Just saw this on the Xtra homepage....seems to confirm what many members of the public and of this forum believe....
Hiding Cameras And Facts
15/06/2004 07:05 AM - By Sandy Myhre
The news that Police are adopting an 'any time, anywhere' approach to speed cameras and a stated 25 percent increase in the number of tickets to be issued, comes as no surprise. It will, says the official jargon, decrease the road toll. It is designed, we are lead to believe, to save us from our ourselves.
But will it?
According to a recent report from Britain's transport department researchers, exceeding the speed limit is not the main cause of car crashes. Data collected from 13 police divisions pointed to inattention (25.8 percent), failure to judge the other person's path or speed (22.6), looked but did not see (19.7) as the three top causes of traffic accidents. Excessive speed accounted for 12.5 percent of those accidents. Furthermore, 70 percent of excessive-speed accidents occurred within the speed limit thus falling into the category of driving too fast for the conditions.
Why, then, are we piling so many of our resources on to speed cameras?
In a hard-hitting column in the June issue of Driver magazine, editor Allan Dick says between 75 and 80 percent of fatal road crashes in New Zealand occur below the legal speed limit. This appears to be consistent with the British experience. He rightly asks why so much government road safety policy is aimed at advertising that tell us "speed kills" and why so much police enforcement emphasis is placed on ticketing drivers who exceed that limit.
There is a strong argument that one-size-fits-all speed limits may not be appropriate. One speed camera outside Fairlie in the South Island ticketed 685 out of 3,500 drivers in 12 hours which suggests that while drivers might have been exceeding the posted limit, they may not have been driving unsafely or without care and attention. In fact, these 685 drivers may have been driving very sensibly indeed by going with the flow of traffic yet their "misdemenour" brandishes them all criminals.
It's hard to escape the notion that speed cameras like the one in Fairlie - and others around the country - are a superbly crafted stratagem to increase government coffers. It's usually called revenue-gathering. The Land Transport Safety Authority and the Police ardently deny this of course but their advertising backs this up. The "speed kills" campaign is all-pervasive.
But the "any time, anywhere" approach to speed camera placement is supported, surprisingly, by the Automobile Association. Did the AA examine some of the research available internationally that shows speed per se not to be the major culprit in road accidents and fatalities? And that by far the majority of those accidents occur under the limit?
What the AA does take issue with however is not posting speed camera area warning signs. Catching speedsters by stealth is not, believes the AA, in the best interest of the motoring public.
The Chief Executive of the AA, Brian Gibbons, further argues for a rethink from road controlling authorities on the appropriateness of speed limits and whether they are "match the character of the land".
What the Police, the LTSA and the AA seemed to have missed altogether however, is the need for a much higher standard of driver training.
In spite of the millions of dollars spent on ramming home the "speed kills" message and the drink/drive "bloody idiot" sloganism, there has been a consistent failure on the part of government departs and reasonably august motoring bodies to even consider raising the standard of driver capability in this country. And while we are debating whether to increase the legal drinking age back up to 20, we still allow 15 year olds to drive.
There is a gradiated driver licence system but it doesn't show how well a driver handles a car. It just means they can't drive on their own and at a certain time of night. A five minute whizz around the block with a traffic officer grants a licence but it doesn't tell the examining officer anything about how the candidate can control the car. Neither does scratching the right answer to pass the written test or doing the test in a foreign language with an interpreter present.
It's well known that it's harder to get a car licence in, for example, Germany or Britain and anyone who has driven in either of those two countries will tell you the standard of behaviour on their roads far exceeds ours. In fact, the death-by-accident rate in both countries is lower than ours in spite of the fact that you can drive as fast as you like on the autobahns in Germany.
The corollary to that of course is that travellers returning from overseas gasp at the cavalier attitude displayed by New Zealand drivers by comparison. In other words, we are poorly trained.
What the Police and LTSA don't say either, is that active and passive safety technology in motor cars has increased markedly and may contribute to a reduction in the road toll as much, if not more, than reducing national speeds. And we may not be as silly as Police and LTSA advertising leads us to believe. More people than ever are availing themselves of the numerous advanced driver training schools and courses available in this country.
The late Denny Hulme, O.B.E, the only New Zealander ever to win the Formula One world championship, was a man who knew a thing or two about speed. He advocated teaching children from as young as 5 years old, when they started school, the basics of good driver attitude, in much the same way as we teach about health issues.
The simplistic "speed kills" message and increasing the number of speed cameras is surely past its use-by date.
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Sandy Myhre
XtraMSN
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Originally Posted by spudchucka
Road toll up in the UK and bikers are to blame
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