Photo radar is ment as a compliment to an overall safety strategy. For most people a catchy little phrase such as "speed kills" is all they need to know to justify speed enforcement. As a result some believe that it is a desireable method to save lives. Unfortunately, reducing speed is not the magic pill that will save lives on the road. Proponents for photo radar , claim that it works for the following two reasons:
1- It reduces speeds, therefore it must save lives.
2- It modifies driver behaviour, by forcing drivers to slow down and reduce accidents
Let us begin by looking closely at the supposition that speed kills.
Speed Kills?
The entire "Speed Kills" story has its roots in the United States in 1974. The worst year in terms of deaths on US highways was 1972 there were 54,376, highway fatalities. In 1973 due to the Arab oil embargo, the US Congress and President Nixon compromised and set the national speed limit to 55mph as a fuel conservation measure. In 1974 The head of the National Safety Council Vincent Toffany and Ralph Nader lobbied Congress and the media to maintain the lower limit based on fatality figures for 1973 (46,741). They reasoned that the drop in fatalities was due to lower speeds and that 8-9 thousand lives would be saved annually. Unfortunately they did not turn the page of the traffic report. Highway engineers judge road safety by taking the total amount of distance driven and dividing it by fatalities, i.e., deaths per 1,000,000 miles driven. When the total mileage driven was divided by the death rate, deaths actually increased by 15.7% in 1973.
Concurrently developments in solid state electronics and microwave technology, made possible for the first time, simple hand held speed radar guns. Police radar guns use were given a boost when the US Congress required that Individual states must ticket a percentage of motorists for speeding in order to receive federal highway maintenance funds. The end result was not an increase in safety, but a swelling in state coffers and an incredible windfall for insurance companies. Insurers were the single largest beneficiary, since their customer rates were based on an individual client's driving record.
Hard Data
The last complete sets of published statistics from the Ontario government show the following. In 1992 Ontario had 6,688,761 licensed motorists that were involved in 224,249 accidents. Out of these accidents 1,090 people were killed and 91,025 were injured. While ever life is precious it is imperative that we keep things in perspective. The numbers show the accident rate in Ontario is the lowest it has been since 1954 and a driver has a 1 in 30 chance of being involved in a collision per year and only a 1 in 6136 of being killed. While the chance of being killed in a car accident is greater than winning the jackpot, the road is hardly paved with dead children as some may suggest. Another safety benchmark is measured by deaths per 10,000 vehicles. As we can see from the table to the right Canada and Ontario in particular is quite a safe place to drive. It also shows that you should never drive in Turkey.
How does this relate to speeding?Glad you asked!
Ontario Road Safety Report P#11 Table2.8
Oddly enough, as shown from the table to the left, whose data was collected by police accident reports, shows speeding accounts for only 1.05% of all accidents. Furthermore table 3.11 (p#25) of the same report shows that out of ALL provincial accidents our highways only account for 20% of the total. This brings us to the million dollar question. Why are our police agencies devoting close to 60% of their enforcement and legal resources, on the cause of only 1.05% of accidents on our safest roads? It is one of those things that make you go Hmmm!
Results of the Ontario Program
Although, the program was prematurely terminated, there was at least time to have one published study. The report was entitled "Photo Radar Safety Evaluation Preliminary 4 Month Speed Results". While the study was short term the numbers corelate closely to a two year study undertaken by the Swedish Road and Traffic Research Institute(VTI Rapport #378, 1992).
Sites were divided into enforced sections of roadway and control sections. Both roads were statistically identical in terms of traffic density, speeds and conditions. These sites were further divided by their number of lanes. They cover 2, 4 and 6 lane highways. The preliminary results were as follows;
The study also claims the following “An examination of the average speeds at each site by each time period indicates that the average speed on all highways has decreased over the last 5 months." They claim that the posting of signs declaring photo radar enforcement and effective enforcement are the only reason's speed has declined for the reporting period. The author has completely ignored the fact that the study figures began in the summer and finished off in the dead of winter. As we all know average speeds tend to decline during the winter months, due to winter road conditions.
Summary
The Ontario program had no plans to collect hard data on reductions in highway fatalities. It merely predictied that lives that would be saved by this program by, reducing braking distances. The mind boggling part was that to justify this conclusion, a US Department of Transportation graph, circa 1954 concerning semi trailer braking distances was dusted off. A fully laden mini van could easily stop in an 1/8th of the distance shown on the graph. In respect to reducing accidents and saving lives, the program was a dismal failiure.In all studies I have seen, speed was reduced somewhat durring the beginning of a photo radar project. Human nature being what it is, speeds gradually climbed back to nearly pre-study levels as drivers became comfortable with photo radar. With this in mind the initial 1-5km/h reduction shows that in terms of modifying driver behaviour, the program was a dismal failiure.
