Speeding - 2 good articles from the BBC

Camera-caught drivers not fined

Hundreds of thousands of drivers caught on camera speeding and going through red lights are not being prosecuted, a BBC investigation has learned.

The figures, for England and Wales, suggest London is particularly bad, with more than half of cases failing.

The BBC Radio 4 probe found cameras in the capital catch about 500,000 people a year, but a third of those cannot be traced to an address.

The Metropolitan Police said tracking down drivers was a national problem.

The Investigation programme found it was difficult to produce national figures partly because there were differences in the way some areas collect their data.

But according to figures supplied by Safety Camera Partnerships to the government, hundreds of thousands are getting away with breaking the law.

Detection

Of the 500,000 people caught on camera in London each year one third cannot be traced - either because they are foreign vehicles, or they are not registered with the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA).

There can also be other problems such as technical faults with cameras and emergency vehicles.

About 350,000 people who have been caught are sent a "Notice of Intent to Prosecute" but only 48% end up getting points on their licences and a fine.

Other parts of the country had also had significant problems, and the programme said it had uncovered evidence drivers were registering cars at addresses other than their own to evade capture.

The Association of Chief Police Officers traffic spokesman, Chief Constable Meredydd Hughes, said detection rates for all crimes was 30% and that in that context speed camera offences were being reasonably enforced.

Kevin Delaney, former head of the Met's traffic police, said the figures were evidence of a wider problem that speed cameras can only catch people who are basically law-abiding.

"Any form of remote detection such as speed cameras relies on the information supplied by the public.

"If that is not correct then remote detection immediately falls flat. You need traffic police to catch the problem drivers."

Dianne Ferreira, communications officer for road safety charity Brake, said speed cameras were "a proven deterrent".

She added: "It's crucial that the camera system works properly. If many people are evading prosecution then the system needs to be looked at.

"It's important that drivers do not get the message that somehow it's all right to speed. A system that saves lives should not be faulty."

However, campaigner Paul Smith, of Safe Speed, said the system was a "disaster from beginning to end".

Mr Smith said the cameras made road safety "worse" by "misdirecting life-saving resources".

He said: "Enough is enough. Speed cameras are a bad joke. Let's pull the plug. They are at the heart of a failed policy that's costing real lives."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6568813.stm

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Caught on camera

Before speed cameras, the number of road deaths was falling dramatically but this is no longer the case. So do speed cameras really make our roads safer?

On a chilly morning in west London, a gaggle of schoolchildren dress up in sunflower T-shirts as part of a bizarre publicity offensive for speed cameras.

The group that runs cameras in the capital, the London Safety Camera Partnership (LSCP) is handing out sunflower seeds to every primary school in the capital to celebrate the 1,500 people who have been saved from death and serious injury by speed cameras in the past five years.

The communications manager for the LSCP, Christine Fitzgerald, is adamant they work. "They do save lives - our data suggests a 50% reduction. When you see a camera, just think somebody has either died there or suffered a life-changing injury."

What does she mean by "life-changing injury"? In London it's applied to anyone who has a serious injury, which can mean everything from paralysis to a broken bone or a concussion. A broken arm is serious, but is it really life changing?

This semantic sleight of hand infuriates the small band of speed camera opponents. Chief among them is Paul Smith, whose group, Safe Speed, does all it can to discredit cameras.

"The figure of 1,500 is a fraud, the vast majority is due to random variation in the location of accidents," he says.

Location location

For years the myth persisted that cameras were put up as a way to generate money rather than to make the roads safer.

Earlier this year the Department for Transport (DfT) tried to put this to bed. They revealed the requirements that cameras have to meet before they are installed. Principally, there have to have been three serious injuries at a camera site in a three-year period. In London it's even tougher with four injuries over the same period.

The government say there's compelling evidence to show that speed cameras save lives. The last evaluation in 2005 claimed there had been over 40 % fewer people killed or seriously injured at camera sites.

Dr Linda Mountain, an engineering academic from the University of Liverpool isn't convinced by these statistics. She has spent three years investigating an effect which blows a hole in the government's statistics on speed cameras. It's a statistical phenomenon known as "regression to mean".

In simple English, it refers to the fact that any extreme score - high or low - at one point in time will probably be less extreme the next time it's tested for purely statistical reasons. This is because scores always involve a little bit of randomness - which can go for or against you.

When applied to accident road safety, it's the idea that if nothing was done at an accident hotspot, the number of accidents might fall naturally anyway, with or without a speed camera. Basically, if you are at the top of a list of accident hotspots, there's only way to go and that's down.

Dr Mountain tried to factor this into the government statistics. Her figures were significantly different to the official ones. She found by including "regression to mean", the number of people killed or seriously injured at camera sites fell by just over 20%, half the government's estimate.

Her report was tucked away in an appendix in the last major evaluation, although the government does accept that "regression to mean" has a significant effect.

Speed kills

This isn't the only doubt over road safety figures. The official statistics lump together deaths and serious injuries on the roads. These have shown a significant fall since speed cameras were introduced, leading to the inevitable conclusion - speed cameras save lives.

But the dramatic fall in serious injuries in road crashes puzzled some academics, who didn't think it reflected what was going on in hospitals. So they compared the hospital statistics for road injuries to the police figures, which the government uses.

"What we found was no substantial decline at all," says Michael Goldacre, a professor in Public Health from Oxford University, and part of the research team.

There's an even bigger problem with road deaths. In the decade before speed cameras came in, the number of road deaths fell by over a quarter. In the decade after they were introduced, deaths went down by just 8%, despite the improvement in new cars and the advances in emergency medical care.

The end of decades of rapid improvement is worrying experts like Jeremy Broughton, of the Transport Research Laboratory, who has written a report for the government examining what's happening to the road death figures.

He believes the problem is a minority of dangerous drivers who are not being deterred by speed cameras and need to be dealt with by more traditional forms of policing.

"When you drive home this evening, the likelihood of seeing a traffic cop is actually quite low and it's certainly much lower than it was 10 years ago," he says.

Problem drivers

The other problem with speed cameras is they rely on drivers to be honest enough to register their cars properly. We've uncovered evidence that drivers are deliberately registering their cars at other addresses to make it difficult for the authorities.

The anti-speed camera vigilante, Captain Gatso, told The Investigation that he registered his car at a different address, allowing him to ignore any penalties incurred.

It is difficult to say how many drivers are taking measure to avoid speeding penalties but there is certainly a particular enforcement problem in London, where over half of offending drivers are not being prosecuted.

Kevin Delaney, the former head of the Met's traffic police, believes this is evidence of a wider problem that speed cameras can only catch people that are basically law abiding.

"Any form of remote detection such as speed cameras relies on the information supplied by the public. If that isn't correct, then remote detection immediately falls flat. You need traffic police to catch the problem drivers."

The Investigation is broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Thursday 19 April at 2000 BST.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6571257.stm