Prince Michael's Awards Innocent!

HRH Prince Michael of Kent can be forgiven for believing that the pious Road Safety Industry is just a nice, caring, benign, charitable and costless necessity when in fact the reverse is the truth.

Its very sound-bite and mantra, 'Speed kills!', fails scrutiny. Fact is speed being motion, quite simply, without it the heart stops and we die; so actually the slogan 'No speed kills' is more the truth. It is also a fact that since man took to the horse, the train,plane, faster shipping and production, the faster it went so life expectancy has gone up not down in the faster economies.

So their very untrue sound-bite is a metaphor of the Industry itself. Why would anything honest need an untrue sound-bite anyway?

The Road Safety Industry is a very aggressive and highly costly industry which actually promotes anti driver and dangerous inexpert comment from charities like BRAKE for example. They are supposed to confine themselves to victim support but are increasingly commenting on the highly intricate matters of driving and road safety; aspects for which they are not qualified.

Why is it that in any other life and death issue we would rely very heavily on experts and yet in driving and road safety, virtually everyone from civil servants, councillors, MPs, most police officers who are not specialist, every Tom Dick & Harry and I suspect Princes too, are experts? A recipe for exploitation if ever there were one. But not only is this a life and death issue, people are prosecuted and even imprisoned too.

Surely before awarding people and groups with medals, His Royal Highness should ask a few questions of truly independent experts on this life and death matter and certainly ensure that there is no vested interest involved.

He could do no better than ask himself why so much focus and interest in it when there is more death from accidents in the home?

I can tell him that there certainly are vested interests behind both the medals I am aware of this year. In fact it looks to me very much like the Industry awarding itself. I doubt if any truly independent and voluntary experts will be invited to the presentation ceremonies or even be considered for a medal either.

I have written to Prince Michael to offer my time for him voluntarily and at my own expense.

Watch this space!!

Spending cuts and speed limits.

Since 2006 there has been a very costly and totally unscientific speed limit review set up by the last government and is still ongoing until 2011?

I have been surveying these and they are not based on any rationale or accident history at all. For example: 50 limits on dual carriageways, will inevitably mean that overtaking where it would be safe becomes illegal so crashes will inevitably be created by this policy on two way roads and single carriageways with opposing traffic.

Most of the unscientific limits of this review has cost the country billions to install and in the unnecessary slowing and criminalisation of a major infrastructure, about £3 billion per annum for every 1 MPH reduction.

Has this nonsensical speed limit review been considered for immediate abandonment within the financial cuts not withstanding the highly dangerous elements as outlined?

Open letter to Institute of Advanced Motorists

Why is IAM promoting speed cameras?

'Speeding' That is to go above an arbitrary and unscientific number on a pole cannot cause an accident. Too fast does, both above or below the limit but no camera can see that.

Does IAM agree with that statement and that most drivers or people answering its recent poll would not know that?

Since when was life and death road safety a non expert consensus matter? Or indeed how many of those polled were driving experts?

Given that without speed/motion we would all die, is 'speed kills' a false soundbite which may have influenced your poll?

East Midlands

Challenge to ROSPA: For or against road fraud?

ROSPA have just published their top accident causes and included was just enough nonsense to justify the continued prosecution of safe drivers. Here I challenge them BRAKE, RAC & AA to denounce it.

Hi,

When will ROSPA accept that physics would not support the notion that to exceed an arbitrary and unscientific number on a pole can cause anything, let alone 5% of accidents, any more than not to won't? That is why most accidents are below the limits. What you have is simply 5% of untrained and unqualified reporting officers ticking a box that shouldn't be in the STATS 19 form.

Speed is a factor in all moving accidents but not 'speeding'.

It is focusing on 'speeding' that feeds an insatiable Road Safety Industry and causes death by deflecting from real accident causes. Further more, the habit of slowing traffic unnecessarily costs about £3 billion a year for each 1 MPH, about £40 billion a year. How many lives could we save with that?

Is ROSPA interested in the lives lost to this profiteering at all?

The official use of terms like 'excessive speed', which are not even in the R.T Act and are really elements of reckless driving at any speed, to muddy the water between 'speeding' and reckless driving for profit, is criminal conduct and fraud to my mind.

Where is ROSPA, BRAKE & AA on all this? Does ROSPA, BRAKE & AA condone this fraud?

PACTS, BRAKE, DfT & Iain Dale wrong.

I am an ex police patrol driver and I have to challenge certain statements in Driving for Change in Behaviour by Christian Wolmar. 14/9 http://bit.ly/b7ord2

He says that the statistics show that the Association of British Drivers has it wrong about too much focus on speed. Clearly, like Ian Dale, who he quotes and the course instructor at Dale's speed awareness course, neither he nor they are experts in driving accidents or road safety. Worse the instructor is not at all altruistic in her message and in any case, being a mother of an accident victim, is no qualification either. Therein lies the problem. Too many non experts having a big say in this life and death matter. The Parliamentary Advisory Committee of Transport Safety, he quotes, is actually nothing more than an important sounding private lobby group with vested interests and without any experts either.

Of course speed is a factor in all road accidents; without speed nothing would be moving on the road at all. So when Julie Townsend of BRAKE says 'It's a contributor to a majority of crashes', I would like her to describe any accident, whether involving planes, trains, bikes or even running, where it is not a 'contributor'. So much for the experts of BRAKE then; perhaps they should just stick to victim support.

But the figures quoted by Wolmar are totally bogus too. For a start, physics would not support the notion that to exceed an arbitrary and unscientific number on a pole, 'speeding' will cause an accident any more than not to won't. Too fast causes them, is often below speed limits and thus most accidents are below the speed limits. Unfortunately most reporting officers are not specialists and do not know this. So all the 28% shows is that 28% of reporting officers ticked a box that should not be there anyway. The correct figure is zero per cent because speeding causes nothing. The millions of speeding tickets issued should each have been after a crash if it were not so.

Christian Wolmar also uses a term favoured by the officials, BRAKE and PACTS. 'Excessive speed'. Where is this in traffic law? It does not exist. It is an element of reckless driving and is nothing to do with 'speeding'. One causes accidents and the other is just coincidental to them. Why has he readily accepted a term, not even recognised in traffic law? It is used liberally by the mighty and aggressive Road Safety Industry, criminally to my mind, to confuse reckless driving with 'speeding' in order to justify a profitable policy of unnecessarily hampering and criminalising perfectly safe drivers and to ignore real accident causes whilst doing it. I refer to this effect as 'Speed Kills! kills'.

But what is the issue anyway? After 300 billion driver miles a year there is less death on the road, from all causes, than from accidents in the home. I think the answer can be found in the countless billions of pounds being consumed yearly by an insatiable Road Safety Industry; I can think of no other explanation for all this nonsense.

May I respond to the comments made about me on the very important matter of road death and prosecutions of safe drivers by Peter Mann ( Letters 10/9). There should be no such misunderstandings left outstanding.

He asks where I get my statistics from: The statistics I use are those from the DfT 1976 to 2008 and from the Lincolnshire Road Safety Partnership. The former show a very steep drop in accidents to the advent of camera partnerships when the drop actually levels out. The Latter clearly show that some of the worst Lincolnshire years were after cameras. My interpretations come from two aspects. I only allow the fatal figures because they are absolute but mingling the subjective 'seriously injured' numbers, as the authorities always do, is to muddy the water. I also expose the 'at our sites' figures (inserted by the officials) as bogus because they are affected, mathematically, by what is called 'the regression to the mean'; an effect where a balloon on a stick would produce the same figures.

However since the 1990s we have also had better vehicles, ABS, air bags, crumple zones, booster seats, better roads, A&E, paramedics and rescue too. One would have expected that, from 95 on, the figures would have been far better than they have. We can be forgiven then for suspecting that perhaps the Partnerships and their aggressive policies that prosecute safe drivers, while unnecessarily and expensively, slowing a major infrastructure to cause more prosecutions, have actually not been doing at all well.

Mr Mann then uses the term 'excessive speed' twice. The authorities often talk of it too. But it doesn't exist in law! There is only 'speeding', that is to go above a number on a pole and cannot cause anything, or reckless driving, under which, the state of 'too fast' or 'excessive speed' is reckless driving.This occurs above and below the limits and is why most accidents are below the limits. These non legal terms should never be used by officials but they do so, criminally in my view, to confuse us and thus mingle 'speeding' with reckless driving to justify camera policy.

Peter then misquotes me. I have only ever asked 'If speeding causes accidents, why are there no piles of wreckage at the end of every street?' never in the context of the slogan 'Speed Kills!' as he says. But 'Speed kills' is an untrue soundbite. It is untrue because, as any GP will confirm, without speed and motion, everything stops, including our hearts, so it is more true to say 'No speed kills!'.

This issue is far too important to stand on silly, and simplistic sound-bites because it is on such sound-bites vast fortunes are made. It is therefore no coincidence that I can also ask why in the pious Road Safety Industry nothing comes cheap? Do the TV campaign producers and performers do it for love? The seatbelt and car booster seat makers, the air bag makers, your friendly road safety man? Why not? If it is all in the cause of saving lives why not just work for cost? And that is what this is all about Mr Mann. There is more death from accidents in the home so why all this focus on prosecuting safe drivers by setting limits that then create the 'speeders'? Oh the cameras don't come cheap either.

My object is to achieve maximum road safety with less hampering and prosecution. Is that so bad Mr Mann?

RSS Ltd in trouble?

Remember Road Safety Support Ltd? See ACPO's little helpers or click on the RSS Ltd label.

Read this about them and the CPS. Read Here

Dear oh dear.