28 June 2004

on 28 June 2004 at 21:28

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?

14 June 2004

on 16 June 2004 at 10:13

Green badge ploy nets disabled

Of all the bureaucratic, misleading and misconceived systems operating in the city of Norwich (and there are a few), the green badge scheme must come near the top of the list.

Let us say that you are a disabled person – a holder of the national blue badge which enables you to park on yellow lines and in certain designated bays. You do not have a green badge and have probably never heard of it.

You drive round the city and eventually spy a disabled parking space. It says so in big white letters, and you confirm it by checking a nearby lamp-post, which has a blue badge on it. You park for two hours.

On your return, you find you have a parking ticket. Why? Cunningly, the council has placed a green badge bay next to the blue badge bay, and you have inadvertently slipped into it. On searching further, you find that a green badge adorns a second lamp-post which you had neglected to spot. After all, you are disabled, and have no desire to carry out a survey of nearby lamp-posts.

Is this a deliberate ploy by the council to fleece the disabled? We know that the council favours fit people, because of its strenuous efforts to help cyclists and pedestrians, but working on the principle that one should not attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity, I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

The green badge fee is £5 a year, and it generates the usual ton of paperwork – all to no purpose, because anyone with a blue badge would almost certainly qualify for a green one if they applied. And anyone rejected has the right to an independent doctor’s examination, at a cost probably slightly in excess of £5.

So why does the council persist with it? Chief executive officer Anne Seex admits that bringing the scheme to an end would save money and reduce bureaucracy. The 22 spaces reserved for green badge holders would be available for blue badge holders, and the shame felt by people receiving a ticket unfairly would be removed.

I understand a consultation process is taking place. I wish this did not worry me as much as it does.

Giant whelk on Stiffkey marshes

I have received a call from world-famous local explorer Richard “Volcano” Meek, following publication on this page of his plans to distract tourists from the over-visited western part of North Norfolk and lure them into the Empty Quarter, east of Cromer.

This, he says, “may appear to sit uncomfortably with my plan to open Whelk World – a leisure complex involving 1000 glass fibre boat-like holiday chalets on Stiffkey marshes and a giant illuminated whelk visible from Holland on clear nights”. But in fact he intends to make this a magnet for the more discerning and artistically sensitive visitor, taking a lead from the success of the Millennium Dome and the Lowestoft kipper. And he has further plans for the so-called Empty Quarter. He adds: “I am in negotiations with the owners of Blackpool's Golden Mile and hope soon to be able to announce that each year after the illuminations are switched off, they will be transferred to Bacton and used to adorn the terminal which is currently little visited in December.”

You knew where the Vikings stood

Viking hordes pitched their tents near Cow Tower on the banks of the Wensum in Norwich over Whit weekend and behaved in such an eco-friendly way that I suspected they were city councillors in disguise. They certainly had a Lib-Dem look about them, despite the absence of road humps. Maybe it was an election ploy, but if so I am afraid it failed to fire my enthusiasm for a politically united Europe, Viking or otherwise.

Despite this late evidence of greenish tendencies, you knew where the Vikings stood – for the kind of rape and pillage not yet disguised as EU directives. The problem with politics nowadays is not that the public is apathetic, but that the parties have no distinctive principles – just a series of half-baked ideas lumped together in response to market research. The result is that you don’t really want any of them. Hence the stubborn support for fringe groups with a narrow but sharp focus. All three major parties are so seduced by the idea of being politicians on a bigger stage that they don’t seem to grasp the fact that most people don’t want to be part of a Europe that has a totally different legal basis and tradition, without UK freedom safeguards.

Some of you may think we’re already way down the road in that direction, but perhaps it’s not too late. After all, the Vikings have moved on.

Don't slow down: we need the money

The anti-car lobby continues its campaign of quarter-truths and misinformation – something we can only expect to continue with the Government’s appointment of a programme assurance officer at a salary of £35,000 a year to help manage speed cameras.

I know a number of people who would love to manage speed cameras for nothing, but their methods might not suit the Government. Meanwhile we have the police in Hampshire to thank for making it as clear as it can possibly be that money, and not road safety, is what they are after.

A man of 71 put up a placard warning oncoming traffic of a speed trap at a danger spot. As a result, everyone slowed down, which must be good, mustn’t it?

The police didn’t think so, because they weren’t getting any money out of it. They took him to court, and the glove puppets who pose as magistrates nowadays found him guilty – and bizarrely banned him from driving! Not only that, they refused to suspend the sentence pending his appeal, which some might say was admitting the injustice by making sure it was administered before it could be put right.

But it doesn’t matter, because speed cameras increase road safety, don’t they? Well, road deaths in Norfolk are up by a third so far this year. They are also up in Suffolk, which doesn’t stop them claiming that cameras have saved 44 lives. Perhaps they could tell us which 44.

7 June 2004

on 8 June 2004 at 15:46

D-Day postponement shock

The articles scheduled for today were held over by the Eastern Daily Press to permit comprehensive reporting of D-Day anniversary celebrations. They should now appear on June 14.