21 March 2005

on 21 March 2005 at 14:09

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.

7 March 2005

on 8 March 2005 at 16:53

Dangers of dispensing with diversity training

You get some funny people in Norfolk, don’t you? The other day I read that these three outwardly respectable guys – middle-classish, whitish, foreign-looking in an English sort of way – had refused to take part in council diversity training.

I mean, whatever next? How are they possibly going to be able to deal with things like ethnicity, gender, disability, age and sexual preference without it being laid on the line by some high-powered consultants with tickable boxes? I mean, before consultants, neither my wife nor myself had any idea what gender we were, how old we were getting and what sort of sex we preferred. But no sooner had we ticked the boxes than it all became clear.

It’s a jolly good job that there are a huge number of quangos around to put these minority men right – and most of them quite rightly broke all known speed records in an attempt to be helpful on this occasion.

There was the Wonderful Standards Board for England, pronouncing the old-fashioned classroom virtues of punishment and disqualification; the Cuddly Commission for Racial Equality, pointing out that we had no choice but to do as teacher said; and last but certainly least, Anne Matin, director of the Norfolk and Norwich Race Equality Council – who blew the whole thing by declaring unhelpfully that Norfolk had always been diverse.

Well, quite. We Norfolk people are known to be gracious and helpful to allcomers, whether Anglo, Saxon, Jute, Viking, Norman or Mancunian. So who benefits from diversity training?

Is it experienced councillors, who have always dealt with diverse people? Is it members of diverse groups? Is it the Government? Is it the huge number of people who find gainful employment in quangos that make sure we’re all behaving – and of course thinking – correctly? Or could it be the distinguished Blairish consultants of the Grass Roots Group, and others of their ilk? Of course not. Perish the thought. They’re probably very cheap anyway.

Hang on – I think that was a knock at the door.

Disturbing geographical anomalies in Norfolk

It started with a passing reference to the precise location of the delightful Norfolk hamlet of Irmingland. I suggested, obliquely, that it might perhaps not be five miles north-west of Hunstanton – as was stated by a handy guide.

I was going to leave it more or less at that, but others rode in and have discovered disturbing geographical anomalies in the said guide, which had, it must be admitted, a restricted circulation, certainly in its first, flawed edition. Reader Tony Foulke wonders if these anomalies may be more than “geographical dyslexia” on the part of the authors and relate to real space-time distortions on the ground. He notes an apparent “magnetic field running north-east to south-west” and a five-sided triangle centred on Knapton which appears to have displaced five key villages: Crimplesham, Felmingham, Shimpling, North Wootton and Knapton itself.

In the guide, these appear as three miles east of Dereham, 13 miles east of Norwich, four miles north-east of Dereham, four miles due north of King’s Lynn and eight miles south-east of Norwich respectively.

Traditional cartographers may be unhappy with such concepts as five-sided triangles, but Prof V A R Scheinlich of the Autonomous Republic of Hingham reassures me that they are quite common in his area. He mentions that similar phenomena have recently been observed near Fustyweed, which is not mentioned at all in the guide. I owe it to the very thorough Mr Foulke to give the other villages and hamlets omitted – Bradenham East and West; Braydeston; Drymere; the Little London between Little Hautbois and Little Massingham; Lyng Eastaugh; North Acre; Puddledock; Ragmere; Smallworth; Stackmere; Stow Bridge; Syleham; Thorpland and Tyby. If they no longer exist, I hope they will have the decency not to mention it. Secret burial ground of petitions

A 2000-signature petition calling for a care unit to in North Walsham to be kept open was left behind by health officials after a public meeting recently. This was described by different people as crass, insensitive, arrogant and unintentional, and it was clearly a mistake. But where do petitions normally end up?

Len “Kissme” Hardy, of Hindolveston, formerly a whole food chef, has for some years now run Petitiongate, a company that aims to handle petitions painlessly and effortlessly. “Our prime aim is to file them carefully and keep them available,” said Mr Hardy yesterday. “But of course most of our customers just want us to lose them.”

Asked how often people came to look at petitions, he said: “I’m not sure I can remember the last time. I think it was a Thursday, probably a leap year.” He did not encourage that kind of thing, he added.

His main customers, he said, were local councils. “We have a very big transport section, and of course the Government has a whole building to itself, near Scarning. Very lucrative, that. We call it The Black Hole. Don’t quote me.”

He denied rumours that he used signatures from old petitions to create new ones for councils who wanted to push through unpopular measures.

Thin end of the scarlet woman

Following shock news last week that shooting woodpigeons and crows would only be permitted in future if scaring them had been shown not to work, there are widespread fears around the country that the Government may be planning to shoot people generally.

Our loose ends correspondent, Mrs Taverham, writes: “Clearly the Government has done its very best over many months to scare us all. But we are still here. Scaring has not worked. Some feel that this woodpigeon thing is a signal. It is the thin end of the scarlet woman.”

Meanwhile several crows and woodpigeon have been admitted to the trauma room at Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital. Our Taverham correspondent, Mrs Loose Ends, said: “They looked terrified. Totally shot.”

Fast bird fined

A Ford Fiesta driven by a small owl along Dereham Road has been clocked by a speed camera at 743mph. A spokesperson for the Norfolk Camera Safety Partnership said: “We are totally satisfied that our cameras are carefully checked and infallible. It probably picked up some vibration in the rear window. “The bird was definitely going too fast anyway. So is everyone else.”