Speed kills

Although he claims to make sure his facts come from reliable sources, it seems that C. Gould has fallen into the Association of British Drivers' mis-information trap. He has made two serious mistakes; relying on a survey of a few volunteers rather than a carefully chosen sample, and, much more seriously, picking out a figure from a results table that shows something completely different.

The Transport Research Laboratory report 323 "A new system for recording contributory factors in road accidents" looked at different ways to collect and interpret road crash data, using eight volunteer police forces. It was not a study of the causes of crashes. The figure he quotes for crashes where "speed is a major factor" comes from a table showing how reported causes had been combined with each other, and does not represent all crashes in which speed was implicated.

If Mr Gould is looking for evidence that speeding causes crashes, he might like to read TRL report 421 "The effects of drivers' speed on the frequency of road accidents", PR058 "Speed, speed limits and accidents", CT084.1 "Speed and road accidents update (94-98)", and LR88 "The relation between a driver's speed and his accident rate".

These reports are more likely to give him the information he needs, but sadly these findings are always ignored by the ABD and other speedophiles (I wonder why?).

Anthony Cartmell
31 Greentrees Crescent
Sompting