ROAD SAFETY
Road accidents are of major concern to many people. Although casualties have been falling over the last few years, it is not at all clear whether this has been due to road engineering, improved vehicles (e.g. in-car safety), major improvements in medical care or road safety policies such as speed cameras, lower speed limits, speed humps, or other measures. The FFDF is deeply sceptical about the benefits of some of those latter policies (for example look at our analysis of speed humps on this page: Speed-Humps ).
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It is deeply regrettable that politicians seem to grab at the simple, if expensive solutions, as a quick fix or panacea to road safety problems. In reality, the issues are often complex and expert advice is often ignored in the search for a simple solution. The law of unintended consequences also applies - for example speed humps can actually cause accidents and have certainly increased air pollution substantially.
There are many misconceptions about the number of accidents, the causes of accidents and how to reduce them. This presentation given by Roger Lawson to the Chislehurst Society in the London Borough of Bromley in 2016 covers some of those topics: Understanding-Road-Safety-2
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It also covers how to look at particular accidents and their causes (use of Crashmap site and Stats19 data) instead of jumping to conclusions as is so often done.
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We have published a number of articles on the topical issues of 20 MPH speed limits, Speed Cameras and Speed Awareness Courses. These subjects are covered on separate pages here:
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See this blog article for some comments on Vision Zero and the statistics on the causes of accidents: Vision-Zero
Road safety is always a topical issue and there are likely to be more articles on the subject on the Blog - use the blog search to find more.