SPEEDING FACTS VS.

FICTION
WHY THIS PAGE?
So why talk about speeding in a site dedicated to information about car maintenance.
Well predominantly to illustrate a point about anti-lock brakes in the Brake Bible but also
to show how car maintenance overall plays into accidents in surprising ways.
SPEEDING - THE EMOTIVE ISSUE.
A long time ago, I ran a site called the Speedtrap Bible; its purpose was to educate the
public about the technology invoked by the police to catch and prosecute people for
speeding. Some thought the site was the saviour of drivers, whilst others pretty much
directly accused me of single-handedly promoting child murder. Speeding - it's an
emotive issue and one which the police and government always use as leverage
whenever they get a chance. Constable Tim NiceButDim, when interviewed next to a
smouldering pile of twisted metal on the side of the M25 will say "This accident was
caused by people speeding, plain and simple."Similarly, Highway Patrol Officer Chad
SteroidAbuse, when interviewed next to a smouldering pile of twisted metal on the side
of Interstate 15, will say "This accident was caused by excessive speed and nothing
more." It's the same the world over, but separating actual fact from emotive fiction is
always difficult. As part of my research when authoring the Speedtrap Bible, I spent a
day at the Transport Research Laboratory in Crowthorne, in England. It's the
government's vehicular research centre, with high speed test tracks, crash rooms, drag
strips, banked curves and all manner of other test areas set in the lush forests around
Bracknell in England. They test everything there from the effectiveness of seatbelts
inside a car to the effectiveness of road surfaces and crash barriers outside the car. I
was particularly interested in their studies on speed in relation to the cause of accidents.
The library at the TRL has copies of all their reports, and the two I spoke to their
technicians about (and ended up buying) were TRL323 entitled "A new system for
recording contributary factors in road accidents" and TRL325 - "The factors that
influence a driver's choice of speed."
IS SPEED A CONTRIBUTING FACTOR IN
MOST ROAD ACCIDENTS? TRL323
The short and politically incorrect answer is no, and here's why. TRL Report 323
entitled "A new system for recording contributary factors in road accidents" was a joint
project between the TRL and the DETR (Department of Environment, Transport and
Regions). It was designed to give true figures for the real causes of accidents taken
across 8 representative police forces over 6 months in the summer of 1996. They
devised a system based on two main categories: what went wrong, and why? Each of
those is divided into subcategories such as failures of the driver or rider, failures of
pedestrians etc. The report is a fascinating read for someone like me who has a website
to maintain, but could be incredibly dull to most people. So to cut to the chase, there's
two sections of information we need to look at.
1. Overall incidence of contributary factors
This is a categorised list of all the factors in the report which could contribute to but not
necessarily cause an accident. I've reproduced the top 5 items from the report here:
All factors involved in Definite factors involved
accident in accident
Description Number % Number %
Failure to judge other person's path or
speed 623 10.7% 218 10.3%
Behaviour - carelessness /
thoughtlessness / recklessness 513 8.8% 210 10%
Inattention 465 8% 130 6.2%
Looked but did not see 436 7.5% 149 7.1%
Excessive speed 424 7.3% 126 6%
What this means is that in 7.3% of the accidents, speed was one of many factors, and in
only 6% of the accidents was it a definite causal factor. Look at the top 4 factors and
you'll see that they can generally be categorised as the old police adage of "driving
without due care and attention." More to the point, if you take into account "loss of
control" accidents (which covers a multitude of sins including wheels coming off the
vehicle, black ice, etc) then according to the report, only 4% of all accidents are caused
by loss of control of the vehicle with excessive speed as the primary contributing factor.
2. Incidence of commonest precipitating factors, by type of accident.
This is perhaps a more telling chunk of information which aims to show the most
common factors involved in different types of accident, such as vehicle-pedestrian,
single-vehicle etc. Excessive speed doesn't feature directly in this information because it
is considered to be a subcategory of "loss of control" (see above). The government and
road safety campaigners will always tell us that pedestrians are killed because
of speeding motorists. This simply is not the case. Would you believe a staggering 84%
of pedestrians involved in accidents are killed or seriously injured due to their own
incompetence? In the TRL report, the prime factors involved in pedestrian fatalities are
listed as:
Pedestrian entered carriageway without due care (84%)
Vehicle unable to avoid pedestrian in carriageway (12%)
"Other" (4%)
So in the real world, it's not motorists tearing up and down town centre roads at speed
that is to blame for pedestrian fatalities, but the pedestrians themselves for stepping in
front of moving vehicles without bothering to look where they're going. This simple fact
alone explains the push in current car design to make more pedestrian-friendly front
ends for vehicle. If you can't stop the idiots from blindly wandering into the road, then
you need to try to damage them as little as possible when you inevitably run them down.
An amusing little sub-note for you here - another report further subcategorises "entering
the carriageway without due care", and shows that after dark, 77% of all adult
pedestrian fatalities are caused when the pedestrian is above the legal drink-drive limit -
ie. is technically classified as drunk - and staggered into the path of an oncoming
vehicle.
For other types of accidents, the "loss of control" figures were as follows:
single vehicle, built-up area - 77%
single vehicle, non built-up area - 85%
multi-vehicle, built-up area - 15%
 multi-vehicle, non built-up area - 22%
Remember that "loss of control" covers a wide variety of factors. Excessive speed
contributes to only 4.04% of all "loss of control" accidents.
On a side note, there's one other grouping of figures which makes for a good read too.
It's not technically to do with speeding, but I'm going to include it here so you can see
the other sorts of statistics that TRL323 assembles. This one particular section is
headed "Attribution of precipitating factors in accidents which involved one car and
either a pedestrian or one other vehicle." In other words, where a car was involved,
what percentage of those accidents were actually attributable to, or caused by the car?
Car collides with pedestrian - 12%
Car collides with bicycle - 79%
Car collides with motorcycle - 90%
If you've read my bikes page then you'll know I also own a motorbike and enjoy riding it.
I just thought it was an interesting figure that 90% of all motorbike-to-car accidents were
caused by the car. And I bet the most common excuse was "didn't see you mate".....

WILL REDUCED SPEED LIMITS REDUCE

ACCIDENTS? TRL325
TRL325 - "The factors that influence a driver's choice of speed." This is another TRL
report which I bought and had a good old look through. It's a survey of 5080 drivers in
an effort to find out what factors contributed to them speeding in the first place. More
importantly it also looked at the correlation between speed and accidents and asked the
question: if you drop the speed limit, does the accident rate go down?
During this study, TRL determined that there were many causes of "speed variation".
These included:
demographics (age, sex, driving experience, exposure to driving)
visual ability
driving skill (hazard perception, car handling, judgemental skills)
psychological factors (risk tolerance, social deviance, thrill-seeking)
temporary states (mood, fatigue, impairment due to drink or drugs, illness)
trip characteristics (length, purpose, urgency)
car characteristics (performance, comfort, noise levels)
road environment (road type, design, speed limit, enforcement levels,
maintenance)
environmental factors (passengers, pedestrians, time of day, signs, local
knowledge, weather)
By grouping these factors and arranging them in order of importance, these become:
Site effects. This includes things such as people's estimation of their speed
based on the geometry of their surroundings. ie. you might be used to
associating a certain frequency of seeing lamp posts with a certain speed. In
a new area, the lamp posts might be further apart, but you're trying to
maintain the frequency of site geometry that you're accustomed to, thus
driving faster without realising it.
Driver effects: age, sex and exposure. This includes things such as how often
you drive, and how far you drive.
Psychological variables. This includes things such as modern cars being
quieter and more comfortable than older cars, thus making it more difficult to
determine the speed you are going without glueing your eyes to the
speedometer. It also includes factors such as "do you own the car?" - people
are more inclined to speed in company cars because the psychological
factors tell them the vehicle isn't their responsibility.
So what does all this mean? Well, it means that there's not one single feature that
causes people to speed. You cannot arbitrarily drop the speed limit, bung up a camera
and expect people to slow down. It simply does not work. More to the point, the last
paragraph of the report sums up the entire study of why people speed, and how speed
is related to accidents:
By using predicted speeds as an explanatory variable in the model of accident
involvement it is possible to obtain an apparent relationship between speed and
accidents. This relationship suggested that a 1% change in an individual driver's choice
of speed is associated with a 7.75% change in that individual's accident liability. This
'elasticity' is much greater than that observed between changes in mean speed and
accident change on a specific section of road. Of course, the fact that there is an
apparent strong "cross-sectional" association between between speed and
accidents does not necessarily imply a causal link between the two, and it cannot be
assumed that reductions in speed by a particular driver will result in any accident
reductions of a size predicted by this association. The association arises from the fact
that both speed and accidents are related in similar ways to the same variables -
particularly age, experience and exposure.
SPEED CAMERAS SAVE LIVES - THE OTHER
GREAT LIE. TRL595
As a side note, it's worth talking here about another TRL report that was commisioned
by the UK government and then quietly hushed up when it too failed to support the
'speed kills' mantra.
TRL595 makes for some jolly interesting reading. It is a motorway safety performance
study carried out on behalf of the Highways Agency between November 2001 and July
2003. The phrase most often touted about this study is this: "The study showed that
there was no significant difference in the rate of Personal Injury Accidents when road
works were present." That is in fact entirely true, but one of the things this report also
looked at was the presence of speed cameras and their effect on accidents. And this is
where it gets interesing. In England, for as long as I can remember, the government
have insisted that speed cameras reduce accidents. They insist that cameras are only
put in at accident blackspots. Driving groups and individuals like me have always
argued that speed cameras are only ever installed to make money, and this belief has
always put us at odds with the government's hard line. I was once served with a cease
and desist order against my old website (The Speedtrap Bible) by the department of
transport, West Sussex police and Thames Valley police. They claimed that by giving
out technical information on the operation of different speed monitoring devices, as well
as their locations and how to fight speeding tickets, I was essentially putting drivers in
danger because (and here's the mantra again) "speed kills and you are condoning
speeding."
So TRL595 and speed cameras - what's the big deal? I'll give you the executive
summary first:
At 29 major motorway and road works sites, recording Personal Injury Accident details
for an exposure of 4,176 million vehicle kilometres:
GATSO-style wet-film speed cameras increase the accident rate at road
works by 55%
GATSO-style wet-film speed cameras increase the accident rate on open
motorways by 32%
SPECS-style digital speed cameras increase the accident rate at road works
by 4.5%
SPECS-style digital speed cameras increase the accident rate on open
motorways by 6.7%
There is little statistical error in those numbers - 18 months and 4,176,000,000 vehicle
km is, in statistical terms, a bloody huge sample set. The conclusion of this particular
section of the report was "The non-works with speed camera PIA rate is significantly
greater than the without speed camera rate."
For the anal-retentives amongst you, here is table 3.18 from TRL595 reproduced in all
its glory.
PIA's Million vehicle km PIAs
Without Without Without
speed speed With speed speed With speed
camera With speed cameras camera cameras camera cameras Ratio
With
out With
No No No Non No No spee spee
n- n- n- - n- n- d d
Wor wor Wor wor Wor wor Wor wor Wor wor Wor wor came came
ks ks ks ks ks ks ks ks ks ks ks ks ras ras
6.4 6.1 Aggre 20. 19. 71. 69. 194. 189. 0.0 0.0 0.1 0.1 1.0 1.036
 2 7 gate 35 12 80 03 96 70 89 89 04 01
39. 39. 428. 420. 0.0 0.0
Digital 60 97 05 31 93 95 0.973
Analo 13. 11. 98.8 94.7 0.1 0.1
gue 60 12 9 3 38 17 1.172
6.0 7.0 92.5 88.0 0.0 0.0
Other 0 0 9 3 65 80 0.815

How do you get the increase in accident rate out of that table? It's pretty easy. Take a
look at the PIA figures for analogue type cameras on open motorway (highlighted
in bold). According to the report the accident rate difference in 'non works' areas
between those without cameras and those with is 0.089 to 0.117. Some elementary
maths to calculate a percentage difference between those two figures gives you 0.117 /
0.089 which is 1.3146, or a 31.46% increase.
THE 1997 PARKER STUDY
In 1997 a report was commissioned where speed limits were randomly increased and
decreased all over the US to see what effect it would have on accident rates. Overall,
drivers did not change their average speeds. What was interesting was that the lower
the speed limit, the higher the accident rate, and the higher the speed limit, the lower
the crash rate. This isn't a statistical anomaly either - it's not like we're talking about
being within one or two percent.
If you want to read the report, it's here, entitled Effects of Raising and Lowering Speed
Limits on Selected Roadway Sections - the 1997 Parker Study. It perfectly encapsulates
why road and vehicle design, and driver training, have far, far more of an impact on
accident rates than arbitrarily imposed speed limits.
SPEED DIFFERENTIAL IS A BIG PROBLEM
Following on from the Parker Study, it's been observed time and again that it's
the speed differential that is the problem. If you put the speed limit at 100km/h when
most people are doing 120km/h, the differential between law-abiding drivers and
everyone else is 20km/h. If you raise the limit to 110km/h, the faster drivers don't go
even faster - they tend to stay around 120km/h - but now the law-abiding drivers are
doing 110km/h, reducing the speed differential to 10km/h
This has be proven in plenty of places around the world. For example vast stretches of
I-15 between Utah and Arizona had the limit raised from 70mph to 80mph and the
crash, injury and fatality figures fell noticably.
SPEED CAMERAS VS. DRIVERS - THE
ESCALATING ARMS WAR.
Reports like TRL323, TRL325 and TRL595 do put a bit of a fly in the ointment when it
comes to the official line that "speeding causes accidents". Despite the facts, the police
and local governments continue to try to strengthen this myth, and use it as their excuse
for installing speed cameras. The simple truth of the matter is that speed cameras don't
reduce accident numbers - they nothing more than a method of earning more revenue
from unwary drivers. So as new technologies come out to trap motorists, so too do new
technologies come out to help them evade the traps. First the police had radar guns, so
the motorists got radar detectors. Then the police got laser guns, so the motorists got
combined laser and radar detectors. Then the police got speed cameras which were
hard to detect with radar detectors, so the motorists got GPS devices with built-in
locations for all the cameras. This ridiculous and escalating arms race is all because
those in power refuse to admit that they're wrong, and for as long as this situation
exists, we, the drivers, will be forced to deal with more and more so-called safety aids in
our cars. The ultimate outcome of this is that drivers are dumbing down because they're
now expecting their vehicles to be responsible for avoiding accidents, because we're all
being fed a constant lie about traffic accident causes. It's a sad cause-and-effect but to
quote Al Gore, it's an inconvenient truth.
THIS VIDEO SAYS IT ALL: SPEEDKING
KILLS YOUR POCKETBOOK
Please, please, please watch this. It's from Canada, but it is highly relavent to the US,
Australia and most countries in Europe too.
BLAMING THE MOTORIST FOR EVERYTHING
In case you hadn't figured it out by now, I'm very pro-car and pro-motorbike and totally
against the motorist being blamed for everything. Where I live in Utah, there's now a
campaign to make drivers solely responsible for mowing down pedestrians who wander
out into traffic without looking. That's totally the wrong message, in my book. It places all
the burden on the driver to avoid a pedestrian, rather than making the pedestrian
responsible for their actions. Things would be different if they all used pedestrian
crossings, but they don't - the wander out into traffic like lemmings and get themselves
injured and killed on a daily basis. They don't seem to understand that the road is for
cars and the pavements (or sidewalk) is for pedestrians. This current campaign makes
as much sense as allowing car drivers to drive on the pavements and making the
pedestrians responsible for damaging cars in the ensuing carnage (pun intended).
Actually, maybe we should drive on the pavements - there seems to be less chance of
hitting a pedestrian there. Once again though, ridiculous campaigns like this play into
the hands of car manufacturers who will tell you that ABS would help in a situation like
this, and once again we're burdened with more 'safety' devices we don't need. This
inattentive pedestrian thing is so epidemic that in Europe now, cars are being
manufactured to be pedestrian-friendly - to damage them less when you hit them.
Another classic case of treating the symptoms of the problem rather than the cause.
The picture on the right shows one of the campaign posters on the back of a bus, taken
by a passenger in my car with my crappy cellphone camera.
CONCLUSION : SPEEDING ISN'T THE
PROBLEM.
So speed doesn't kill. Well - it does - but in nowhere near the numbers we're told and
not in the way the authorities would like you to believe. It's common sense that higher
speed will make any accident more violent, but higher speed does not cause the
accident in the first place. The police and governments should be spending more time
on educating people to drive properly and pay attention - less loss-of-control or
inattention accidents would be the result of that. They should spend more time making
pedestrians responsible for their own actions instead of blaming drivers. That would
reduce the pedestrian culling. They should spend more time and resources banning
cellphones and arresting drivers for drunk and drugged driving - all major causes of
accidents as supported by dozens of reports. But speeding remains the lowest fruit in
the tree and consequently the easiest one to pick, even though it's the single least
responsible line item for the cause of accidents.
All interesting reports then. I'm not saying they're gospel, but I am far more prepared to
believe this type of study than I am prepared to believe politicians. According to these
reports, speed is neither a contributing nor definite factor in the majority of road traffic
accidents. Nor will reducing vehicle speeds necessarily lead to any reduction in accident
rates.
There's an interesting UK parliament memorandum on this very topic that you can enjoy
for further reading here: Memorandum by The Association of British Drivers (RTS 11)
I've also created a PDF of that page in case it conveniently disappears. You can
download the PDF here.
Thanks to the TRL for an interesting day out, and the TRL's library and publication
services for helping me to find and purchase TRL323 and TRL325 reports.
You can find many of their reports online for free now at the TRL documentation library.