21 March 2005
Scamera Partnership does something about safety record
It must be terribly frustrating for the Norfolk Scamera Partnership – all that lovely dual carriageway on the A11 with not a single fixed speed camera, and it’s got one of the most improved safety records in the country.
Clearly, something needed to be done. Off they went with one of their irritating little camera vans, and within 45 minutes they had caused an accident. A driver travelling at 82mph braked sharply on seeing the van, lost control and went into the central reservation.
But doesn’t that prove he was going too fast to control the vehicle? No, it doesn’t. Between 80 and 90mph is a perfectly safe speed for a competent driver in good conditions on most of the dualled A11. It is illegal, of course, but that’s because almost all our speed limits are set 10-15mph too low.
So why did he crash? There is an essential difference between a speed camera and other road hazards. In response to the latter you can do one of a number of things – steer into a different lane, brake gradually, even accelerate. But in a desperate attempt to avoid being victimised by a speed camera, you can only do one thing: brake sharply. And as all competent drivers know, that is the most dangerous action to take, because it gives you least control over the vehicle.
So speed cameras provoke drivers to do the most dangerous thing. But surely it’s still the driver’s fault for exceeding the speed limit?
Strangely, the safest way to drive is not to keep your eyes glued to the speedometer. Experienced drivers know when they are travelling at the optimum safe speed for their vehicle, and because of various empty-headed decisions by people who should not be in a position to make them, this usually turns out to be rather faster than the speed limit. Correct momentum is a valuable safety factor.
But of course we don’t want skilful drivers on the roads, do we? We want absolutely anyone to be able to drive, however incompetently, and then penalise those who do it well. No doubt the Scamera guys will argue that they detected a couple of people dangerously exceeding 100mph. Excessive speed is certainly dangerous, but how sure are we about these measurements? In recent weeks several cases have come to light of cameras getting speeds wildly wrong – one in Scotland where the car was supposed to be travelling faster than it was capable of, and a number in Suffolk on the A140, including a bus containing a tachograph which showed it was actually travelling at 29mph and not 81mph, as filmed.
Needless to say, these were freak results and every other measurement is spot on. Of course it is.
It’s time for much stiffer requirements for Scamera partnerships to demonstrate that their equipment is accurate. It would be nice if they could also tell the difference between safe and excessive speed, and between stopping and causing accidents.
Public transport challenge to air quality
One of the least convincing reasons for banning cars from Castle Meadow in Norwich – and drastically restricting them elsewhere in the city – was that it would improve the air quality. To anyone standing behind a bus as it pulls away, this was never much of an argument, and the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy has recently warned of the dangers caused to people using city streets by PM10, a pollutant emitted by diesel engines. A writer to our sister paper, the Evening News, suggests that with more and more buses proceeding through Castle Meadow, Orford Place and St Stephens, a face mask might be advisable for pedestrians.
Eric Kirk, formerly in charge of Castle Mall, was in a good position to check what actually happened when cars were banned from Castle Meadow. He used a meter annually to check air quality in the malls and his offices above Castle Meadow.
He says: "When cars were banned during the experiment it proved impossible to have the windows open because of the noise and fumes from the bus engines. The air quality in my office was worse than anywhere else in Castle Mall, including the car parks.
"The CO2 readings on Castle Meadow improved by just 18 per cent, yet on the corner outside Marks and Spencer it was 70 per cent worse, and in Cattle Market Street it was 55 per cent worse.
"I challenged the council for claiming it was an environmental success, but found they had not taken any readings before the experiment."
Graham Pope, chairman of the council of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, suggests that local authorities should go as far as to ban vehicles powered by diesel from built-up areas until PM10 emission is zero. As the Evening News correspondent puts it, “expansion of public transport in Norwich now appears to be a very undesirable undertaking”.
Clean away
Readers will be surprised, nay, shocked to hear that Norwich did not even make it into the top ten cleanest cities in Britain, announced at The Cleaning Show in Birmingham this month. Ely and Cambridge did make the shortlist, but no further, which leaves East Anglia looking pretty, well, grubby.
And to make things worse, we missed out on the World Toilet Summit too. That went to Belfast.
Questioning creation and evolution
Author Philip Pullman, interviewed in the EDP last week, is one of a band of eminent critics of Christianity who are particularly worried by the teaching of creationism in schools.
But why should this be a problem? Evolution is a well-established theory that works well in many areas, but provokes tricky questions in others. Creationism is a longer-established theory that has some obvious difficulties. If both are taught accurately and objectively, children can only benefit. As it is, teaching evolution as the complete solution to our existence is as misleading and simplistic as saying six-day creationism answers everything. Mr Pullman is dismayed at the spread of unquestioning faith, but this is a scientific as well as a religious problem. And he may be interested to know that the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill, which would make it a crime to incite religious hatred, is strongly opposed by large numbers of Christians, as well as himself.