25 July 2005

on 25 July 2005 at 04:00

Off-target policies could be fatal

Targets undoubtedly have their place, but the places they are forced into often seem to be the wrong ones.

How can it possibly be right for the efficiency of a police force – or, worse, individual officers – to be measured by the number of convictions obtained?

It must be well-nigh irresistible to go for the easy option and leave difficult crimes untackled – the kind of mentality that leads to ineffective, unjust but cash-rich measures like speed cameras.

It’s just as ludicrous that councils should measure the efficiency of traffic wardens by the number of tickets issued. But this happens in many areas, as a report to the Department for Transport made clear last week.

Why should wardens be penalised if everyone parks legally? Surely they should be rewarded if they encourage correct parking. But that would not bring in money. So confrontation and “offending” are promoted.

It’s all part of the fashionable Persecution of Motorists Scenario (PMS), of course, as are measures like long-phase pedestrian lights in places such as Norwich.

It’s fun, if you’re a certain kind of traffic planner, to make drivers wait for thin air – never mind the pollution and congestion that is an inevitable by-product. But it turns out that this apparently pro-pedestrian measure has a downside for walkers. It could kill them.

If traffic is stopped on red in all directions, pedestrians tend to think they can cross – even if the lights are red for them too. And the longer they stay red, the more likely they are to risk it, thinking that the lights must be about to change in their favour.

Unfortunately they are sometimes about to change in the traffic’s favour. Even Norwich can’t make motorists wait for ever.

A more realistic phasing of the lights would, unsurprisingly, be safer for everyone. Now that’s quite a sensible target to aim at.

Exactly what were these lights for?

Motorists unfortunate enough to drive into Norwich from the wrong direction are just starting nine weeks of even more disruption than usual, as workmen remove the traffic lights on the Grapes Hill roundabout.

A bit of road widening and painting will bring the cost up to a cool £¼ million. We are told the result will be to reduce congestion and help improve air quality – both admirable objectives.

It does however make one wonder why the much-criticised lights were put there in the first place: was it to create congestion and worsen air quality?

Part of the current work includes “converting the pedestrian crossing on Chapelfield Road to pedestrian and cycle use”, which must be the ultimate money-wasting project. Standard pedestrian crossings around the city are used constantly by cyclists without any conversion at all.

There must be a tiny amount of sympathy for planners who are faced with the unanswerable question of how to cope with the traffic that will be generated by the Chapelfield Shopping Extravaganza.

But there was a time when the question wasn’t unanswerable. It was just that no one liked the answer, because there was no money in it. The words “short” and “sighted” spring irresistibly to mind.

Going wrong on the distributor road

There are three major wrong decisions that could be made about the Norwich northern distributor road.

• The first is not to build it: only the blind, those who will not see and those who don’t live or move in the north of the city could imagine that an increase in the current congestion there is a viable option.

• The second is to build it too far west, where it completely fails to serve the purpose for which it is designed. • And the third – possibly most bizarre of all – is to make it a single carriageway. Show me someone who wants it built as far west as possible, single carriageway, starting in 2020, and I’ll show you someone who thinks you should “have what you need rather than what you want”, and whose idea of what you need is strangely lacking in human understanding.

Beware of people who think they know what you need. As H L Mencken put it, “the urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule”.

Difficulties of driving while lulled to sleep

A survey this month tried to persuade us that certain music is safer to drive by. The limitations of the survey are demonstrated by the fact that easy listening music got safe-drive approval, despite its propensity for sending people to sleep. Only a few people, most of them from Norfolk, are able to drive in this condition.

But the most obvious danger of music in cars has nothing to do with melody or lyrics. It’s to do with changing the CD (or tape), which is quite hard to achieve while controlling the car efficiently. Strangely this is almost never mentioned in road safety campaigns.

11 July 2005

on 11 July 2005 at 04:00

Brave new system will make league tables even more meaningless

In a brave bid to make school league tables even more meaningless than they are now, the Government has brought in a system of assessing children that involves making a complete record of everything a child does after entering the school system.

In the process, a swathe of personal data is created that makes identity cards look wishy-washy and liberal in comparison. The aim may be to improve children’s education, but even without the big-brother element, there are huge flaws.

The better a child does when he or she is tested for the first time, the worse it is for the school, because all comparisons in future will be made against that. Any “falling back” will be disastrous, even if it is still to a level above average. But even more ridiculous, simply maintaining the high level will be regarded as less than satisfactory.

The obvious effect will be to make head teachers mark down their pupils at the earliest stages, so that they look as if they are improving. Anyone pushing children towards excellence at an early age will be penalised later by misleadingly low places in the league tables.

In the interests of statistics and paperwork, genuine teaching and aspirations will go out of the window.

Not that there is much chance of excellent teaching with the paperwork now demanded of schools.

The new Ofsted system may involve fewer and shorter visits, but the binfuls of paper already demanded are due to increase. Schools will have to have written policies on everything from fox-hunting to paving stones, and it will all have to be cross-indexed so that it can be located at a moment’s notice. This is clearly regarded by the Government as more important than actually teaching, and therefore more important than children.

Not surprising, really. Children, who tend to learn at different speeds at different times and in different ways, cannot be manipulated half as easily as numbers and ticks in boxes. And manipulation is what politicians need to do.

Perfect spot found for speed cameras

Interesting quote from the Norfolk scamera spokesman the other day: “People realise speed cameras work and they want them.”

Partly true: I would like all of them, because I have somewhere I could put them. It is extremely deep. It is called the North Sea.

He continued blithely: “They are generating more and more support.” Easy mistake to make. What he meant to say, of course, was that they are “generating more and more cash”.

Not surprisingly, when your livelihood depends on speed cameras, you can get a little blinkered. A Metropolitan Police chief superintendent writing to a national newspaper sees more clearly: “The police service is being driven down a policy route that does too little to catch dangerous drivers, fails to target persistent offenders and is unduly influenced by speed.”

He concludes: “What is needed is fewer speed cameras, more traffic police and a proper recognition of the skill and importance of their work.”

No chance of that happening, of course. It doesn’t generate cash.

Computer models predict increase in global warming reports

The fact that an area north-east of Thetford is hit more often by lightning than anywhere else in the UK was blamed on global warming last night.

“A computer model showed that by 2050 lightning will be hitting Thetford several times an hour,” said Professor Ian “Sam” Aufmerksam of the UEA’s School of Penguins, Chess and Road Surfacing. “Of course this may not be a bad thing, unless it’s under water too.”

He revealed that reports attributing widespread disaster to global warming were also likely to increase, according to satellite observations. “It’s important that people do what they can to prevent these reports happening,” he said. “They have been increasing hugely in the last 20 years and are clearly anthropogenerated. They can be very damaging at critical points, and take people’s minds off things we can actually do something about, like tackling HIV/Aids, abolishing poverty, controlling malaria and getting clean water to everyone on the planet.”

Prof Aufmerksam was last night blamed on global warming.

Poohsticks Olympic campaign water under bridge

A bid to bring the Poohsticks Olympics to Norfolk failed when they were awarded to a small village in the South of France yesterday.

“We are extremely disappointed,” said Henry (Fred) “Shrimp” Houseago, 106. “We took a VIP delegation to somewhere in the Far East and made a first-class presentation, though I say so as shouldn’t.

“We had Prof V A R Scheinlich, the Hingham expert; Mrs Hicks, the mayor of Little London, near Corpusty; the Rev Nick Repps-cum-Bastwick, the progressive cleric; and even Len “Kissme” Hardy, from Hindolveston, who won a gold medal in the 1960s, he tells me. They are all expert Poohsticks players.”

Plans to build a Poohsticks Stadium to revitalise an area south of Reepham will now fall by the wayside.

“I can’t help feeling that we got the backlash from Paris failing to win the other Olympics,” said Mr Houseago last night.

La Federation Poohstix d’Europe was unavailable for comment.

Spare beds sign of healthy society

When my mother-in-law was dying in Cromer Hospital, there was a bed free in the next room. My wife was able to make use of this to stay with her over the critical three nights.

In the sort of society some accountants would like, this would not happen. They do not like to see any beds going spare, because it means wasted money.

It’s not actually wasted money, of course – just wasted in the spurious way that they calculate such things – the sort of process that ends up with £1,312,260 as the cost of each death on Norfolk’s roads, and other equally meaningless and offensive figures.

Happily, the staff in Cromer Hospital are not accountants. In my limited experience, they are an exceptionally caring group of people.

A healthy and caring society is one that is happy to see excess beds in small hospitals, because you never know when they will be just what is required. And if they do have a cost attached, just hand us a list of costs attached to the NHS. I am sure we could all quickly find savings we would much sooner make. Extra managers, for instance. They are almost never needed.