Removal of speed cameras

bice

Put this in 'road' but might be better here:

Has anyone - particularly riding in Oxfordshire, which has switched off its speed cameras - noticed the effects of this? Apparently speeding has gone right up in some parts of Oxfordshire as a result of the county council decision to stop paying for the cameras. other couties have scaled down as well. (The fines go to central government).

In London speed cameras and cameras to keep cars out of bus lanes have added to cyclist safety hugely. (Far more useful than the daft and expensive Boris bike scheme.)

Not that I like them ... I have just opted to pay £74 for a driver awareness scheme in Basingstoke rather than be fined £60 and have three points on the licence for driving at 37mph in a 30mph zone in Hampshire.

RufusA

Not wishing for this to become a contentious thread but "Speeding gone right up" is relative.

For example the greatest increase of "88% rise" in speeding motorists represents 29 vehicles over a five day period or on average one extra speeding motorist every 4 hours! This is at one fixed measurement point on the road, and doesn't represent average speeds etc.

From a cyclist perspective I would prefer to take the risk of an extra car on my commute going a few miles over the speed limit than the erratic driving of a vehicle that suddenly slams on it's brakes because it has spotted a camera.

If the money spent on cameras was diverted to traffic patrols to catch motorists using mobile phones, or with still misted/iced windscreens in the morning, or driving erratically /aggressively I'd feel safer for sure as a cyclist.

Actually turns out the 88% rise figure was made up anyway:

http://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/833952 ... sleading_/

Rufus.

Robstar24

i live in the home counties which is full of clarkson style 'war on the motorist' drivers, haven't noticed any deterioration of driving standards since phasing out of speed cameras. from when i drive i do find i tend to pay too much attention to the speedo, and location of cameras than to the road, which is where attention should really be. perhaps police should consider a sliding scale of fines/punishments. eg: driving at 40 in a 30 should be punished more severely (particularly so if near a school) than say, doing 80 on a motorway.

Banned member Porgy

Might be a stupid question but how do they measure the number of speeding motorists after they've removed the speed cameras?

night_porter

They haven't removed the speed cameras, they are still working but no-one is being prosecuted.

The argument is that SOME of the cameras are being left on to monitor the situation.

There has also been some independant mobile monitoring by news people in an effort to sensationalise the situation......go figure

Of course it would make more sense to ask the good cyclists of Swindon how it has been there as they stopped using their cameras over a year ago.

nwallace

If given enough room a car passing me at 120 will still be a hell of a lot more comfortable that having my elbow brushed by a wing mirror with a 5mph speed differential.

(Chances are you would have heard the 120 mph car a mile off as well while the 25mph one probably didn't make a sound until it was a couple of meters behind you, said it before when out on the road a rattling agricultural V8 coming up behind you is a lot better than a whisper quiet 1.4 that you don't even hear an engine noise from as it passes)

White Horse

night_porter wrote:

Of course it would make more sense to ask the good cyclists of Swindon how it has been there as they stopped using their cameras over a year ago.

They haven't really made a difference to cycling. At least 2 of them had decent cycle tracks next to them.

The odd speeding vehicle is rarely an issue when cycling. It's idiots that's the problem so I would much rather see the odd police car pulling a muppet over than someone getting their photo taken for doing 35 in a 30.

Good thing about the flashing warning signs that remind drivers straying over the limit is that I can tell a car is approaching from behind because the things flash

mybreakfastconsisted

Since speed cameras save around 100 lives a year and it's estimated every road fatality costs £1m, it's hard to see how removing them can possibly save money.

SamWise1972

mybreakfastconsisted wrote:

Since speed cameras save around 100 lives a year and it's estimated every road fatality costs £1m, it's hard to see how removing them can possibly save money.

6000 UK speed cameras, that means that to break even, they have to cost £16,000 or less per annum. That includes purchase, installation, maintenance, staff to monitor, management, IT and business support costs for those staff, costs of prosecution etc. I could imagine that they might actually cost that to run.

nwallace

mybreakfastconsisted wrote:

Since speed cameras save around 100 lives a year and it's estimated every road fatality costs £1m, it's hard to see how removing them can possibly save money.

If you can prove that a speed camera will stop someone doing 60mph in a 60mph limit round a 20mph bend then you may have a point.

The suggestion that the National Speed Limit be reduced to 50mph is another example of Speed Kills Alone. The news reports always show people at a corner which you look at and think "You can't get round there safely at 30 so why will knocking 10mph off the limit be of any use"

I wonder how that 100 figure was attained, considering that road deaths have been dropping for the last few years although may have bottomed out how can any of it be put down to cameras alone. The driving tests are now considerably more difficult and inbuilt safety features considerably better than they were.


It's Bad driving that kills, cameras only catch 1 element of bad driving.

RufusA

mybreakfastconsisted wrote:

Since speed cameras save around 100 lives a year...

The 100 figure is of course flawed.

It is 5 years old, and looked at accidents at hotspots and compared the hotspot figure with that for the 4 years after the camera was installed.

The key failings in the report IMHO are:

a) It didn't include a control group of accident hotspots without cameras for comparison.
b) It didn't look at any other improvements/changes that took place at the site - improved surfaces, better markings/warnings, crash barriers etc. Often cameras are installed as part of a general road improvement project in an area.
c) It didn't look at whether inappropriate speed or exceeding the speed limit was a factor or cause in any of the fatalities.

http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roadsafety/sp ... gr4598.pdf

Most of the hotspots are simply statistical anomolies. The report clearly states it didn't take in to account any regression to mean. There are more cost effective methods of producing the same "life saving" regression to mean, such as getting a druid to install crystals, or even doing nothing.

http://www.rutengehen.info/ (Sadly in German, showing lives saved in Austria after installing crystals).

Rufus.

mybreakfastconsisted

RufusA wrote:

mybreakfastconsisted wrote:

Since speed cameras save around 100 lives a year...

The 100 figure is of course flawed.

It is 5 years old, and looked at accidents at hotspots and compared the hotspot figure with that for the 4 years after the camera was installed.

The key failings in the report IMHO are:

a) It didn't include a control group of accident hotspots without cameras for comparison.
b) It didn't look at any other improvements/changes that took place at the site - improved surfaces, better markings/warnings, crash barriers etc. Often cameras are installed as part of a general road improvement project in an area.
c) It didn't look at whether inappropriate speed or exceeding the speed limit was a factor or cause in any of the fatalities.

http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roadsafety/sp ... gr4598.pdf

Most of the hotspots are simply statistical anomolies. The report clearly states it didn't take in to account any regression to mean. There are more cost effective methods of producing the same "life saving" regression to mean, such as getting a druid to install crystals, or even doing nothing.

http://www.rutengehen.info/ (Sadly in German, showing lives saved in Austria after installing crystals).

Rufus.

The report DID allow for regression to the mean:

http://www.liv.ac.uk/researchintelligen ... speed.html

RufusA

mybreakfastconsisted wrote:

The report DID allow for regression to the mean:

http://www.liv.ac.uk/researchintelligen ... speed.html

To be fair the report and researcher were aware of the affect, but the results and headline grabbing figures did not take account of any RTM. The following quotes are taken from the report itself:

Report wrote:

Both casualties and deaths were down – after allowing for the long-term
trend, but without allowing for selection effects (such as regression-to-mean)

Report wrote:

At such sites, there will be fewer accidents in future
even if nothing is done to the site: this phenomenon is called regression-tomean
(RTM), and will exaggerate accident savings estimated in the main
analysis. The extent of RTM cannot be determined from the monitoring data
used in the main analysis.

It does suggest the RTM affect may be small, but subsequent research questions that assertion.

Rufus.

mybreakfastconsisted

RufusA wrote:

mybreakfastconsisted wrote:

The report DID allow for regression to the mean:

http://www.liv.ac.uk/researchintelligen ... speed.html

To be fair the report and researcher were aware of the affect, but the results and headline grabbing figures did not take account of any RTM. The following quotes are taken from the report itself:

Report wrote:

Both casualties and deaths were down – after allowing for the long-term
trend, but without allowing for selection effects (such as regression-to-mean)

Report wrote:

At such sites, there will be fewer accidents in future
even if nothing is done to the site: this phenomenon is called regression-tomean
(RTM), and will exaggerate accident savings estimated in the main
analysis. The extent of RTM cannot be determined from the monitoring data
used in the main analysis.

It does suggest the RTM affect may be small, but subsequent research questions that assertion.

Rufus.

Allowing for RTTM Dr Mountain concludes safety cameras save 100 lives a year.

Besides, focusing on lives saved is a distraction.

Safety cameras enforce the law. Speeding fines are a stupidity tax paid by those too ignorant or arrogant to think the law should apply to them.

Speeding is never a victimless crime. It's aggressive, anti-social behaviour.

It intimidates vulnerable road users. It scares the elderly, it divides communities, bullies people off the roads. It's noisy, aggressive, bullying behaviour.

Safety cameras , or 85% of them, are sited where there has been a fatality but, as I said, focusing purely on lives saved is not the whole picture.

RufusA

mybreakfastconsisted wrote:

Allowing for RTTM Dr Mountain concludes safety cameras save 100 lives a year.

The 100 figure is "An absolute figure...." with "No adjustment was applied to account for long-term trend..." (pg44) and "...without allowing for selection effects (such as regression-to-mean)" (p2 and throughout).

Their latest research would make interesting reading where they re-analyse the data using various distributional forms for predicting RTM:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19540977

Press coverage of the research shows that RTM accounts for over 50% of the changes in accident data.

Rufus.

mybreakfastconsisted

Speed cameras do not save as many lives as claimed because of a statistical flaw in the calculations used to justify their deployment, a study has found.


Linda Mountain, a senior lecturer at Liverpool University, estimates that the 6,000 or so speed cameras in the UK save about half as many lives as claimed, although they are an important source of revenue.


Official statistics suggest that speed cameras save on average about 100 lives a year based on the fall in fatal accidents at the recognised accident hotspots where they tend to be placed. But Dr Mountain found that about 50 per cent of the decline in accidents would still have occurred irrespective of whether a speed camera was deployed, due to a statistical phenomenon known as regression to the mean.

The phenomenon is a direct result of placing a camera at a site with a disproportionately high number of accidents – by chance alone it is likely that there will be fewer accidents after the camera is in place. "Regression to the mean and trend effects do not mean that speed cameras have no effect on accidents, only that care must be taken when estimating the size of this effect," Dr Mountain told the science festival.

"The effect of regression to the mean is that if we install a speed camera, or just stick a photo of a camera on a road map at locations with very large numbers of accidents, the camera – or the photo of a camera – will appear to be successful in reducing accidents," she said.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scien ... 24508.html

two years ago.