Brake highlights ‘disregard’ for traffic laws

12.00 | 28 April 2015 | | 39 comments

In a new survey of 1,000 drivers carried out by Brake, half (49%) admitted to breaking traffic laws, a finding which the charity describes as “worrying”.

Roughly half of those who admitted doing so cited inattention as the reason, while the vast majority of the others admitted doing so deliberately, “because they think they can get away with it or do not agree with the laws”.

Brake says UK roads are becoming “increasingly lawless territory”, and that police officers say they have been forced to “retreat” from motorways, major and rural roads.

Brake is calling on the new government after the General Election to reverse this trend and make traffic enforcement a national policing priority, and give “greater impetus to bringing casualties down and making streets safer”.

Julie Townsend, deputy chief executive, Brake, said: “Law breaking on our roads is not just down to a minority but endemic.

“For whatever reason, many seem to feel they are beyond the law or that traffic laws are somehow optional. This represents a failure by government to ensure traffic policing is receiving adequate priority and to make clear the importance and legitimacy of traffic laws.

“Whoever takes power after 7 May needs to make traffic policing a national policing priority, to ensure there is a strong deterrent against risky law-breaking on roads.

“We also need to see road safety given greater political priority, to set casualties falling once more and deliver safer streets for communities everywhere. That means reintroducing road casualty reduction targets, and working harder to win the ideological battle, to ensure everyone who gets behind the wheel understands why the rules exist and accepts their responsibility to abide by them and keep people safe.”

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    I have more collisions in my bedroom when the lights are off than ever I have had on the road. Lights! Aah, that must be it. Notice how along darkened roads headlights illuminate what we need to see, and we are not distracted by any surrounding views?


    Derek Reynolds, Salop.
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    Bob:
    The 99% loss of visual acuity is taking into account the presence of street and vehicle lighting. I suppose it’s a good illustration of how well we can adapt to severly degraded situations if we don’t notice how degraded they are.

    “We need to change the wrongful thought patterns of others” is a bit Stalinist isn’t it? People aren’t crashing because of wrongful thought patterns (although the behaviourists would love to think that they are), but because their knowledge is limited and their understanding is bounded by the circumstances in which they find themselevs. If it were true then nobody in this forum would have done anything whilst driving that would have been even slightly alarming to any road user in their vicinity. None of us would never have made any form of error or mistake or experienced any surprises when driving in fact thanks to our ‘correct’ thought patterns we would be perfect in every way.


    Duncan MacKillop. No surprise – No accident.
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    (Duncan): I disagree entirely. As regards night driving I understand that we are not meant to be active during night time hours and as we were not given the abilities ie. eyesight or hearing in order to catch prey during that period. However because of our superior brain and developed cognitive abilities we became able to illuminate our streets and highways by means of lamp posts,or to enable the road surface to be seen by headlights. Thus turning night into day and reducing risk. So that’s taken care of that one.

    As regards the human species then yes I agree that the majority hold the system together most of the time. As we know the system would not work without the consent of the majority however begrudgingly it’s given. Therefore we are in a way its strength but at times we are also its weakest part. Otherwise how can the majority be able to use the highways with no problems and yet some, the few make a right mess of it.

    Perhaps it’s a lack of cognitive ability on their part or of mere poor thought processing or a lack of experience or one of many of the other negative or faulty traits that we as humans possess. We need to change the wrongful thought patterns of others to a more useful, correct and constructive one. This is using the latest in thing of C.B.T. which stands for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.


    Bob Craven Lancs…Space is Safe Campaigner
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    Bob:
    We have to be careful in painting the human as the ‘weakest link’ in the system because they are also the strongest link that literally holds everything together. If we lose sight of the understanding that people cause safety then we can get led down the blind alley of behaviourism which eventually results in the baby being thrown out with the bath water.

    It is true that people can and will operate in a severely degraded state, but that is also true of the system as a whole. Take driving at night for example. During the hours of darkenss the human loses nearly 99% of its visual acuity in comparison to when they operate in daylight. This massive degredation has never led to calls for a total ban on night driving as the evidence shows that even when the system is so massively degraded the humans within it are still capable of managing it safely to a very high degree.


    Duncan MacKillop. No surprise – No accident.
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    This talk about the commercial airlines being put forward as a prime example of all the principals and practises of being safe with never ending safeguards put in place. Makes one feel safe whilst on a plane.

    It now transpires that the weakest link, the pilot is not doing all that well. Very sick in fact… Everyday there are new revelations of how sick and run down our pilots are, suffering long hours, drink and drug abuse, of lacking sleep and domestic issues at home. Of turn arounds, being scheduled to do as many trips in a day as possible without sufficient rest periods. of falling asleep whilst at the controls.

    The weak link is human even if everything else appears ok. This one will go on for a long time unless their working conditions are improved. Until then pressures and mental illnesses including suicides and attempted suicides that are now coming to light and the secret clinics that pilots are sent to, to straighten them out. It appears that one can never be certain of the cognitive ability of the person piloting the plane.

    Looks worse than HGV drivers hours or anything else that we see on our roads. Perhaps not. Maybe not just pilots but the general driving public have these problems whilst in control of a vehicle. Car or aircraft it matters not, it’s just human frailty.


    Bob Craven Lancs…Space is Safe Campaign
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    Driving a commercial aircraft is described as 99.9% boredom and 0.1% sheer panic. Most of the time the vehicle is under automatic control (automatic pilot to use the well worn phrase). All it does is planned by and controlled by computers. The pilot just sits there ready to react if anything goes wrong. The pilot is trained for this reaction. When the aircraft is on the ground the pilot is driving the plane like a large bus, sometimes takes the wrong turning, sometimes does not stop in times and sometimes has minor collisions on the ground – but not in the air.


    Robert Bolt, St Albans
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    Honor makes an interesting point so it’s worth expanding on the differences between the commercial air transport system (CAT) and the road transport system. The CAT system is designed to be mostly procedural with the minimum amount of interpretation whereas the roads evolved to be mostly interpretive with a limited number of procedures. In a procedural system the predictions of what will happen next have already been worked out in advance and so if the procedure requires the pilot to do ‘x’ then they will definitely get ‘y’ as a result. In the interpretive system the predictions of what happens next have to be made on the fly in response to the variation in the system. This means that the driver may do ‘x’, but whether they actually end up with ‘y’ is often in the lap of the gods.

    Another wrinkle comes in the availability of a third party (Air Traffic Control) to monitor the procedures that are being carried out by individual aircraft. The radar operator can see the entire system and how the individual elements are interacting, something the individual pilot has limited capability of doing. They therefore have to rely on ATC for warnings about system state or to get instructions on changing a procedures and so on. In a procedural (rule based) system the responsibility for situational awareness is shared between pilot and controller both of whom are following a strict set of process instructions to bring about a successful outcome. An equivalent of that in road transport might be the interactions between drivers and a Policeman on point duty for example.

    I suppose the road transport system could be changed from interpretive to procedural, but the chances of it actually working better/safer than it does at the moment is doubtful to say the least.


    Duncan MacKillop. No surprise – No accident
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    I wonder why it is that I so often read assertions that drivers should be allowed to interpret and adapt (or ignore) traffic laws to please themselves but I’ve yet to hear anyone suggesting that airline pilots, train drivers or ships captains should have the same degree of discretion. It could make Heathrow or the Dover Straits very interesting?


    Honor Byford, Chair, Road Safety GB
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    Analysts!

    Two vehicles can collide without either being outside any law. Traffic laws in essence are there to define what is legal – not necessarily what is safe, though safety is at the root of traffic laws in the main. Breaking a traffic law need not make a driver unsafe, and does not necessarily mean they will crash or harm anyone. Were we all to abide by all the traffic regulations in force at any one time, it would not stop accidents happening.

    We can analyse the human mindset and psyche until the cows come home. It doesn’t change what people do at the controls of a vehicle. And changing the human mindset is about as possible as global peace in our time. But we need to try at least.


    Derek Reynolds, Salop.
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    Now we’re getting somewhere!

    It seems that the question is whether a driver can be attentive, careful, and considerate and yet still make a prediction error? David tells us that for the most part people can predict and deal with the mistakes made by others and that is absolutely true and yet prediction is not an exact science is it? Nobody is ever going to be 100% accurate with every prediction which means that all the predictions they make will be in error to some extent. Constant predictions and constant errors will also be true for everybody else in the system irrespective of how careful or attentive they are being. It’s when two people make coordinated prediction errors that result in them both trying to occupy the same physical space that collisions occur and it is this coordinated error mode that we really need to understand.

    The law says that we must be attentive, careful, and considerate yet it says nothing whatsoever about errors in prediction. It seems that the law demands perfection, but the human beings in the system simply cannot deliver perfection no matter how hard they try. It’s easy after the event to point the finger at someone and say they should have paid more attention or they should have been more careful which is just another way of saying that the person involved had actually broken a law which is impossible to keep.


    Duncan MacKillop. No surprise – No accident.
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    I am not at all convinced by Duncan’s belief that the vast majority of crashes happen to normal drivers doing normal things, while not breaking the law.

    I spent many years attending collisions and working out how they occurred. In most cases the law was broken in some way. Perhaps not in some blatant manner by either passing through a red traffic light, or exceeding the speed limit by a large margin, but by driving without the reasonable care and attention, and consideration, required to be exercised by law.

    Duncan is forever searching for how we manage to have so few crashes, and I suggest that for the most part the majority of drivers are attentive, careful, and considerate. This allows them to predict and deal with the mistakes made by other road users. Although he does not like it, the fact is that most crashes do indeed involve people who are breaking the law.


    David, Suffolk
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    All very well Duncan, but simply studying statistics cannot give you the ‘understanding how these normal things turn out to be not so normal’ can it? Why study road accident statistics when you can witness for yourself the ‘normal things’ becoming abnormal? These incidents are not happening thousands of miles away – they’re practically on our doorteps. You will see ‘normal’ people doing ‘normal’ things, but with varying degrees of competence, care and elements of risk-taking, which your stats won’t reveal.


    Hugh Jones, Cheshire
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    Hugh:
    I’m afraid I do not posses some supernatural ability to see all things, but what I do posess is an undertanding of statistical sampling. The idea is that you do not have to drink all the soup to know what it tastes like as just a tiny spoonful will do the job perfectly well.

    The standard model in systems thinking is that between 85-99% of the accidents within a system are the result of ‘normal’ causes (the natural variation in the system) and that only 1-15% are the result of ‘special’ causes (abnormal variation in the system). A statistical sample of accidents will reveal that road accidents are no different to any other type of accident in any other environment which kind of proves the standard model. The ‘bad apples’ which so exercise the people within the road safety industry fall firmly in the ‘special’ causes bracket and therefore represent only a tiny fraction of the overall problem.

    There are around two million road accidents every year on Britain’s roads and yet we are expected to believe that all of them are caused by bad people doing bad things? No, most of them are caused by normal people doing normal things and it is understanding how these normal things turn out to be not so normal is where we should really be concentrating our efforts.


    Duncan MacKillop. No surprise – No accident.
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    Nice try Idris, but as you know quite well, the reporting officers do not witness the collisions they have to report on, nor are they in the vehicles at the time, so they simply cannot say for certain what the drivers’ behaviour was in the moments leding up to a collision. Witnesses are unreliable and the driver is not going to say they were speeding are they? The collision reporting system we have is fine for the factual stuff i.e. where, when, who did what, but not necssarily ‘why’ and ‘how’.

    As I said to Duncan, leave the graphs and data at home and simply spend some time observing driver/rider behaviour at a location to get a better idea of the ‘why?’ and ‘how?’.


    Hugh Jones, Cheshire
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    Idris
    Thanks for that interpretation of the court case. I note that the BBC report says: “Their judgement noted that people “who choose to keep and drive cars” have implicitly “accepted certain responsibilities” under UK law.

    “This includes an obligation to name the driver of a vehicle after a road traffic offence has been committed.

    “The judges also pointed out that UK law made it clear that no offence has been committed if a car owner can prove that he or she did not know, and could not be expected to know, who was driving the vehicle.”

    See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6251936.stm

    Thanks you for clarifying that you don’t claim represent anyone. I have clearly misinterpreted a post on another article where you said you were on the UKIP transport committee. But in future will accept that you do not speak for anyone but yourself.

    My only knowledge of these signs which you so clearly make me culpable for is from yourself. If you were to send me a photograph of the sign then I could comment. Please do and I will do my best to “help you with your enquiries”. After all, I have nothing to hide!


    Rod King, 20’s Plenty for Us
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    Hugh:
    To update you that reckless driving is not an offence any more, only dangerous and careless driving with a huge gap in the burden of proof between them.


    Jeff, Cumbria
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    Rod
    Even by your standards the extent to which you misrepresent facts continues to astonish me. I do not claim to represent anyone. I took my complaint about motorists alone being denied the centuries-old right to silence that remains available to every murderer, terrorist, arsonist, rapist and crook to only one Court on the Continent the ECHR, with the support of Liberty and every lawyer I knew. The Court itself determined that I had a valid argument important to 300m drivers and that it should be referred direct to the Grand Chamber of 17 Judges instead of the usual 5. In the event I lost, by 15:2 but the dissenting judgement of the Moldavian Judge, still available on the web, was a masterpiece of logic and analysis. The essence of the majority judgement was that road safety trumped the fundamental right of defendants to expect courts to prove their case without threatening even larger penalties for not confessing.

    It is also strange that you claim no knowledge of the 20’s Plenty signs like the two within 200 yards of my home, and elsewhere. They are clearly professionally made in metal, with metal straps around the School signs to which they are illegally attached. I will now file Hampshire’s Highways Authority my long delayed complaint about these signs and those who install them. I will copy that complaint, and the photographs it will contain, to Nick (Rawlings) so that he can confirm to readers that the signs are exactly as I describe.

    Hugh too chooses to misrepresent my point, which was that large numbers of accidents, probably a majority, occur when no one involved was breaking any law. This is very definitely the case in terms of speeding as 95% of collisions do not result in the police officer ticking either the “likely” or “possible” box on the Stats19 form. Similarly, momentary loss of concentration, (or indeed failing to see another vehicle due to built-in defects in the way human being see) in a long and otherwise flawless drive does not necessarily amount to breaking the law.

    It would be a considerable help to me and perhaps to others if both of you would stick to the facts.


    Idris Francis Fight Back With Facts Petersfield
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    Duncan – and now Idris – seem blessed with what appears to be a supernatural ability to witness or have witnessed every road accident and observed and assessed the behaviour of those involved and concluded that little or no ‘law-breaking’ was involved and that just about everyone was compliant with the rules of the road at the time. Careless driving and reckless driving are still offences and – Acts of God aside – there’s an element of both in RTCs.


    Hugh Jones, Cheshire
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    Idris

    I see no recurring argument that obeying the law at all times will result in zero accidents. What I do see is an argument that disobeying the laws and rules which we do have can both lead to collisions and can effect the ability to avoid collisions and reduce their severity.

    I am not sure if your describing other peoples posts as “drivel” is designed to intimidate them but seems typical of the way that the libertarian and minority motoring lobby which you purport to represent tends to debate.

    I note that your quest for “following the rules” was particularly close to your heart when your elderly Alvis was captured on camera doing 47mph in a 30 limit. Then you went pleading to every court in the continent claiming that under “human rights rules” you did not need to assist with identifying the driver. And in the end every one of those courts agreed that your selectivity on rules was somewhat displaced and threw out your case.

    Coming to your allegation of my “illegal speed limit sign”. This is a figment of your imagination. I do not have any road signs and have never put one up. You may be referring to a wheelie bin sticker printed on sticky back plastic which has a small 20 sign within it. Not unlike many road safety posters which incorporate signs. It seems strange that someone’s wheelie bin sticker should cause you so much consternation when you seem to have so little regard for real speed limit signs.


    Rod King 20’s Plenty for Us
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    I see mass non-compliance with speeding laws most of the time, including all 3 lanes of motorways – but very rarely indeed a crash. No one who drives has never broken a speed limit, if only by mistake, the great majority who deliberately break speed limits when safe to do so confirm by doing so that they believe the law – and strict enforcement – are wrong.

    Throughout this thread I see the naive belief that if only everyone obeyed the law at all times, no accidents would occur. That belief is simply drivel – and indeed a substantial majority of all crashes do occur when no one involved is breaking any law.

    One law that makes sense to me however is that the authorities should have the sole right to erect speed limit signs – so when are you going to see to it that your illegal ones are removed, Rod?


    Idris Francis Fight Back With Facts Petersfield
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    You make an interesting point Hugh, but let’s look at it from the perspective of the person we are looking at instead of from just our perspective, if you get what I mean.

    Let’s assume that everybody is exercising self-discipline and the desire to get it right, after all nobody has a desire to get it wrong do they? We may observe them getting it wrong, but unless there is any feedback to them in the form of surprise or a crash then they must be assuming that they are getting it right. We can only learn from error so if there is no obvious error then there can be no learning. From our point of view we may understand more about the prevailing situation than they do so we will have a different concept of right and wrong to the one that they hold.

    A good example is what we call the ‘Nightmare Overtake’ where our student attempts an overtake that we wouldn’t dream of doing. In such situations there is clearly a mismatch in understanding about the system state between the instructor and the student. Although we ‘know’ that the overtake is not really on the student still attempts it because they have done something similar in the past and just got away with it (from our point of view), and got it absolutely right (from their point of view).

    This is the giant problem with the behaviourist viewpoint in that the behaviourist tells the person that they’re doing it wrong, but the person concerned ‘knows’ they’re doing it right thanks to the evidence of their own experience. This is the fundamental mismatch that we need to address made all the more difficult thanks to the fact that for most of the time they are indeed doing it as right as it’s possible to do it!

    This is why systems thinking is so much more useful than behaviourism because it addresses variations in situations rather than variations in individuals. We now know that an individual’s knowledge is finite and always bounded by the circumstances in which they find themselves and with systems thinking we can turn that to our advantage. Rather than viewing the people as a problem to solve we view them instead as a resource to harness as they can tell us what is actually wrong with the system rather than what we think they’re doing wrong in the system.

    The hours spent watching a junction can tell us far more about the state of the system than it ever will about the individuals within it, but it will only tell us that if we allow it to.


    Duncan MacKillop. No Surprise – No Accident.
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    Re-your last sentence Duncan – it’s easier than you think – simply ask yourself what you are doing to get it right every time and then you must surely then realise having observed others, what they are not doing right, or what they’re doing ‘wrong’. Your own self-discipline and desire to ‘get it right’, must be one of the dominant factors I would have thought.


    Hugh Jones, Cheshire
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    The road transport system as developed does indeed separate people by split seconds and inches, how else could it be? All that comes between two drivers in a head-on situation is a bit of white paint down the middle of the road so how in any way is that safe?

    The system is far safer than it has any right to be because the people within it get it right ten thousand times more often than they get it wrong. They may well take their eyes off the ball and move too fast on occasion, but they are still getting it right aren’t they? Finding out why and how they get it right so often is the key to finding out why and how they will sometimes get it wrong.


    Duncan MacKillop. No surprise – No accident.
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    Bearing in mind that split seconds, inches, luck and chance can separate near misses from actual contact, I wouldn’t expect you to see any crashes Duncan, but you will witness the sort of behaviour that causes crashes i.e. road users not ‘getting it right’ – more often than not due to impatience; taking their eyes off the ball; moving too fast; poor positioning etc.- generally just not thinking hard enough about what they’re doing! Fortunately, it’s by the minority, so collisions would be rare.


    Hugh Jones, Cheshire
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    Hugh, I’ll have a dig through the archive to find all the data confirming that more compliant people have crashes than non-compliant ones if that makes you happy.

    I will also do as you say and go and sit at a busy junction and you’re right I will see most of what you describe, but what I won’t see are any crashes! I will see lots of dynamic non-events where the road users have successfully negotiated the junction without bumping into anybody else and that’s all that matters isn’t it? After about six months or so of sitting watching the junction for 24 hours a day I might be lucky enough to see a collision, but the chances are it will only be a mild fender bender. According to the statistics I would have to wait another 11 years before I saw an injury accident and 37 years before I saw a fatality so the reality is that for most of the time, most of the people handle the variation in the system rather well.

    If I did see lots of people getting surprised by the turn of events at the junction I would surmise that there was perhaps something wrong with the junction rather than with the people that were using it. If on the other hand they made their way without batting an eylid then I would suggest that there was not a lot wrong with that particular junction and would turn my attention elsewhere.


    Duncan MacKillop. No surprise – No accident.
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    Duncan:
    How can you possibly know that it is ‘the significant proportion of fully compliant drivers and riders..(who) are involved in accidents’? How do you know that a ‘fully compliant person still crashes’? Have you done a detailed analysis?

    Instead of guessing, I would suggest you spend an hour or so at a reasonably busy junction, or on a densely populated road and watch for yourself the variation in behaviour of motorised road users, ranging from the sensibly cautious to the downright ‘don’t care’, observing also compliance and non-compliance with rules of the road and notice who are most likely to be accident-prone. Much better than reading about theories because it’s real and it’s there to be seen.


    Hugh Jones, Cheshire
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    The Elephant in the room is still the significant proportion of fully compliant drivers and riders that are involved in accidents.

    Perhaps Rod could explain in simple terms how this is possible? If a person is fully compliant and yet still crashes how does that square with the community objectives and benefits that come from greater compliance?


    Duncan MacKillop. No surprise – No accident.
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    And that takes us, Rod, back to Brake’s survey. What Brake have found is that persuading/forcing citizens to comply isn’t working. Millions of Citizens, even those who support your view that others should be persuaded/forced into complying, are themselves breaking traffic (and other) laws.

    And my point is, how can we form a reasonable view on which option we should support if we are denied the relevant evidence? Starting an evidence-led approach in road safety would enlighten all involved, even you Rod!


    Dave Finney, Slough
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    Dave

    I would put it to you that you are avoiding a fourth option which most people within road safety are pursuing.

    That is to work to increase compliance to better gain the benefits that come from following an ordered use of the roads in line with community objectives and benefits.

    And that is why engagement and education are powerful drivers of behaviour change. But at the same time enforcement is important in endorsing those community values.


    Rod King, 20’s Plenty for Us
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    I would suggest that the fact that the number of collisions in relation to the amount of vehicular and pedestrian traffic on our roads is as low as it is, is because there IS general compliance by the majority with traffic laws not – despite the perceived notion by some – that there is mass non-compliance, which there isn’t, although it is still at a level to be a significant factor in incidents/accidents.

    We tend to notice law-breakers on the roads more than we notice those who are doing it right, so we perceive the problem to be worse than it is.


    Hugh Jones, Cheshire
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    I think, Rod, you are confusing “data”, “evidence” and “conclusions”. The data is clear, millions of citizens break traffic laws (including us) and from this we can conclude that either:

    1) the citizens must be forced to comply
    2) we must change the laws
    3) we must accept we live in a lawless society

    Given that option 3 is a non-starter, should we pursue option 1 or 2? The really important question is what effect would each option have (especially on deaths and serious injuries)? The option chosen by the authorities is option 1 but the problem is that we do not have reliable evidence of what effect this is having. If interventions (such as your 20mph, Rod) were to be deployed within scientific trials, we would know.

    Your aims, Rod, are not incompatible with mine. Let’s agree to promote an evidence-led approach.


    Dave Finney, Slough
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    It is stated that there is more non-compliance to traffic laws, yet the fatalities year on year have declined over the past ten years or more. So which laws are we looking at which apparently are causing so much alarm?

    So far, we have a road safety charity asking questions that are opinions of a cross section of motorists. How valid are they? Would not data of accidents and causes be a more valid test rather than motorists opinions? Or is this some fear mongering propaganda from an organisation bent on more restriction and legislation against motorists?


    Derek Reynolds, Salop.
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    Does full compliance = full safety?

    There is a strong belief that it does, hence the excitement about fully compliant driverless cars, but is that borne out in reality? The evidence we have shows that in fact the vast majority of people involved in accidents were being fully compliant with all the rules and regulations at the time. The usual way this significant anomaly is covered up is by saying that what people were doing at the time was inappropriate for the situation and that they should have done something different to what they did do. It seems then that in the majority of cases the risk is not in non-compliance, but in the lack of appropriate actions for the situation.


    Duncan MacKillop. No surprise – No accident.
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    Dave

    You say “Should the people be forced to change their behaviour, or should the laws be changed to only outlaw irresponsible actions?”

    But if you agree that breaking the law and speeding is an “irresponsible action” then how can you use such “irresponsible actions” as a basis for determining what is responsible and lawful.

    Yours is an “anarchists charter” where non-compliers set the levels at which they are required to comply.

    I am afraid that all your talk of “scientific trials” appears to be a smokescreen for your own antipathy towards the setting and enforcement of responsible laws set by the democratic process.

    If this is not the case then maybe you could address how compliance can be gained through engagement, education, engineering and enforcement rather than constantly trying to undermine respect for the rules which we do have.


    Rod King, 20’s Plenty for Us
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    What we have here in fact is partly the result of years of low priority policing. As my old sergeant once said look after the small things and the big things look after themselves. Years of policing neglect with regard to traffic legislation has helped to lead to this year on year increase in poor driving habits. Add to that the fact that if caught they can pay a fine off by credit card and therefore one has no financial deterrent at all.

    Further what we are seeing is a complete and utter apathy and complacency and disregard to safety matters. Three very dangerous states of mind that many drivers suffer from. Many drivers do not believe that they are driving dangerously or breaking the law even when the offences are pointed out to them and they can become quite verbally aggressive to the police officer who deigns to stop them. It’s a ploy to get away with it and let’s face it the police have enough on their plate without being subjected to verbal and argumentative abuse by drivers as well.


    bob Craven Lancs…Space is Safe Campaigner
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    I think you’ve missed the point Brake is making, Rod.

    Their spokesperson said: “law breaking on our roads is not just down to a minority but endemic.” Theirs and other evidence (eg from the UK mass prosecution system) does suggest that Brake are right. That means that millions of people (including us, our families, friends and colleagues) frequently break the law.

    The question is what should we conclude from this? Should the people be forced to change their behaviour, or should the laws be changed to only outlaw irresponsible actions? The problem is that it’s not possible to form a valid conclusion because the evidence is not clear on what outcome each intervention has achieved. That’s why we need to adopt an evidence-led approach using scientific trials.


    Dave Finney, Slough
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    Dave
    I am not sure if your concept of “evidence-led approach” includes actually reading the report on the survey in question. But if you had done so then you would have found that:

    • 9% said: I break traffic laws sometimes because I think the laws are wrong/unnecessary (6% female, 13% male)

    I don’t think that a 9% disapproval can be construed as the “law being wrong”.


    Rod King, 20’s Plenty for Us
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    What worries me is that half of the people surveyed don’t think they have broken any laws whilst driving. Considering that error and inattention are a constituent part of the driving process the idea that none of these problems has ever led this huge percentage of people into breaking the law is not a valid hypothesis. There are around 2,500 individual laws in the road traffic act and I very much doubt that anybody knows them off by heart. This suggests that there may be many people who are occasionally in contravention of one law or another and yet not be aware of the fact.


    Duncan MacKillop. No surprise – No accident.
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    Surely the 49% who admit breaking traffic laws are just the tip of the iceberg? I suspect the other 51% are either not being honest, or are not aware they are breaking the law. It is possible to conclude, as Brake have done, that we therefore need to prosecute even more than 2 million per year. This suggests that British people are intrinsically careless, reckless or dangerous.

    Alternatively, if almost all break the law (including judges, lawyers, police officers, politicians etc), then perhaps it’s the law that’s wrong, not the people? The problem of which is right is the lack of accurate evidence of the effect of the laws and their enforcement.

    Ultimately wouldn’t it be better to have an evidence-led approach? If we employed scientific trials we could demonstrate what effect interventions had, regain public trust AND improve road safety.


    Dave Finney, Slough
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