Safety Fast

1940's reminder: Second World War Jeep at Goodwood
Speeding has become a scapegoat. Myth and folklore has led to it being blamed for every accident while real causes are neglected. Police, local authorities, safety campaigners and shrill lobbyists erect flashing signals and create camera partnerships to persuade voters something is being done about safety. It is a fraud. Speed laws provide every self-righteous roundhead and fretting dirgiste with political capital.

Populist polls would restore hanging. The Mob would dance round the guillotine. It is the same with speeding. When I was a parish councillor, pushing for a 20mph speed limit through the village would have made me popular. There was always agitation about, “accidents waiting to happen.” They never did of course. The street was perfectly safe; police did checks showing nearly everybody drove well within the limit and accidents were unknown.

Where I live now is being similarly lobbied and I can see why. Enormous trucks coming through at 50mph is scary, I hate them. Yet not many accidents are caused by driving too fast. Some 57% are due to drivers, 27% to combinations of roadway and driver, 6% to combined vehicle and driver, 3% solely to roadways. Combined roadway, driver and vehicle accounts for 3%, which leaves 2% solely to vehicles. The last 1% is down to combined roadway and vehicles. The drivers’ 57% is down to inattention, bad judgement at junctions, distraction, fatigue, losing control in bad weather and other causes. Excessive speed scarcely features. The money, time and effort expended on speeders is largely wasted. It would be far better devoted to driver training and testing to IAM standards.

Speeding is not the first safety myth. In 1992 even Rospa challenged a hoary old legend.
Sunday Times: Motoring, 30 August 1992
Blaming the rise in road deaths during 1941 on the blackout is wrong, according to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (ROSPA). New research shows it was fewer traffic police and a withdrawal of safety propaganda that led to 9,169 fatalities on British roads in the second year of war.
The historian A D Harvey claims in the current issue of ROSPA's magazine Care on the Road, that the casualty rate slowed in 1942 and 1943, when the black-out with its dimly-lit streets and hooded headlights was still in force.
Harvey's research reveals that the only changes were more policing, and better safety propaganda. Similar remedies applied now could have telling effects.
The carnage of the 1930s, with over 7,000 deaths a year led to the introduction of The Highway Code, but even this failed to stem the destruction. In desperation the Minister of Transport Leslie Hore-Belisha, imposed the 30mph speed limit, set up pedestrian crossings, and brought in the driving test.
Fatal casualties reached a peacetime peak of 7,343 in 1934, before Hore-Belisha's Road Traffic Act checked the rise. There were 6,648 fatal accidents on British roads in 1938. But after the street lights were switched off in September 1939, the toll rose dramatically. The total for the year was 8,272. Newspapers complained during the 'phoney war' that the blackout was killing more civilians than the enemy.
The Birmingham Post blamed drivers' exasperation at the absence of road direction signs, which had been painted over or taken down to confuse invaders. The Manchester Guardian's explanation for so many accidents was, 'the psychological effect of living dangerously,' in war-time. The Home Office took this to mean, 'War-dangers have caused road-dangers to be taken lightly.' Among other explanations was the inexperience of service drivers. Yet military vehicles did not show up as the culprits.
Pedestrians suffered worst in the early months of the black-out, but by 1941 they were keeping well out of the way.
The slaughter prompted a conference at the Home Office in 1941. The Home Office took the view that the biggest single cause was diminished police supervision, a conviction shared by chief constables. Young policemen had been called up, and those left were busy enforcing black-out regulations and taking part in civil defence.
'The Police War Reserve has not the same interest as the regular police,' according to the chief constable of Manchester. There was a failure to prepare the reservists for traffic policing, and road safety publicity campaigns, developed in the 1930s were run down.
The chief constable of Lancashire complained that, 'The instructions to school children which had largely fallen off during the war were worth continuing'.
Following the conference, policing was stricter, and road safety publicity was revived. The result was a reduction in the number of deaths in 1942 to 6,926, and in 1943 to 5,796. The figure continued downwards to its peace-time low point of 4,513 in 1948.
The toll increased again in the 1960s, but the trend is now downwards. Despite huge increases in traffic, speed, and annual mileage, road deaths last year were once again at the 1948 level, at 4,520.

That was 1992. By last year road deaths in the UK were less than half that, at 2,222 following road improvements, better cars with better handling, roadholding, steering, brakes, seatbelts, airbags, better visibility and better driving. More motorways have reduced casualties, drink-driving has diminished. It is not because of what we are paying to speed cameras. We are driving every bit as fast as we were in 1992.

Speed Limits: Other drivers should stick to them

Either there was little support for any change in the 70mph speed limit, or the 1,519drivers in the MORI sample for the 1995 Lex Report on Motoring were a self-righteous lot. My Sunday Times motoring column of 22 January 16 years ago noted about a third enjoyed driving fast, two-thirds did not, yet scarcely any wanted the limit raised to 80mph, as the 2011 Minister of Transport is broadly hinting. The 1995 survey showed strong opposition, among the surveyed, to lowering the limit, yet two months earlier anonymous magazine readers voted nine to one in favour of raising it to 80mph with stricter policing. It looks as though there is a dichotomy about speed limits; Everybody Else should slow down.

A strong majority (nearly two drivers out of three according to the Lex survey) believed driving too fast the second most frequent cause of accidents after drink-driving. There was support for speed cameras although respondents declared these made no difference to their own driving - presumably beyond reproach - but were useful for slowing others.

Drunks, speeders, the over-tired, and ,'driving too close to the vehicle in front' were blamed for accidents, disregarding bad weather, congestion, faulty road design, vehicle defects and practically everything else.

Surveys, however reliable and illuminating on facts, suffer from respondents telling interrogators not so much what they think, but what they feel they ought to think. Pollsters try to take this into account by 'weighting' results, yet blaming drinking and driving as the most frequent cause of road accidents shows how strong the social pressure on it has become. The real figure is less than one-fifth. The popular view that 'accidents happen to other people' now reads, 'accidents happen to other people who have been drinking too much and driving too fast.'

Speed has always been a target for safety propagandists. The 70mph limit was imposed in 1965 by a Labour Minister of Transport, Tom Fraser, in response to a spate of accidents on foggy motorways. It was scarcely a measured reaction, but gave the impression of determination to do something. Fraser called it an experiment and asked the Transport and Road Research Laboratory (TRRL) to look into it.

The results were at best inconclusive, at worst deceitful. The TRRL knew on which side its bread was buttered and to accommodate the new incumbent, the non-driving Barbara Castle, reached a suitably equivocal conclusion. Mrs Castle made the limit permanent. It made no difference to the fog accidents, of course, and enforcement was patchy. Motorways remained the safest roads in the country accounting for just 3 per cent of the casualties, 11 injury accidents per hundred million kilometres compared with 108 in built-up areas and 33 in non-built-up areas.

Modern technology has made enforcement easier. Cameras, Vascar, unmarked cars, and radar guns make motorway speeders more likely to be caught. The AA supports the 70mph limit and says two-thirdsof its members agree. The RAC advocates a review. 'We have the worst of both worlds,' it says. 'We have a limit that is ignored by the majority, including the police. We ought to ask why we have a 70mph limit. If it is right then it should be enforced, if it isn't, what should it be?'

Unintended consequencies

Not before time, there's proposed safety legislation not obsessed with speeding. Proposals for new powers so police can issue tickets for bad driving are all very well, but begs the question of how you catch the miscreants. One sees drivers weaving in and out of motorway traffic, risking theirs and everybody else's necks, and just wish there was a patrol car there to scoop them up. There never is. And with the passing of a regime that thought it could enforce safety by speed cameras while reducing traffic police, maybe we are on the threshold of a new era.

We need more patrol cars like this Vauxhall Insignia
Unfortunately making new regulations does not follow logical processes. This 1993 Sunday Times column was concerned about unintended consequences. The original copy for "proposed law..." is attached.


The AA has just taken delivery of a fleet of new Ford Transits.
Sunday Times: Motoring 02 May 1993
DEATH BY DANGEROUS DRIVING

The creation of a new offence of causing death by driving is to be looked at by the AA as soon as the proposals are drawn up for a new criminal justice bill in the autumn. It is barely a year since the Road Traffic Act introduced two offences, causing death by dangerous driving and causing death by careless driving while over the prescribed blood-alcohol limit. Instead there will be a new single offence with double the existing maximum jail term of five years.

Courts will need to take account of the circumstances of accidents to make a distinction between misdemeanours with unexpectedly tragic consequences and minor shunts. 'We need to make sure that motoring offences do not get out of proportion,' an AA spokesman said. 'Causing death while at the wheel of a car must relate to similar offences in other areas, although we acknowledge public concern over the powers judges have for dealing with the lunatic fringe who drive without concern for life.'

A driver who runs into a car stationary at traffic lights is clearly culpable. But the difference between the consequences may be no more than a matter of chance. The driver of the stationary car may get a stiff neck when his headrest cushions the blow, step from his damaged vehicle and exchange names and addresses before driving off, aggrieved but alive.

Another stationary car might have no head restraints. They are a relatively recent safety feature. In an identical accident with the same degree of carelessness by the offending driver, whiplash could break the driver's neck and kill him.

Consequences in traffic accidents can often be a matter of luck - running into a car with safety features against running into one without. Driver B could face a custodial sentence of up to ten years against driver A getting a caution, a fine, and a few points on his driving licence for essentially the same misdeed, running into the back of a stationary car.

Drink-driving is a different issue. Impairment through drinking is a serious business, the courts take it seriously, and the distinction of a separate offence of causing death while unfit to drive through drink should remain.

But there is a distinction between the driver who crashes carelessly or recklessly into a bus shelter when it is empty, and the one who kills all the occupants. The difference rests only on whether anyone was in the shelter at the time. In one case it might mean a wigging by the bench, in the other a long term of imprisonment.

The logic of increasing penalties according to the consequences of transgressions, would imply decreasing them where the risks are small. Speeding at 3am on an empty motorway in clear weather would become less serious than recklessly flouting the law on a busy afternoon.

Reckless, careless, driving without due care and attention, or whatever it may be called under various road traffic acts, now generally comes to light when there has been an accident. Yet it is the bad driving that is the offence, not whether the driver knocks down a tree or kills a sheep.

In the last four years nearly 100 cases of apparently lenient sentences on drivers involved in accidents have been referred by the Attorney General to the Court of Appeal. Fourteen involved fatalities. The protests the Home Office receives over sentences on killer-drivers are overwhelming.

It is difficult not to take account of fatalities in assessing culpability, but leaving aside the drink-driving issue, not many drivers set out to kill, and pressing for fierce penalties on those who do will not do much for deterrence and could look like a cry for vengeance.

More gloom from the AA

The AA should stick to what it used to be good at.
Tick-box stuff from the AA. It's worried about the MOT Test. Says 94% of 18,700 members polled last summer thought it quite or very important to road safety. What this means is 93% ticked the box saying quite important and 1% very important. What is the AA thinking about adding exclamation marks to fretting over a 40% failure rate, for a test brought in fifty years ago? Cars are safer, they last longer, and although 62% believed extending tests to every other year would lead to more unsafe cars on the road, that means 38% didn’t.

AA publicity is Nannysome: “Reliance on the MoT test as a yearly safety check is best illustrated by the 17.6% failure rate on lighting and signalling, the vast majority of which could be fixed by the owner soon after a bulb blows. ‘Roads this winter have been littered with cars driving with a headlight, tail light or stop light out. The only time many of these drivers do anything about it is when the car goes for an MoT test or when traffic police pull them over,’ says Edmund King, the AA’s president.” Who, it must be said, will do anything to get himself a sound-bite. Being gloomy works best.

Far better to believe Marie Woolf in The Sunday Times: “Drivers will be required to take fewer MoT tests under government plans that could save motorists hundreds of pounds. Ministers are preparing to relax the frequency of vehicle checks - possibly replacing annual MoTs with tests every two years. Philip Hammond, the transport secretary, wants to delay the first MoT on a new car from three years to four. The government is proposing to consult on other options - the most liberal would allow MoTs every two years over the subsequent six years. That would mean only four tests in 10 years, halving the number.”

MoT tests at £55 invariably go up when testers suggest new tyres or shake their head over rusty sills. Hammond wants to remove the burden for drivers facing petrol price rises. Cars now have long service intervals, most have technology that warns of faults so we should make the most of improvements in cars since the grease gun was banished and structural failures caused accidents.

The Sunday Times also says: “The transport secretary is looking at the motorway speed limit: 70mph is too slow for modern cars and 80mph would be acceptable given the far better brakes and safety measures in cars today. That could be enhanced by "smart" speed limits, which would vary according to road conditions. These ideas are encouraging if they lead to action. It won't end the war on the motorist but it will make driving a bit cheaper and more pleasurable.” Hooray to that.

Glum AA will shake its head. Edmund King will be on every news channel except perhaps Al-Jazeera.

Picture from the archives: Original Mercedes-Benz 300SL photographed at Brooklands.

Prevent or Punish: JJ Leeming

Sherlock Holmes’ quick eye took in my occupation (with the red-haired man, writes Dr Watson), and he shook his head with a smile as he noticed my questioning glances. “Beyond the obvious facts that he has at some time done manual labour, that he takes snuff, that he is a Freemason, that he has been in China, and that he has done a considerable amount of writing lately, I can deduce nothing else.”
Mr. Jabez Wilson started up in his chair, with his forefinger upon the paper, but his eyes upon my companion.
“How, in the name of good-fortune, did you know all that, Mr. Holmes?”

Holmes’s powers of observation were always a surprise.

“Your hands, my dear sir. Your right hand is quite a size larger than your left. You have worked with it, and the muscles are more developed.”
“Well, the snuff, then, and the Freemasonry?”
“I won’t insult your intelligence by telling you how I read that, especially as, rather against the strict rules of your order, you use an arc-and-compass breastpin.”
“Ah, of course, I forgot that. But the writing?”
“What else can be indicated by that right cuff so very shiny for five inches, and the left one with the smooth patch near the elbow where you rest it upon the desk?”
“Well, but China?”
“The fish that you have tattooed immediately above your right wrist could only have been done in China. I have made a small study of tattoo marks and have even contributed to the literature of the subject. That trick of staining the fishes’ scales of a delicate pink is quite peculiar to China. When, in addition, I see a Chinese coin hanging from your watch-chain, the matter becomes even more simple.”
Mr. Jabez Wilson laughed heavily. “Well, I never!” said he. “I thought at first that you had done something clever, but I see that there was nothing in it after all.”

Holmes was put out. He knew his scrutiny was acute and that, as often as not, it provided information overlooked by the most studious. Deep knowledge relieved him of the tedium of prejudice – pre-judgement on the basis of received wisdom or faulty logic. “I begin to think, Watson,” said Holmes, “that I make a mistake in explaining. ‘Omne ignotum pro magnifico,’ you know, and my poor little reputation, such as it is, will suffer shipwreck if I am so candid.”

JJ Leeming was in the Holmesian mould. He would have agreed that “Omne ignotum pro magnifico - every unknown thing is taken for great,” by those who knew no better. He was ruled by observation, logic and working under Lt-Col G T Bennett, the County Surveyor of Oxfordshire, was among the first to apply them to a study of road accidents, Bennett realised that the established view — even in the 1930s — about the culpability of drivers for accidents was not based on the facts. Such was no more acceptable then, than today. The only people who took any notice were other traffic engineers. Malcolm Heymer reviewed JJ Leeming’s 1969 book Road Accidents, Prevent or Punish for the Association of British Drivers (ABD). My copy, about which I wrote at the time, I fear was lost in my last move. I thought everyone had forgotten the great engineer. Fortunately the ABD has not and Leeming should be read by anyone with an open mind on road safety.

Leeming was County Surveyor of Dorset, believing that road accidents should be analysed critically and dispassionately. His conclusions, like those of Holmes in the view of Mr Jones of Scotland Yard, were viewed with suspicion. “You may place considerable confidence in Mr. Holmes, sir,” said the police agent loftily. “He has his own little methods, which are, if he won’t mind my saying so, just a little too theoretical and fantastic, but he has the makings of a detective in him. It is not too much to say that once or twice, as in that business of the Sholto murder and the Agra treasure, he has been more nearly correct than the official force.”

The great detective had an exact opinion of Mr Jones: “He is not a bad fellow, though an absolute imbecile in his profession.” In the view of Establishment Jones’s, accidents were caused by the wilful misdeeds of drivers, who must be punished. Leeming knew that this culture of blame led to making true contributory factors difficult to establish. Jumping to conclusions, he claimed, resulted in failures to address real problems when he took over in Dorset.

He gave an example: “Two men left a public house. Although not actually drunk, the landlord thought they had had enough and did not think the driver incapable. They drove a few miles to Warmwell Cross, where the driver, paying no attention to a Halt sign, collided with a lorry. Both men were killed.”

Most people would ascribe the accident to drink-driving and give it no further thought. Leeming decided that a traffic engineer had to establish all factors, without ascribing blame. A factor, he said, was something that could have altered or prevented the accident and he identified five; Chance, Human Error, Road Layout, the Law, and Drink.

Chance: Obviously if the lorry had not been on the main road, the accident would not have happened, despite the car driver's Human Error. Road Layout: investigation into other accidents at the same place revealed what had already deceived drivers. The crossing lay over a crest and although a stop line and HALT markings were painted on the road, the incline made them virtually invisible to approaching drivers. Anybody familiar with the area — Leeming and his staff — knew the junction, so never had to rely on spotting the markings. Strangers were caught out, sometimes fatally. Law: Leeming included this for two reasons. Firstly the regulations concerning Halt signs at that time meant that they were not placed at the junction itself, nor did they tell drivers the distance to the junction. Secondly, and more important, was the pressure on police to charge drivers with offences — from failing to obey Halt signs to causing death by dangerous driving. This had prevented Leeming from discovering the trap earlier, so he organised an experiment involving police, to observe drivers’ behaviour. Those who failed to stop at the sign were pulled up and talked to Leeming's staff. Local press unfortunately ran a story complaining that erring drivers were going unpunished and the experiment was abandoned after a day, but not before drivers had provided vital clues about the invisibility of the sign. The junction was improved and there was a dramatic reduction in accidents.

Whether the collision would have happened had the driver not been drinking is anyone's guess but it showed how importent it was to look beyond the obvious.

Leeming had not been entirely immune from conclusions about driver blame. When he moved to Dorset in 1946 he assumed, like almost everybody, that skidding accidents were due to bad driving, dismissing claims about road surfaces as mere excuses. However, following complaints about a series of bends with a bad accident record, he examined the road surface, discovering that bitumen had risen to the top, covering the aggregate, so it became slippery when wet. Although still unconvinced, he had the surplus material planed off. The accidents stopped. Even then he thought it an isolated case.

Another incident convinced him. There were complaints about skidding on asphalt surfaces laid by new machines. The materials used weren’t new, the method of laying was. Leeming assumed the skids were due to bad driving, but when they became frequent he investigated: “I discussed it with a senior member of the police. He dismissed it all with a remark, ‘good drivers don't skid’. Later I received a phone call from another policeman, who said I must do something about the surface. One of their cars had skidded and was a write-off. I could not resist murmuring that good drivers don't skid, and it was not well received. Even the police are human; he had not heard what his colleague had said.” Further examination of the road surface showed, once again, how the bitumen had risen to the top due to a vibration bar fitted to the new machines. A reduction in the bitumen content of the mix cured the problem. Leeming found other counties with similar problems so began experimenting with surface dressing on sharp bends with poor accident records. The results were dramatic. His conversion was complete.

Leeming became a firm believer in not jumping to conclusions about the causes of accidents, or the value of accepted solutions, without a rigorous study of the facts. In his chapter on statistical methods, he quotes G K Chesterton: “A man of science isn’t trying to prove anything. He’s trying to find out what will prove itself.” Leeming was always meticulous about including all results and data available on any issue he was investigating, even if some of the data pointed in a different direction from the rest.

As we know only too well, many reports on road safety (and other) issues have started with an assumed conclusion, and data has been selected to fit a conclusion. Leeming was scathing about propagandists who misused statistics by comparing different things and hoping people did not notice that they were being duped.

Nothing to do with safety really but a nice picture. Number one daughter at Le Mans, 1930s.

Safety Fast

1974-1977 Ford Granada Ghia Coupe featured in The Ford in Britain Centenary File, an Eric Dymock Motoring Book available March 2011
There is not much new in the latest anti-speeding wheeze. The return of cameras by Prohibitionists was predictable. Roundheads propose one of those fatuous speed awareness courses to anybody exceeding limits by only a little, at £100. The Times parrots the airy talk of, “some 800 people a year,” being killed if speed cameras are decommissioned. “Populist objection to speed cameras cannot withstand … scientific research,” it says. It should be cautious. Climate changers and global warmists, to say nothing of millenium buggists, salmonella scaremongers, passive smoking soothsayers, panics over BSE, DDT and a dozen more hysterical “scientific researches” produce a jaundiced view of “experts”.
Campaigners follow predictable paths. A half-truth, an emotive pull, an expert advocate will set a bandwagon rolling and if the result is a Puritanical ban on rich speeding drivers so much the better. A dozen years writing for The Guardian showed me how it was done. Opinion was entrenched on speeding. I never subscribed to the newspaper’s political stance, although to its credit, once nominated as a contributor it left you alone. Your opinions were your own. Alastair Hetherington probably took the view that if I got myself into what he would regard as a hole, I should stop digging. All that was required was the house style of writing, which was the most demanding of any newspaper for which I wrote. Right-click to enlarge

If you wanted reader reaction, whimsies on speeding guaranteed it. During the first oil crisis 50mph limits were imposed to save fuel. Guardian readers of 23 December 1974 loved them.

This correspondence column of 6 January 1975 was quite restrained. Mr Burke seems perversely pleased to drive a 90mph car. A bit racy for 1974.