive, although they undoubtedly save lives, don’t actually stop one single accident happening in the first place.

The falsehoods about speeding, perpetrated by a simplistic and untrue slogan and the official use of non legal terms such as ‘excessive speed’, ‘too fast’ ‘in a hurry’, all of which are used by officials and in police statistics and yet do not exist in the Road Traffic Act. These all come under dangerous driving and are simply used to muddy the facts to justify false speeding policy which is costing this country billions.

We estimate that for every 1 MPH we slow road transport, it costs on average £2,000,000,000 pa. (About £20 billion a year total). How many hospitals could you build with that? How many ambulances and fire engines could you buy with that? How many lives could we have saved? So what is the cost of this highly lucrative Road Safety Industry, its in-expert lobby groups and charities, in the terms of lives lost to its false policy and costs?

When a motorway is closed for 11 hours or a city closed for half a day, whilst a road accident is treated like a murder scene, how many millions of pounds are lost? What of the knock on accidents later in the day through stress, making up time or tiredness? Who is costing the activities of this industry and the impact it does have on the NHS and the economy? No one? Why not?

A study of trends will show that there has been very little gain but so far there is no study of the impact of the costs of road safety policy.

Why do we have over 40 road safety partnerships all spouting the same mantra? Send the emergency staff back to their stations to save lives there and make up the shortages in the police, ambulance and fire service from where they came. Employ the civilians elsewhere until, by natural wastage, they are not replaced.

We need to think radically about freeing up the driver, restoring speed limits to a natural level as the 85%tile method did. Focussing on real accident causes and above all, understanding that the British driver is doing very well and if they were not doing it, the economy of this country would collapse overnight and many thousands would die from it.

Beware of approaches from vested interest and unqualified lobby groups. This life and death issue should only rest with independent experts in the subject.

We now need to be turning these costs around and saving lives at the same time; both directly on the roads but also by efficient use of the driver and the roads.

I will be most happy to assist you further. Best wishes and good luck in government.

Sincerely

Keith Peat