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Originally Posted by Xaccers
You end up with commissioner who can work within the system to ensure the police are tackling issues which the community want them to tackle, rather than spending time and money on other matters.
So you get what you want, someone who cannot just campain on popularist issues, can't claim they'll get the police to stake out all parks incase of paedophiles, can get the police to impliment curfues to curtail youth crime.
You get someone accountable and removable which we currently don't have.
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Speed cameras do not save lives.
The fatality rate on the roads has been decreasing year on year by approx 5% from 1950 to 1993, but from 93 to 01 this decrease averaged less than 3% and from 99 to 01 it was less than 0.5%!
Meaning that the roads are not getting safer, more people are being involved in fatal accidents.
They have not had a detrimental effect on the percentage of vehicles (not just cars) exceeding the speed limit either (according to national statistics)
Very few accidents have ever been been caused by normal motorists exceeding a speed limit so, it's hardly surprising that efforts to enforce speed limits are not reducing accidents. Read what the Chief Constable of Durham was reported as saying:
Mr Garvin explained: "I actually believe in casualty reduction and trying to make the roads safer but, having looked at the accident statistics in this area, we find that if you break down the 1,900 collisions we have each year only three per cent involve cars that are exceeding the speed limit. Just 60 accidents per year involve vehicles exceeding the speed limit.
"You then need to look at causes of these 60 accidents. Speed may be a factor in the background but the actual cause of the accident invariably is drink-driving or drug-driving. Drug-taking is becoming more of a problem. In 40 per cent of fatal road accidents in this area one or more of the people involved have drugs in their system."
Many accidents were caused by fatigue, although one of the most common causes of crashes was the failure of drivers to watch out for oncoming vehicles when turning right. "The cause of accidents is clearly something different than exceeding the speed limit and we ought to be looking at those other factors," Mr Garvin said.
If normal motorists speeding isn't causing accidents, then it has clearly been utter folly to base a road safety policy on a problem that does not exist. But that's exactly what we've done. We have done it because people in and around Government have a series of oversimplified and mistaken beliefs.
A study by the Transport Research Laboratory has shown that vehicle activated signs which can be set at the speed limit (well below speed camera guidlines) are 3 times more effective at reducing vehicle speed, even after the driver has been passing the sign for 3 years.
The study also demonstrated a substantial reduction in accidents where the signs were used.
They also cost a heck of a lot less than gatsos or truvelos!
Now, I'd want my commissioner to campain for more of these signs and fewer gatsos as they are factually more effective at increasing road safety.
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An independent report last year said speed cameras save on average 100 lives per year. And they raised £20m. Top! Extending your argument, should we scrap speed limits as speed is not such an important factor? But I will say that I like those vehicle activated signs and would guess they are quite effective (but there's no way I would concede they're cheaper than gatsos because gatsos, as I say, raised £20m last year thanks to the fundraising efforts of speeding drivers who can't quite grapple with the legal entity that is a speed limit). But a speeding driver that freqently uses a route with a vehicle activated sign will soon get wise to the fact that s/he will not be punished for breaking the law and so will return to old ways. And, there is a flaw in your argument. If vehicle activated signs produce a 'substantial reduction in accidents' then surely speed
is indeed a factor?!!
And I'd also be interested in how serious those 60 speed related collisions in Durham were in relation to the others. Volume does not tell anything like the whole story.
I also don't dispute that there are other causes of accidents which need more effective policing and that we need more traffic police* - and more proactive traffic police at that - to achieve that aim.
What will happen with the proposed system is that topics like this will become dominant when, as always with politics, there are more important things to hand. Leaving aside for one moment the argument as to whether speed cameras reduce accidents, surely we should applauding their effectiveness at detecting a crime and ensuring an offender faces justice (whilst covering local authority prosecution costs and returning a dividend to the Treasury). I mean this is the cause of so much angst with other offences - that people get away with it and don't pay the price.
From where I'm standing this is not an issue worthy of lengthy political debate, but is precisely the sort of issue that will be raised countless times by aspiring politicians under Howard's proposals.
EDIT: NB noticed an error on one of my earlier posts which suggests I think the reduction in traffic police wasn't numb. It is.
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Originally Posted by Xaccers
This wouldn't be another layer though incog, this is a replacement, and unlike the current system, this would be more open and accountable and be able to respond to the actual concerns of the community, wether that be by tackling different crimes, or educating the community that their percieved issues are incorrect.
Also, instead of 7-9 officials, it would be just one.
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This looks pretty accountable to me:
http://www.bedfordshire.police.uk/introduction.htm and the (relatively) good news for you:
http://www.operationscorpion.org.uk/...r_0502010a.htm
Tell you what though, you don't make Leighton Buzzard sound a good place to live.