Better Driving Please

[Gareth]

I read somewhere the rates are down because the method of defining a KSI has been changed.

I've read somewhere that concussion is no longer classified as a serious injury for the purposes of accident statistics gathered by the police.

The certainly helps to get the figures down when you're more interested in promoting a political agenda to justify the recent excessive focus on speed to exclusion of other, possibly more important, factors.

[TripleS]

...we've switched from saying that vehicles should be appropriately slow in urban areas where the danger to other road users is greatest, to the idea that the posted limit is the appropriate safe speed.

Hear, hear.

Yes, VH, accidents rates have been reducing. But the really big question is, have they been reducing as much as we could reasonably expect in recent years?

Absolutely. The obvious problem though is: it costs more money to educate the public than bang-up loads of 'self-financing' speed cameras. I think this, and many arguments around road safety come down to money.

Personally I would be prepared to pay more (road tax, petrol tax whatever) to fund improved driver education or tiered licences or more traffic police if it meant a better standard of responsible driving allowing a relaxation of speed limits. It's a hell of a big job and would take many years but I would support it if I could see the benefits.

Any one else agree?

Generally yes, but let them fund it by cutting out some of the wasted expenditure rather than taking more money off drivers.

....and to those who say there is no scope for cutting expenditure, just look at some of the things governments spend money on, and ask them if they would still spend it if was their money they were spending, and not just coming out of the public purse.

Best wishes all,
Dave.

[waremark]

Thanks Von for a good response to my post of last night. I do not agree, but I shall resist going round in circles with more contrary arguments - it is unusual for any of us to change sides from our entrenched positions in the circular arguments about speed limits and enforcement!

On Scotland, I posted some relevant data for the 10 years to 2004 here:

http://www.traffic-answers.com/forum/in ... 4#msg49414

Although they do have speed cameras up there, they do not have anywhere near as many and they have not gone through the massive reduction of speed limits which has made journeytimes in the south longer and driving so much less stimulating.

[Søren]

I’m nothing more than you say, but it does seem that those you entrust with understanding this complex interaction are taking far too simplistic a view of it. This simplistic view does not fit what is happening.

No I'm not talking about anyone specific, I'm just saying that you seem to be contradicting many road safety experts. Some of these surely have more time and data available than you or I and we should both respect their considered collective opinion.

Yes, if their research stacks up. I’m always slightly (very) wary of research which has been commissioned by a group who has a vested interest in only one conclusion. The problem for them is what do they do when the research reaches an undesired conclusion? Do they admit it or do they veil it, or do they simply ignore it.

I’d love something more up to date. I’d like it to be on the internet I’m not sure who would fund it. But I see no reason why it shouldn’t be relevant. The speed limit at the time in the USA was I believe ~70mph.

The report was done over 40 years ago in another country - there are many differences I would be cautious of:
a) different speed limits (not just NSL)
b) different culture
c) different driving skills
d) different cars
f) different roads

In fact so many and serious are the differences, I don't think it adds much to the debate.

I accept that there will be the distinctions you cite, but I fail to understand why they need to override this finding.
But again it’s your opinion, the research is out there to be heeded or ignored. As I said previously, the Solomon research seems to fit my perception of the risk associated with the skill and attention levels of drivers on the open road at various speeds. I’d be interested to know your view on the link between safe driving and speed chosen.

Dr Stradling is an unwilling witness in this case. He has been commissioned separately by the Scottish Executive, the DfT and the West Midlands camera partnerships to show a relationship between speed and crash involvement, in particular the relationship which shows that drivers who speed are more likely to be crash involved. He obliged of course and completed papers such as the one I’ve highlighted to make this conclusion.

Well any academic worth his salt will do their best to produce an unbiased, factually and scientifically respectable paper regardless of who's paying. Their reputation stands on this. You held him up to support your case and now you are saying he was only doing what his paymaster wanted?

It is difficult to pick and choose data collected on this subject, because most of it is collected for those who have a vested interest in evidencing that speed kills. They are the ones with the (our) cash after all. I don’t believe that they would ever lie or adjust their findings. However Dr Stradling has not satisfactorily explained why he has not linked his findings to ‘miles travelled’. If he wanted to make his conclusions as clear as possible then he should make that association properly and unequivocally.

Unfortunately he failed to take proper account of mileage travelled when he concluded that people with speeding tickets had more crashes. He may as well have written “people who buy petrol are more likely to crash than those who don’t.”

Yes I've heard this before...isn't it really easy though to take account of the higher mileage of some drivers and adjust their accident rate accordingly? If he didn't do this then others could.

I’m sure they could. AFAIK It hasn’t happened yet. He suggests in later papers that he has adjusted for mileage, but insists on using mileage ranges within which there is reason and scope for this mileage association having no value whatever. Stradling was reputedly floundering after a very short time when taken to task on this very point some time ago.

In the report I’ve mentioned he did give indication about the driving styles of higher and lower mileage drivers which allows a calculation to show that those who have received speeding tickets are a significant percent safer than those who don’t.

Please tell me more.

I can’t lay my hands on the specific maths, and it does seem to have taken account of more than one research paper, but it had an association between the mileage to ticket ratio of higher mileage drivers compared to lower mileage drivers, and research indicating that higher mileage drivers were less likely to crash (taking account of exposure), and other research that associated higher mileage drivers with a propensity to drive faster. Once I have a link to it, I’ll post it.

But the very fact that the DfT and camera partnerships are making a deal of such poor research shows me that they will take whatever they can in an attempt to strengthen their case. It seems like they have to clutch at straws – I’d have hoped that the road safety research that we depend upon was a bit better founded than this.

And even if there was any credence to Dr Stradlings assertions what is he telling us? He would appear to be telling us that despite getting tickets these drivers still seem to be crashing. It’s not exactly a ringing endorsement for the policy. People who deserve tickets (and there are lots of them) need to be stopped and spoken to. They need to be shown and told what they are perceived to be doing wrong – not get an envelope through the door some days later. This is of absolutely no remedial benefit whatsoever, but it does make a lot of people very angry.

I only lay as much information as I can before you. I know what my experiences have taught me. Your opinion is entirely yours, mine is mine, but we are allowed to share them.

Yes indeed and it's always good to share: opinions, toys, rolos etc. Just to emphasise I do respect your experience which is clearly much greater than mine and one thing we are both agreed on is our desire to use traffic police rather than speed cameras.

I have no agenda. I simply believe we are wasting money and lives by overdependence on a policy and strategy which has no positive link with better driving, and much potential to dumb down the quality of motoring. Steve Stradling has one thing right – road safety is much more to do with the mind than to do with driving skills, it has so much more to do with behaviours and attitudes than the highest levels of skill (which really should never be needed on a road anyway).

[vonhosen]

I think we've had part of this discussion before. VH appears to believe that before people are given responsibility, they must prove they are worthy of responsibility. I and others believe that you must give people responsibility for them to learn to take responsibility.

I liken it to bringing up children - if you never give them the opportunity to take responsibility for making decisions that affect their future lives, they are ill prepared to function as independent adults. Instead a parent needs to give them a basis of knowledge and experience, and then let them start to take responsibility but also to suffer the consequences.

Is it right that others should suffer consequences of their actions though, or should others be protected from them until they are consistently competent within the parameters they are being allowed to operate within ?

If you had to operate a complex piece of potentially risky machinery at work that required skill to operate well, would your employer give you a manual & say "There you go son, I'm sure you'll get the hang of it quickly" ?

You train so that they are consistently safe & competent within parameters & then you allow them to imrpove through experience within those parameters. If you change the parameters (or the complexity of the machine they are to work on) you give further training so that they are consistently safe & competent within the new parameters & then again allow them to imrpove through experience.

Look around and it is easy to see the consequences of this approach in many people, both young and old, today. Its especially worrying to see some young adults, when they've never had the opportunity to learn to handle money in a responsible fashion, go and make a complete pig's ear of it as soon as they get their first job.

I submit that by having a net lowering of speed limits, coupled with rigid enforcement of limits that are slower than most drivers accept as reasonable, we've switched from saying that vehicles should be appropriately slow in urban areas where the danger to other road users is greatest, to the idea that the posted limit is the appropriate safe speed.

As decisions appear to be and are removed from drivers, they loose interest in driving, and switch off from noticing and reacting to hazards. Yes, VH, accidents rates have been reducing. But the really big question is, have they been reducing as much as we could reasonably expect in recent years?

How do you come by reasonable projection figures though ?
I've seen people talk about what level deaths should be at & I've seen them talk about the advances in vehicle safety etc that would have led to them, but I don't see them talking about the flipsides that could possibly make it harder for those reductions than in previous years. Has any consideration in these projections been given to demographic changes in the population for instance ? The increase in drivers who haven't learnt to drive in the UK but elsewhere ? The expanding EU & migration here from those new members states, with these drivers able to drive in the UK for extended periods on the home nation licences, or just exchange for a UK one.

http://www.newzimbabwe.com/pages/uk26.12009.html

http://www.injurywatch.co.uk/news-and-g ... sh-1396634

http://www.injurywatch.co.uk/news-and-g ... rry-crash/

http://www.injurywatch.co.uk/news-and-g ... s-2196551/

Let's be clear, as I said before drivers have not for many mnay years had the freedom in law to decide on appropriateness of speed above our limits on any of our roads. And back in the day you were still prosecuted by Police for exceeding the speed limit where they weren't shoing any evidence of danger or inappropriateness when you did so.

[crr003]

If you had to operate a complex piece of potentially risky machinery at work that required skill to operate well, would your employer give you a manual & say "There you go son, I'm sure you'll get the hang of it quickly"

That's how it worked in the good old days.....

Don't you think health & safety and risk assessment has gone overboard? I heard they took the beds out of Fire Stations and replaced them with recliner chairs.
The firepeople had to have TRAINING on how to operate the recliner?
(Even if it's not true it sounds about right).

[vonhosen]

Thanks Von for a good response to my post of last night. I do not agree, but I shall resist going round in circles with more contrary arguments - it is unusual for any of us to change sides from our entrenched positions in the circular arguments about speed limits and enforcement!

On Scotland, I posted some relevant data for the 10 years to 2004 here:

http://www.traffic-answers.com/forum/in ... 4#msg49414

Although they do have speed cameras up there, they do not have anywhere near as many and they have not gone through the massive reduction of speed limits which has made journeytimes in the south longer and driving so much less stimulating.

I still don't see how you are saying Scotland's roads are safer than those in England.

2004
Motor vehicles per 1,000 population
England = 545 , Scotland = 481

Road deaths per 100,000 population
Engalnd = 5.4 , Scotland = 6.0

Road deaths per 10,000 motor vehicles
England = 1.0 , Scotland = 1.3

Road deaths per billion km
England = 6.3 , Scotland = 7.2

Pedestrian deaths per 100,000 population
England = 1.1 , Scotland = 1.5

England has higher levels of vehicle ownership but lower fatality levels.




If we look at non urban A roads in 2005.
In Scotland they accounted for 50.3% of their fatalities & 33.7% of their KSIs
In England they accounted for 36.2% of their fatalities & 21.9% of their KSIs

[Søren]

I read somewhere the rates are down because the method of defining a KSI has been changed.

I've read somewhere that concussion is no longer classified as a serious injury for the purposes of accident statistics gathered by the police.

The certainly helps to get the figures down when you're more interested in promoting a political agenda to justify the recent excessive focus on speed to exclusion of other, possibly more important, factors.

Perhaps the administrators might just be looking a little harder at the police submitted SI stats, to see if they are absolutely right. Nothing wrong in that of course, but if you then compare it to previous stats to show a trend, that can't be right.

Recently produced HES SI stats were certainly wildly at odds with the DfT stats.

[martine]

I’d be interested to know your view on the link between safe driving and speed chosen.

I don't think I have a view as such as I don't think I'm qualified to speak. What is clear to me is that the higher level of training a driver has received, the more 'sensible' their chosen speed is likely to be. Speed limits are set I suppose for the average driver, taking many things into account. The 'limit' causes a problem though when drivers or different abilities; different road conditions; different weather conditions etc come into play.

I don't think there is an easy (or even difficult!) answer except that we would benefit by further training (compulsory or voluntary).

But the very fact that the DfT and camera partnerships are making a deal of such poor research shows me that they will take whatever they can in an attempt to strengthen their case. It seems like they have to clutch at straws – I’d have hoped that the road safety research that we depend upon was a bit better founded than this.

The problem I've got though is that many of the people inside and outside the SCPs are genuinely interested in road safety and reducing accidents. I've met some and the come across as knowledgeable, sensible people - so are you saying they are misguided or ignorant?

People who deserve tickets (and there are lots of them) need to be stopped and spoken to. They need to be shown and told what they are perceived to be doing wrong – not get an envelope through the door some days later.

Agree wholeheartedly.

Steve Stradling has one thing right – road safety is much more to do with the mind than to do with driving skills, it has so much more to do with behaviours and attitudes than the highest levels of skill (which really should never be needed on a road anyway).

Absolutely.

[Søren]

I am being honest here, and have the upmost respect for Von on these forums, so apart from the odd leg pull, I don't like posting against him....

However.......

As a bad boy driver/rider who has gotten older and now behaves more than he ever thought possible it is education, NOT enforcement of any kind that has led me to change my driving behaviour.

I dislike these scameras so much (and all the messages they convey) I have to keep reminding myself that I'm getting older, am married, have children and other responsibilities to stop me becoming the next captain gatso (although I'd use electronics to defeat them, rather than explosives).

The part soren keeps getting right, time & time again, is involve the motorist, stop the guardian reading liberals turning it into an anti car thing, stop using excuses like global warming to raise money etc.

Nigel

I know education is best, I say education is best, but what I also say is that you've got to have the education before you have the release.

You don't let your small child loose with the cooker until they have learned to use it properly, or it's going to end in tears. If they start messing around doing risky things with it, you stop them using it before the accident happens.

I'd love all our drivers to be excellent, but frankly a lot of them I wouldn't trust to do anything more than beans on toast.

You can't educate someone who has no interest in the subject matter. Most people have got the licence & beyond that they don't give a stuff.

We all want more education.

But the most important facet of education is to release our pupils to learn from experience. To do that they need to be trusted to be responsible for their own safety and others safety too.

This IMO requires good refereeing. it requires recognition that certain skills are essential, and certain ground rules should be irrevocable. Beyond that certain additional skills are advantageous.

The ground rules are the basic legality rules such as driving licence, insurance, VEL, roadworthy, registered, belted, con&use legal, no impairment, etc etc. These are premeditated offences or ommissions and must be enforced to absolutely the highest standard.

Essential skills are the basic driving test skills, to enable a person to drive with a satisfactory degree of hazard recognition, courtesy and concentration.

It's then currently down to individual interest and decent refereeing to maintain and improve 'motoring' skills.

The failure of basic driver ability and concentration skills need observation, education, and perhaps enforcement. These involve failures like lack of road awareness, passive tailgating, failure to negotiate hazards appropriately, SMIDSY movements etc. These are basic skill failings, and should always be corrected if possible to do so.

Beyond that are indiscretions which are indicative of a dveloped level of driving and motoring skill, and in my view they fall neatly into two categories.

A) Indiscretions knowingly undertaken for reasons of thrill or aggression.

B) Indiscretions advertently or inadvertently resulting from ones reasonable effort to drive according to conditions.

These two categories are easily distinguishable, and need to be refereed distinctly and appropriately i) for best road safety dividend and ii) for best recognition of responsible good motoring.

If we keep putting our drivers more and more on rails, more worried about speed enforcement than proper motoring skills, I'm afraid that more and more drivers will be less interested in good driving, and the skills will diminish. It's an unnecessary spiral of decline which we need to halt.

You allow them to learn skills within parameters, not without parameters.
Driving is a hazardous activity & where ever somebody wishes to learn they have to do so within established ground rules. Our road traffic laws are the ground rules. Our road traffic rules include speed limits. Our speed limits are another skill that by definition within the basic test, they have to be able to operate within & to. They have to be a part of any driving plan.
When you did your Police driving courses, did you not have to keep within posted speed limits (NSLs aside) ?
Of course you did & you would be marked down as a failing where you couldn't do that as a part of your driving. It is considered an essential skill that you be aware of your speed.

But the difference with speed is that it is a product of our careful considered responsible driving.

It increases naturally as hazards diminish, it decreases naturally as hazards increase.
We are encouraged constantly to drive right to the edge of legality. No other law demands that we work so hard to comply. And that compliance might invade ones optimum safe performance. If the system cannot cater for considered or inadvertent lapses over the limit when it is perfectly safe to do so, we are failing our motoring public.

I'd love all our drivers to be excellent, but frankly a lot of them I wouldn't trust to do anything more than beans on toast.

But exceeding the speed limit is a possible or probable contributory factor, not cause, in less than 5% of collisions.

And the vast vast majority of these must be thrill seekers like boy racers and weekend bikers.

I fear your lack of trust is misplaced von.

We don't ignore contributory factors just because it isn't the primary cause.

I don't want to see speed dealt with in isolation, I want to see all contributory factors & causes dealt with.
I don't want to see people transgressing speed limits by small margins punished (unless the use of speed was considered inappropriate).
I don't want to see people exceeding our limits by larger margins, because they are out on an experiential learning exercise either.
If we are going to allow some people to travel at larger margins in excess of the limits, then I'd like to see a system of available training & testing before that happens. Tiered licencing presents many difficulties I am sure, but it does also offer a unique opportunity to encourage people to take further training, not to just allow them to travel quicker, but to become more skilled all round.

But ask yourself if we are dealing with problem speed, the kind of speed which kills and seriously injures. No, we are misleading the public by being so visibly heavy handed on speed but in reality the killers are being given a much freer rein due to the predicatbility of enforcement locations.

I think we need to use trust a bit more We had ACPO guidance of 85mph on motorways until recently. We had discretion based on hazard density. We didn't have speed caused carnage then. It hasn't improved.

[vonhosen]

But the difference with speed is that it is a product of our careful considered responsible driving.

It increases naturally as hazards diminish, it decreases naturally as hazards increase.
We are encouraged constantly to drive right to the edge of legality. No other law demands that we work so hard to comply. And that compliance might invade ones optimum safe performance. If the system cannot cater for considered or inadvertent lapses over the limit when it is perfectly safe to do so, we are failing our motoring public.

I don't say that we shouldn't cater for inadvertent lapses, but we shouldn't allow people exceeding the limits by a wide margin where the actions are considered or not.

Speed isn't the only offence it's easy to fall foul of, it's as easy to fall foul of without due care.

[Søren]

But the very fact that the DfT and camera partnerships are making a deal of such poor research shows me that they will take whatever they can in an attempt to strengthen their case. It seems like they have to clutch at straws – I’d have hoped that the road safety research that we depend upon was a bit better founded than this.

The problem I've got though is that many of the people inside and outside the SCPs are genuinely interested in road safety and reducing accidents. I've met some and the come across as knowledgeable, sensible people - so are you saying they are misguided or ignorant?

I believe they are genuinely interested in road safety and casualty reduction. The trouble is they don't have the right tool for the job.

A sledgehammer will crack a nut, but how useful is the end product?

[Søren]

But the difference with speed is that it is a product of our careful considered responsible driving.

It increases naturally as hazards diminish, it decreases naturally as hazards increase.
We are encouraged constantly to drive right to the edge of legality. No other law demands that we work so hard to comply. And that compliance might invade ones optimum safe performance. If the system cannot cater for considered or inadvertent lapses over the limit when it is perfectly safe to do so, we are failing our motoring public.

I don't say that we shouldn't cater for inadvertent lapses, but we shouldn't allow people exceeding the limits by a wide margin where the actions are considered or not.

Speed isn't the only offence it's easy to fall foul of, it's as easy to fall foul of without due care.

I don’t want wide margins of speed. I don’t want inappropriate speed. I just don’t want honest average drivers to get too hung up about speed limits, because of the much greater possibility of being caught due to the lower margins of enforcement and a 'business case!!' compelling many times more enforcement than there was previously.

I am convinced that this blinkering is bad for road safety.

[Gromit37]

Hi folks...

This is my first post, so be gentle with me please

This will probably ramble on bit, I'm at work and keep getting distractions

Firstly to say that I'm am not yet an advanced driver (I'm just about to join a RoSpA group in Notts), and I certainly don't consider myself to be a good driver. Although I have held a license for nearly 20 years, I've probably only got 5 years real experience, having not owned a car for the first 15 years. It is at least clean, I've managed never to get caught speeding.

Anyway, I've been browsing this forum for a while now, enough to recognise the names and kind of experience that some of the members have etc, and there's an awful lot of good information here. However, this topic is interesting and at the same time, some of the arguments appear flawed.

Firstly, there are an awful lot of cars on the roads, and a large variation in the skills of those that drive them. We would all agree that we need a system of control to reduce accidents and ensure we can all drive in relative safety. There have to be limits of some kind. It's easy to say that perhaps a small minority of people who speed are actually dangerous, and that exceeding the limit in general isn't dangerous in itself... that it is the attitude of the drivers that counts. Is there such a thing as responsible speeding? If we say "yes" then how do we qualify it? Who can say it's ok for a middle aged, 'experienced' driver to travel 10mph over the posted speed limit, and yet on the same stretch of road, at the very same time it, may not be ok for a 17 year old thrill seeker?

I'm not sure how you can prove somebody's thought processes? How do you know (or more importantly, prove) that one is paying careful attention and one is not? How do you measure the ability of each driver to cope with such a situation without performing some kind of test? Whilst it's a different issue, is anybody against having a fixed blood/alcohol level for drink drivers? There are similarities. One glass of beer/wine/spirit affects some more than others, but we have a fixed limit.

I agree that a fixed speed limit has it's drawbacks, and that breaking that limit may not actually be dangerous for some drivers, but may still incur the wrath of a police officer or speed camera. If we don't have speed cameras, then we would have to have more traffic police. Now that is fine in theory, and no offence meant to those on here who are/were serving Police officers... but we then have to rely on the discretion of those officers to say who gets in to trouble and who doesn't. It becomes subjective. Hence open to individual interpretation. The goalposts suddenly get much further apart. It also becomes impractical. All of a sudden the whole system would be swamped because people would argue the toss. The courts would be swamped, the police would be run ragged and there would be a lot of confusion.

By having a relatively inflexible system, as in the case of speed cameras, you bring errant behaviour in to focus. There is no debate, you are either doing right, or you are doing wrong. It may not be ideal, but it is extremely practical. I'm not a fan of speed cameras per se, but what are the realistic alternatives?

Education is the key?

Very true. But then we already have a system of driver education.

Surely, anybody who has passed their driving test is regarded as being competent to drive a vehicle on the roads? We are all taught to control a vehicle, what rules to obey, how to obey them and what we cannot or should not do. We get a nice simple booket that tells us the best practice, we get some instruction from a professional instructor, we are passed/failed by an independent third party, and we get a license to prove we are good enough. Some may be better at it than others, but everybody will have been taught the same basic skills and rules. There is a recognised standard.

If after all this, people cannot be bothered to practice what they were taught, are they not being irresponsible? Would it make any difference if the standard of driver education were raised? Would people still take the risks they do now? I don't know the answer, but I suspect that whatever the standard of basic driver training... there are a lot of people who will always think there are better than everybody else, and that they have more right to use the road than those around them. You can lead a horse to water...

In many ways, 'speed' is the cause of a lot of accidents. People are often in a hurry to get places, so they percieve the limits to be too low. 'The car in front is going too slow, so I'll move closer and they might move out the way'. 'If there's a big gap between me and them, somebody might push in and I'm one step further back in the queue... so I'll stay close'. The term "making progress" seems to be used in 'Advanced Driving' circles, and most people want to make progress. Time is always short, and speed is of the essence. The perception of progress might be linked to the perception of speed, and the lack of progress causes frustration, anxiety, anger and even violence. People's priorities become skewed. Arriving at the destination becomes more important than observing best practice. In some ways it is the lack of percieved 'speed' and progress that causes the accidents.

In reality it's time management, personal organisation and focussing on the right things at the right time that will improve road safety. Driving needs concentration, and people are too busy to concentrate on one thing at a time. Which is why we have a simple system of speed limits. It removes some of the burden of deciding what is safe and what is not. It doesn't replace the need to think about your surroundings, but it's a simple, easy to follow guide that should help stop you from having an accident. This road 'should', taking in to consideration all the other factors, be safe at 30mph. At 35mph, it may not, so don't do it. Is it really so bad?

Sorry to ramble on and on and on, and these are of course only my personal opinions. Hopefully this makes some kind of sense to some of you. I'm as guilty as most when it comes to speeding, and I expect to learn an awful lot from the advanced driving group... I have my share of bad habits too. Now I'm off to polish on my halo and wait for the wrath of vonhosen, soren and TripleS to descend upon my head at a high rate of knots

[vonhosen]

Welcome Gromit

I won't be berating you