Safe Speed was a United Kingdom-based

pressure group Advocacy groups, also known as interest groups, special interest groups, lobbying groups or pressure groups use various forms of advocacy in order to influence public opinion and ultimately policy. They play an important role in the developm ...

that campaigned against

speed camera In everyday use and in kinematics, the speed (commonly referred to as ''v'') of an object is the magnitude of the change of its position over time or the magnitude of the change of its position per unit of time; it is thus a scalar quanti ...

s, claiming that it did so on the grounds of road safety.

History

The organisation was started in 2001 by Paul Smith, a former computer electronics engineer, which ran from Smith's home in

Scotland Scotland (, ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a border with England to the southeast and is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean to th ...

. Following Smith's death in 2007 the campaign was taken over by his partner Claire Armstrong.

Criticism

There have been few formal studies evaluating the claims made by Safe Speed: *

George Monbiot George Joshua Richard Monbiot ( ; born 27 January 1963) is a British writer known for his environmental and political activism. He writes a regular column for ''The Guardian'' and is the author of a number of books. Monbiot grew up in Oxford ...

has argued that Safe Speed is much more about speed than safety, and is part of a "culture of speed". *The claim that "one third of road deaths are due to speed cameras" was disputed by the

Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety The Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety (PACTS) is a registered charity. For much of its history, it was also an All-party parliamentary group of the UK parliament The Parliament of the United Kingdom is the Parliamentary sove ...

(PACTS) and by the National Safety Camera Scheme which cite seatbelt and alcohol laws introduced prior to the 1990s, and recent increased road use and mobile phone use as better explanations for the perceived increase in casualties. Safe Speed's method of extrapolating from two years' data is also disputed. * ''Which?'' magazine reported that the

(PACTS) and the National Safety Camera Liaison (NSCL) cite three studies which do allow for long-term trends, and which confirm the correlation between speed cameras and accident reduction. The magazine also reported that the

Transport Research Laboratory TRL Limited, trading as TRL (formerly Transport Research Laboratory) is an independent private company offering a transport consultancy and research service to the public and private sector. Originally established in 1933 by the UK Governme ...

(TRL) disputes Safe Speed's interpretation of TRL 323. In particular they state that the study was dependent on subjective judgements of primary cause, and that many of the other primary causes listed also implied excessive speed. Other TRL studies (e.g. 421 and 511) have examined the relationship between speed and accidents and suggest a strong association. A study of over 300 roads, encompassing several hundred thousand observations, demonstrated that the higher the average speed of traffic on a given type of road, the more accidents there are. The study also demonstrated that injury accidents rise as average speed increases (if all else remains constant).

References

External links

* {{Official website, http://www.safespeed.org.uk/index1.html Traffic enforcement cameras Road safety in the United Kingdom Advocacy groups in the United Kingdom

History

Criticism

References

Further reading

External links