Speed not only issue on safety

Last weekend's sudden wet weather may have led to a spate of crashes leaving six people dead, according to the National Safety Council (NSC). Chairman Eddie Shaw says that staying within the speed limit isn't enough to halt road deaths - motorists need to drive "at speeds appropriate to the weather and road conditions".

On Monday, the go-ahead was given to privatised speed checks, a cornerstone of the Government's road safety strategy. Under the proposal, hundreds of mobile detection units will be sent to hidden locations, especially blackspots.

The problem for the Government, however, is that new speed cameras, run privately or not, will not detect inappropriate speeds, as highlighted by the NSC. Bad driving is a leading cause of road deaths, say safety campaigners.

Speed cameras will not detect drunk drivers travelling on the wrong side of the road in the middle of the night with no lights on. Nor will they catch "boy racers" driving inside the 100km/h limit in dense fog, or those overtaking on bends. Proper enforcement is the only way to stamp out such driver behaviour.

Campaigners have called on the Minister for Transport, Martin Cullen, to consider the pace at which the following key aspects of his Department's strategy are introduced: random breath testing, a ban on talking on the phone while driving and the full range of penalty point offences. Fixing on speed, they say, may yield disappointing results.

In Britain, meanwhile, a debate is underway on the effectiveness of speed cameras. Local bodies have stopped signing off on new camera locations until they see a crucial report on the effectiveness of cameras.

London's transport department denies a "moratorium", but says it will not go ahead with new cameras until the report from University College London is published in the autumn.

"We won't sign off on new sites until we have this piece of work," said a spokesman. "We feel it's worth holding off because it's such a valuable piece of work. The study will examine how cameras work on the roads, where and how they are best used." Britain currently has about 6,500 operational speed cameras.

Engineer Paul Smith who founded Safer Speed, a group lobbying against the cameras, is "really really confident" the British government will abandon cameras altogether in due course. Britain has one of Europe's best road safety records but, according to Smith, this was achieved long before the introduction of speed cameras 10 years ago.

With improvements in car safety, road design and medical science, Smith calculates that British road deaths should be falling by 5 per cent a year. "It has been the worst decade in terms of improvement in road safety," he says, despite the growth in the number of cameras.

Smith is "100 per cent certain" that Britain is pursuing the wrong road safety policies. "Speed cameras have been an unmitigated disaster." He believes the British government's "oversimplified view" that speed kills has lead to hundreds of deaths.

He says the British government is having "cold feet" on cameras. "It's only a matter of time before the camera policy is cancelled completely. I'm really confident of that."

Smith has given up his job to lobby full-time and check available research. The Observer newspaper recently said the three-month "moratorium" on cameras was "partly in response" to Smith's work.

On the other side of the debate, Caroline Chisholm of the road safety charity, Brake, says: "All the independent research suggests that cameras reduce deaths and serious injuries by 40 per cent."

Motorists who complain about getting caught on camera speeding have no case to argue, she says - "If you don't speed you don't get fined."