28 June 2004
Time to campaign against real causes of accidents
It is not unusual to be criticised for something I have simply not said. But it was bizarre to peruse the EDP letters page last week and find I was criticised for saying something I could not possibly have said.
The widely misreported figures on speed cameras nationally hit the streets on June 16: my last page appeared on June 14 and was as usual written a few days earlier, so I could not, as one reader seems to think, have queried which lives were supposed to have been saved by them.
The confusion may have arisen because I did ask (satirically, in case anyone else was wondering) which 44 lives were supposed to have been saved by Suffolk’s speed cameras – a claim made earlier this month.
In fact this is interesting, because it illustrates how people will bandy figures around wildly in an attempt to justify the unjustifiable. The national report claimed 100 lives saved nationwide: Suffolk seems to have done extraordinarily well if it alone managed 44 of them. One might well ask for the names and addresses.
As others have pointed out, the whole thing is a sham. The same “independent” report that made the claim also revealed that accidents had gone up at many camera sites, and it is a matter of record that since the speed-obsessed brigade got their teeth into our drivers, road fatalities have been going up nationwide following a long downward trend.
The reduction in accidents at some sites is hardly surprising. If you erect cameras in places where there have been a high number of accidents, it is not at all unlikely that they will fall in succeeding years, since accidents are random events. There is a scientific reason for this, which if you are interested you can access on www.safespeed.org.uk/pr126.html – a useful site for those sceptical of scameras and interested in the facts.
So if we installed garden gnomes instead of cameras we would get roughly the same results – without the generation of huge cash income, from which I understand the Treasury swallows 20 per cent.
Why do so many people think speed cameras are a good thing? Often because they don’t think at all. Another reader rightly diagnosed major causes of accidents as carelessness and impatience – and then called for more cameras and higher fines. But speed cameras do not film carelessness and impatience, most of which takes place well within the speed limit. It is about time the Government had a campaign against the real causes of accidents, if that is what it really cares about.
Quite nice trees on horizon
Most of us have been familiar for a long time with AONBs and, in some cases, SSSIs. Just in case you haven’t, they are Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty and Sites of Special Scientific Interest, and they perform a useful function in preserving landscape from people who might want to turn it into an urban wasteland. You know the sort of people: they view beauty as an optional extra in life and can live quite easily in the hell portrayed by Big Brother and its cousins, the angst-ridden soaps. There are a few of them about; so I’m grateful for any sensible attempt to preserve the wonders of the natural world. But I am a little worried about one designation that I came across for the first time recently: an Area of Attractive Landscape (AAL).
I am not sure what effect this has on planners, but it frightens me. It’s far too bland – rather like saying that a person is interesting (AIP). It wouldn’t put off the wastelanders for a moment.
What are we to expect next? Areas of Quite Nice Trees (AQNTs)? Sites of Fairly Presentable Hedges (SFPHs)? Reasonably Pretty Rivers (RPRs)? These are not suggestions.
Destination of cats' eyes unclear
A number of visitors to Norfolk have been asking me about our policy towards pets, following encounters with a number of signs reading “Cats’ eyes removed”.
I was able to disabuse them fairly quickly of the notion that these were actual cats – so no hard felines there. But I was surprised to be informed that such notices were peculiar to Norfolk and left a disturbing impression. They may be right: I have since seen signs elsewhere referring to “missing road studs”, which hardly seems to be an improvement in the ambiguity department but does sound slightly less painful.
My visitors were not, however, prepared to let it go at that. Why, they wanted to know, were so many cats’ eyes being removed? Where were they storing them? Was someone putting together a museum of cats’ eyes that would become part of our national heritage? Were they going to be used to illuminate the Great Whelk destined for Stiffkey marshes? Was Lottery funding involved?
Perhaps an EU directive had been issued.
I was not really able to help. I suggested that it might be part of the grand plan to make driving so unpleasant that no-one would want to do it, or possibly a road safety ploy, preventing drivers from seeing where they were going. (I know it sounds ridiculous, but so does putting lumps of concrete in the middle of the road and calling them traffic calming.)
Can readers suggest anything?
Over-the-shoulder look at road safety
The installation of vast numbers of pedestrian crossings on the most dangerous road in the northern hemisphere – Prince of Wales Road, Norwich – is presumably based on the interesting idea that the more opportunities you give people to cross the road, the safer they will be.
But are those cutting-edge crossings really so well planned? One reader suggests that a rather important safety principle has been overlooked: looking where you’re going.
He writes: “I like to look at the road I am about to cross, but on these new crossings the red and green man on the other side of the road is not there.
“He’s been moved to a display on your own side next to the push-button. So at the same time as checking the road you have to look over your left shoulder (and hope no-one is in the way).” Tricky. But no doubt the trusted old method has been proved defective in some way. We should be told.
Surely it could not simply be that the new method is cheaper?