I had been trying to get away from these road safety rants of mine, I really had.
But this was too interesting to pass up: An interesting, amusing (as in "funny hmmm....") and self-aggrandising article from the Courier Mail: Fast-aid cuts road toll to lowest since 1952 (January 04).
What does? I thought it was speed cameras! Also: Where, dear deity, did that hyphen come from? "Fast-aid" isn't mentioned elsewhere in the article so it's not a brand or other name, and clearly it's not a compound adjective - "cuts" is a verb. It's bloody stupid, is what it is.
The point of that article, as expressed concisely and almost well in the lead, is:
BETTER, faster ambulance crews helped Queensland achieve its lowest road toll last year since accurate records began in 1952.
Again: I thought it was speed cameras!
In the midst of a health system SNAFU (it's probably so long-term it doesn't deserve to be called a crisis anymore) where staff aren't paid and emergency beds have waiting lists, hearing that any aspect of the ambulance system has been improved is fantastic.
What interest me here, however, is that it is a beautiful, nay, elegant illustration of the fact that reality is really complicated and, therefore, epidemiology is quite hard.
There are two factors affecting the road toll: How many people are injured badly enough to be fatal and; how many are given adequate treatment. The first factor can be broken down into: How many people are involved in potentially fatal accidents and; how well they are protected by the car and fate.
The road toll is therefore affected by road and traffic conditions, the judgement of drivers, the road-holding and handling of their cars, the crash protection and passive and active safety features of those cars, and the response times and skill of all arms of the emergency response services.
This is why I keep describing the road-safety debate as puerile, shallow and all but a waste of time.
The point of this article is that: The road toll is lower because more people are being prevented from dying.
Yes, there are numerous other factors, short- and long-term. But I would really, really love to see the figures reported as: total accidents/potentially fatal accidents/fatal accidents. Give us some perspective.
There is also this:
In 2010, there were 5.5 road deaths per 100,000 Queenslanders, which met a target to virtually halve the rate from a decade ago.
Note halve. There are more many more people using the same road network, meaning higher traffic densities, meaning greater risk, and yet per capita roughly half as many people are dying. If you ever look at the annual traffic toll and observe the sameness of the figures from year to year, ponder what that means in terms of a growing population. It means that it has never been safer to be driving. Well, not since cars were limited to walking pace and they attracted gawkers wherever they went.
Well, they're using a historical low for comparison purposes, which will make any statistician beat their head against their desk, but you see the point.
Whether it's due to stick approaches like cameras, or better driver training (although I have my doubts) or the simple fact that cars are improving in capabilities and tank-like levels of occupant protection out of sight (and bikes get the occasional nice feature like ABS or traction control) while the roads and speed limits are staying the same, we have seen real death tolls plummet.
I'm not sure which is worse: The publicly portrayed understanding of causality or the public portrayed understanding of mathematics.
Showing posts with label vehicles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vehicles. Show all posts
Tuesday, 4 January 2011
Sunday, 2 January 2011
Do we make them justify anything?
In case you haven't worked this out already: I really, really don't think much of the road safety discussion currently being played out in the state and national media.
It's important but it's crude, simplistic, over-wrought and driven far too much by government and police sound bites, and I don't even mean the almost exclusive focus on deaths to the exclusion of permanent trauma causing lifelong disabilities at a tremendous emotional, physical and financial cost to individuals and their families.
And most of the discussion orbits the topic of speed cameras.
In order to justify the use of speed cameras as a road safety initiative, not merely a fundraising initiative, there needs to be a direct and confirmed causal link between the usage of cameras and an overall reduction in the rate and severity of accidents. Not just a correlation - a causal link. There are too many possible factors impacting driving behaviour for us to jump to a simplistic conclusion if there's a dip in the death rate.
Then, if we've done that, we need to be sure that there are more effective, more cost-effective ways of addressing the road toll. Maybe speed cameras work, but not as well as some of the alternatives.
Maybe the road and traffic authorities know what they're doing. But it's really hard to be sure of that, because they're not talking as if they do.
Let's start with More speed cameras deployed to cut road deaths from the ABC (December 15).
It tells us: Police are trying to cut road deaths; they are putting camera vans in 40 and 50 kilometre per hour zones; there are more camera vans in service (12, now); in two years 57 people have died in 40 and 50 zones; the road toll is lower than it was last year, and; putting camera vans in low-speed areas is part of a plan to cut the road toll.
There are logical holes in that. There is no justification that camera vans help to lower the road toll, they are concentrating resources on areas with a very low percentage of the toll (57 in two years, when the two-year total toll is in the region of 600) and where death is less likely due to the low speeds anyway.
Are non-suburban areas less important? Or is it harder to put resources there, so it's too much of an effort?
There is not even any indication of how many deaths are related to speed anyway, which would give the public some hope of working out for themselves if the tax money they're paying to be used in crude behaviour modification on them has any hope of being spent in a way remotely resembling good value.
From the Brisbane Times (December 18), we have Sixteen reasons for covert speed cameras.
Ooh! Justification!
Hahahahaha, psych! No, it's just another article saying "We have road deaths, let's do something simple and easy."
Here's the interesting part, right up front: 16 speed-related deaths in two years in 40 and 50km/h zones. That's 16 out of 57 in low-speed zones, or 28 per cent, or less than one third, and that's out of a tiny proportion of the total. Tell me: What are the police doing about the 72 per cent of deaths that weren't speed-related? Anything?
If we take a two-year total of about 600, that is, as pointed out in the comments to this article, about 2.7 per cent of deaths getting the added attention of two covert camera vans. May I suggest that's a little disproportionate?
There is, however, a balancing although inadequately explored opinion delivered by National Motorists Association of Australia, saying that covert cameras are all about revenue raising and can never be as effective as police on the streets.
It would be nice to have some sort of discussion about why that is.
Finally, appearing in the RSS feeds as "Speed cams are lifesavers" (what, muscular men in red speedos?), the Courier Mail gave us Covert speed cameras linked to Queensland plummeting road toll.
Okaaaay. Linked by whom? Statisticians? Accident researchers?
Well, I've read the entire article twice and I'm still not sure. It's not really stated.
The salient points are: A poll showed 25 per cent of motorists have changed their behaviour as a result of covert speed cameras; quite a lot of money has been charged in fines this year, and; there are concerns of a bounce in the accident rate as people adjust their expectations and return to previous behaviours.
The whole "cameras = less deaths" thing is only ever hinted at.
It is assumed that "changed their behaviour" means "safer." They might, instead, be driving slower but angrier and more aggressively. They may be safer but it could be because people are more alert on the roads trying to spot covert police and are therefore more aware of road and traffic conditions, rather than because they're driving slower.
If that's so, then good. But there might be better, more generally useful ways of getting the same result.
It's even assumed the current low death toll has any explanation beyond annual fluctuations. I've forgotten too much about statistics to know what the thresholds are and gee, it'd be nice to hear someone explaining it.
As an exercise, I went to PubMed, typed in "speed cameras" (with quotes, to get the actual phrase) and had a quick read through the abstracts of relevant articles.
There's the usual problem of identifying articles that have anything to do with the topic, and then when you find them there are a nice smattering of methodological problems. I even found one article finding a difference in effectiveness between different types of roads, and then another article using one category of road as a control and the other as an intervention group.
There was also, astonishingly, a Cochrane review, conducted by researchers right here in Brisbane.
Going to the source, we find that the Cochrane Library contains 12 articles relating to prevention of traffic crashes.
(NB: The conclusion of Motorcycle rider training for the prevention of road traffic crashes is "We have no idea, no study has been of a high enough quality to justify drawing any worthwhile conclusion.")
The camera review is here.
A review of 35 relevant studies concluded that cameras are associated with lower speeds and lower rates of accidents, but the degree of effectiveness can't be confirmed because the studies are of varying and generally moderate quality.
There, see? We have a result: Research has concluded that speed cameras help lower the road toll. It took me five minutes to find that.
Now, before I have any faith that my tax dollars are being well spent, I want to see:
I know, "tell him he's dreaming'."
We can hope.
It's important but it's crude, simplistic, over-wrought and driven far too much by government and police sound bites, and I don't even mean the almost exclusive focus on deaths to the exclusion of permanent trauma causing lifelong disabilities at a tremendous emotional, physical and financial cost to individuals and their families.
And most of the discussion orbits the topic of speed cameras.
In order to justify the use of speed cameras as a road safety initiative, not merely a fundraising initiative, there needs to be a direct and confirmed causal link between the usage of cameras and an overall reduction in the rate and severity of accidents. Not just a correlation - a causal link. There are too many possible factors impacting driving behaviour for us to jump to a simplistic conclusion if there's a dip in the death rate.
Then, if we've done that, we need to be sure that there are more effective, more cost-effective ways of addressing the road toll. Maybe speed cameras work, but not as well as some of the alternatives.
Maybe the road and traffic authorities know what they're doing. But it's really hard to be sure of that, because they're not talking as if they do.
Let's start with More speed cameras deployed to cut road deaths from the ABC (December 15).
It tells us: Police are trying to cut road deaths; they are putting camera vans in 40 and 50 kilometre per hour zones; there are more camera vans in service (12, now); in two years 57 people have died in 40 and 50 zones; the road toll is lower than it was last year, and; putting camera vans in low-speed areas is part of a plan to cut the road toll.
There are logical holes in that. There is no justification that camera vans help to lower the road toll, they are concentrating resources on areas with a very low percentage of the toll (57 in two years, when the two-year total toll is in the region of 600) and where death is less likely due to the low speeds anyway.
Are non-suburban areas less important? Or is it harder to put resources there, so it's too much of an effort?
There is not even any indication of how many deaths are related to speed anyway, which would give the public some hope of working out for themselves if the tax money they're paying to be used in crude behaviour modification on them has any hope of being spent in a way remotely resembling good value.
From the Brisbane Times (December 18), we have Sixteen reasons for covert speed cameras.
Ooh! Justification!
Hahahahaha, psych! No, it's just another article saying "We have road deaths, let's do something simple and easy."
Here's the interesting part, right up front: 16 speed-related deaths in two years in 40 and 50km/h zones. That's 16 out of 57 in low-speed zones, or 28 per cent, or less than one third, and that's out of a tiny proportion of the total. Tell me: What are the police doing about the 72 per cent of deaths that weren't speed-related? Anything?
If we take a two-year total of about 600, that is, as pointed out in the comments to this article, about 2.7 per cent of deaths getting the added attention of two covert camera vans. May I suggest that's a little disproportionate?
There is, however, a balancing although inadequately explored opinion delivered by National Motorists Association of Australia, saying that covert cameras are all about revenue raising and can never be as effective as police on the streets.
It would be nice to have some sort of discussion about why that is.
Finally, appearing in the RSS feeds as "Speed cams are lifesavers" (what, muscular men in red speedos?), the Courier Mail gave us Covert speed cameras linked to Queensland plummeting road toll.
Okaaaay. Linked by whom? Statisticians? Accident researchers?
Well, I've read the entire article twice and I'm still not sure. It's not really stated.
The salient points are: A poll showed 25 per cent of motorists have changed their behaviour as a result of covert speed cameras; quite a lot of money has been charged in fines this year, and; there are concerns of a bounce in the accident rate as people adjust their expectations and return to previous behaviours.
The whole "cameras = less deaths" thing is only ever hinted at.
It is assumed that "changed their behaviour" means "safer." They might, instead, be driving slower but angrier and more aggressively. They may be safer but it could be because people are more alert on the roads trying to spot covert police and are therefore more aware of road and traffic conditions, rather than because they're driving slower.
If that's so, then good. But there might be better, more generally useful ways of getting the same result.
It's even assumed the current low death toll has any explanation beyond annual fluctuations. I've forgotten too much about statistics to know what the thresholds are and gee, it'd be nice to hear someone explaining it.
As an exercise, I went to PubMed, typed in "speed cameras" (with quotes, to get the actual phrase) and had a quick read through the abstracts of relevant articles.
There's the usual problem of identifying articles that have anything to do with the topic, and then when you find them there are a nice smattering of methodological problems. I even found one article finding a difference in effectiveness between different types of roads, and then another article using one category of road as a control and the other as an intervention group.
There was also, astonishingly, a Cochrane review, conducted by researchers right here in Brisbane.
Going to the source, we find that the Cochrane Library contains 12 articles relating to prevention of traffic crashes.
(NB: The conclusion of Motorcycle rider training for the prevention of road traffic crashes is "We have no idea, no study has been of a high enough quality to justify drawing any worthwhile conclusion.")
The camera review is here.
A review of 35 relevant studies concluded that cameras are associated with lower speeds and lower rates of accidents, but the degree of effectiveness can't be confirmed because the studies are of varying and generally moderate quality.
There, see? We have a result: Research has concluded that speed cameras help lower the road toll. It took me five minutes to find that.
Now, before I have any faith that my tax dollars are being well spent, I want to see:
- Discussion on the best form of cameras - point-to-point, visible fixed, visible temporary, covert temporary, and visible or covert vehicles in the traffic flow.
- Discussion on what to do about all the accidents that aren't related to speed.
- Some sort of visible commitment to research-based policy.
- Research into why cameras have that effect, and how to maximise it.
I know, "tell him he's dreaming'."
We can hope.
Wednesday, 24 November 2010
Treating drivers as simpletons is a major cause of road accidents
All of a sudden, five stories from the Queensland Times appeared in my RSS reader.
They are, in the order in which they appeared: Speed cameras do help save lives, Drivers disregard the Fatal Four, Forget the phone, you're driving, Enough is enough - Drive 2 Stay Alive and Count the cost of careless driving.
Spot the theme?
It appears that Drive 2 Stay Alive (I will withhold my comments on cutesy SMS-like usage of homonymic numbers) is a program adopted by the QT to encourage road safety, and all five of the articles list the other four in a "Related links" box right at the top.
Which is all very admirable - the intent, I mean, not the internet formatting. I really can't fault the QT for public interest journalism in this matter.
In fact, it's fantastic that the last-named of these articles points out the costs of road accidents aren't just in fatalities, and include medical treatment, disability care, clean-up bills and legal costs as well as costs to the economy in loss of labour (I've always wondered how they calculate that...)
But I would like to make a few points, because my cynicism doth runneth over.
Over the next four weeks, we will provide informative features to help you stay alive on our roads, and by taking the online pledge, you are saying enough people have died needlessly on our roads.
Umm... I will withhold my opinion of online pledges, as well, but admirable, admirable.
Let me get into the meat of criticism, now, and it's exemplified for me by this statement:
Colin Goodsell from the RACQ said distraction while behind the wheel was one of the top causes of accidents on Queensland roads aside from the fatal four – speeding, drink driving, seatbelts and fatigue.
Okay, first of all, not wearing a seatbelt is not generally a cause of accidents. It can be - you could lose control because you moved relative to the seat in a corner or while braking - but it's generally a cause of getting hurt in an accident, not a cause of the accident happening. Language like this may be approved by marketing and may present a united front, but I'm not sure it helps.
Also, if the "fatal four" is speeding, drink driving, seatbelts and fatigue, is it a "fatal three" for motorcyclists or do they have a different set?
And then there is the argument that distraction is the biggest cause because if you were truly paying attention then, either you wouldn't be speeding or it wouldn't be as a big a problem, you wouldn't be drink driving and you would be managing your fatigue.
All of these road safety campaigns, possibly in an attempt to get the message across, over-simplify matters so badly that you're left with the impression of a collection of tick-a-box, exclusive and non-related options. I have been complaining for years that some of the most dangerous drivers I meet on the roads are the ones who aren't speeding, and I've been much more comfortable in cars where the driver was speeding but competent than in some cars where the driver just wasn't paying attention to much except the speedometer, the road signs and the conversation.
I am convinced that ignoring the interaction between all cognitive factors and driving decisions is just going to lead to trouble.
It's also a major factor in my complaint against the anti-speeding arguments and the anti-speeding initiatives and the crowing of authorities when a rise in speed cameras is correlated (say it with me: "Correlation does not equal causation") with a reduction in road fatalities.
If they don't, in public, consider the possibility that the reduction is not because people have decided to not speed but because they are keeping a much sharper eye out for cameras and camera vans and are therefore more likely to spot and respond to other dangerous situations, then I just aren't going to take them seriously.
In fact, the "Speed cameras do save lives" article is a classic of waffling, unsubstantiated claims that would get laughed out of any research proposal. "Police have linked...", "increase in speeding detection... has been credited..." Oh, puh-lease.
And then there's the almost throwaway line "... more people driving to the speed limit and road conditions."
Just try and convince me that the two are necessarily (to use the word in its nice and exact meaning) related. Go ahead, just try. Most articles run like that: "Speeding.... speed limit... too fast... dangerous.... road conditions." Slipped in almost as an afterthought, the one most important factor - road conditions. Driving to the speed limit at all times is just a recipe for disaster the next time there's a decent storm.
What I would like to see, in all of this pleading, public displays of hurt bewilderment and patriarchal trumpeting from the various authorities, is this exhortation: Take responsibility for your own driving, and look out for everyone else.
That's it. Drop all this talk of specifics, mention it when it's relevant to individual situations, but just keep reminding people that, actually, they have a "licence" to drive, not a "right", and they are in command of several tonnes of metal travelling at speeds never before attained by human beings and in excess of what our physiology and neurology evolved to cope with.
Start treating drivers like complicated, thinking, sentient human beings and, just perhaps, they'll start behaving like it.
They are, in the order in which they appeared: Speed cameras do help save lives, Drivers disregard the Fatal Four, Forget the phone, you're driving, Enough is enough - Drive 2 Stay Alive and Count the cost of careless driving.
Spot the theme?
It appears that Drive 2 Stay Alive (I will withhold my comments on cutesy SMS-like usage of homonymic numbers) is a program adopted by the QT to encourage road safety, and all five of the articles list the other four in a "Related links" box right at the top.
Which is all very admirable - the intent, I mean, not the internet formatting. I really can't fault the QT for public interest journalism in this matter.
In fact, it's fantastic that the last-named of these articles points out the costs of road accidents aren't just in fatalities, and include medical treatment, disability care, clean-up bills and legal costs as well as costs to the economy in loss of labour (I've always wondered how they calculate that...)
But I would like to make a few points, because my cynicism doth runneth over.
Over the next four weeks, we will provide informative features to help you stay alive on our roads, and by taking the online pledge, you are saying enough people have died needlessly on our roads.
Umm... I will withhold my opinion of online pledges, as well, but admirable, admirable.
Let me get into the meat of criticism, now, and it's exemplified for me by this statement:
Colin Goodsell from the RACQ said distraction while behind the wheel was one of the top causes of accidents on Queensland roads aside from the fatal four – speeding, drink driving, seatbelts and fatigue.
Okay, first of all, not wearing a seatbelt is not generally a cause of accidents. It can be - you could lose control because you moved relative to the seat in a corner or while braking - but it's generally a cause of getting hurt in an accident, not a cause of the accident happening. Language like this may be approved by marketing and may present a united front, but I'm not sure it helps.
Also, if the "fatal four" is speeding, drink driving, seatbelts and fatigue, is it a "fatal three" for motorcyclists or do they have a different set?
And then there is the argument that distraction is the biggest cause because if you were truly paying attention then, either you wouldn't be speeding or it wouldn't be as a big a problem, you wouldn't be drink driving and you would be managing your fatigue.
All of these road safety campaigns, possibly in an attempt to get the message across, over-simplify matters so badly that you're left with the impression of a collection of tick-a-box, exclusive and non-related options. I have been complaining for years that some of the most dangerous drivers I meet on the roads are the ones who aren't speeding, and I've been much more comfortable in cars where the driver was speeding but competent than in some cars where the driver just wasn't paying attention to much except the speedometer, the road signs and the conversation.
I am convinced that ignoring the interaction between all cognitive factors and driving decisions is just going to lead to trouble.
It's also a major factor in my complaint against the anti-speeding arguments and the anti-speeding initiatives and the crowing of authorities when a rise in speed cameras is correlated (say it with me: "Correlation does not equal causation") with a reduction in road fatalities.
If they don't, in public, consider the possibility that the reduction is not because people have decided to not speed but because they are keeping a much sharper eye out for cameras and camera vans and are therefore more likely to spot and respond to other dangerous situations, then I just aren't going to take them seriously.
In fact, the "Speed cameras do save lives" article is a classic of waffling, unsubstantiated claims that would get laughed out of any research proposal. "Police have linked...", "increase in speeding detection... has been credited..." Oh, puh-lease.
And then there's the almost throwaway line "... more people driving to the speed limit and road conditions."
Just try and convince me that the two are necessarily (to use the word in its nice and exact meaning) related. Go ahead, just try. Most articles run like that: "Speeding.... speed limit... too fast... dangerous.... road conditions." Slipped in almost as an afterthought, the one most important factor - road conditions. Driving to the speed limit at all times is just a recipe for disaster the next time there's a decent storm.
What I would like to see, in all of this pleading, public displays of hurt bewilderment and patriarchal trumpeting from the various authorities, is this exhortation: Take responsibility for your own driving, and look out for everyone else.
That's it. Drop all this talk of specifics, mention it when it's relevant to individual situations, but just keep reminding people that, actually, they have a "licence" to drive, not a "right", and they are in command of several tonnes of metal travelling at speeds never before attained by human beings and in excess of what our physiology and neurology evolved to cope with.
Start treating drivers like complicated, thinking, sentient human beings and, just perhaps, they'll start behaving like it.
Thursday, 23 September 2010
Speed camera defences are facile and unhelpful
Recently, while riding or driving, I have done the following obviously dangerous things
Notice anything about all of those? Notice any uniting factors?
There were two of them:
The most obvious reason is, of course, that speeding is easy to police and it's a low-hanging fruit: Set up fixed cameras with radar/laser attached, set up mobile cameras and leave them, put automatic equipment in patrol cars.
It's much harder to police fatigue, much harder to police inattention (although very obvious when the inattention leads to something dangerous actually occurring), much harder to police drug and alcohol usage (just look at the effort involved in running a random breath test) and much harder to police the road rules in general, although we do have red light cameras.
I have four basic issues with the campaign against speeding:
And now here we have another contribution, an opinion piece submitted to the Courier Mail from the chief executive officer of RiverCity Motorway, the organisation running the clusterfuck that is the Clem 7 tollway tunnel:
Speed cameras help keep Clem 7 on the road to safety.
When you read this article, you at first don't notice that it's anything but a news story. Then it dawns on you that it's editorialising a bit, then it gets personal, then you look down the end to notice the byline.
Online, this needed to have been flagged as a column from the very start.
The big problem with this article is illustrated right here:
No logical pathway, in fact, from "For those people who don't believe speed cameras are an important safety measure" to "speed cameras inside the Clem7 are in place to safeguard the people who use the tunnel."
No mention of whether the dramatic fall in speeding in the Sydney Harbour Tunnel was in any way, shape or form associated with a drop in accident rate.
Speeding is wasteful in fuel, reduces safety margins, is potentially rude and, in traffic, hazardous if you puts you at a different speed to everyone else. The faster you hit something the more damage you do, but this bald claim? I'd like to see anyone get this through an undergraduate essay in any science or otherwise research discipline.
So I have to ask: Have people become so used to seeing the proof that they assume it, and skip over the bit in the middle? Or is this just a debate that runs on unthinking consensus, ideological certainty?
If it's run on proof, then more of that needs to come out in the public debate.
At the moment, there are two factors limiting my speed: What I think is safe, and: the likelihood of getting fined and losing licence points.
And a slavish adherence to the big black numbers in the red circle doesn't seem to have anything to do with what I think is safe. Far more important to me is the behaviour of other road users, the quality of the road, how awake and focused I am, the light conditions, the atmospheric conditions, the vehicle I'm on or in, and the likelihood of somebody or something running across the road in front of me.
I have become used to people I overtook back there overtaking me here because my reading of the conditions made me slow down. I'm used to people who do 75 in the 80 zone then doing 75 in the 70 zone. I've become used to people doing 70 in the 80 zone who do 60 in the roadworks 40 zone, crowding me or trying to get past while I'm riding 2 metres from people wielding shovels.
Speeding? That's the least of the things I worry about.
At the end of this abysmal, preaching article there is this:
It's very difficult to have any faith in the ability of any authority to manage any roads when this is the quality of their debate.
- Strayed onto a white line in the pouring rain, and had the bike slip sideways in the middle of a corner.
- Almost pulled out in front of a car because it was 2am and I had a lapse of concentration.
- Overtaking vehicle leaving its wheels in my lane, next to me, while looking at something else.
- Vehicles cutting in front while driving slower than me, making me brake sharply.
- Vehicles trying to merge into me.
- Vehicles starting to merge in front of me while I was overtaking.
- Vehicles creeping into road in front of me from a side street, leaving me unsure what its intentions were.
Notice anything about all of those? Notice any uniting factors?
There were two of them:
- They all involved lapses of judgement, and (with one arguable exception) concentration, and;
- None of them involved exceeding the speed limit
The most obvious reason is, of course, that speeding is easy to police and it's a low-hanging fruit: Set up fixed cameras with radar/laser attached, set up mobile cameras and leave them, put automatic equipment in patrol cars.
It's much harder to police fatigue, much harder to police inattention (although very obvious when the inattention leads to something dangerous actually occurring), much harder to police drug and alcohol usage (just look at the effort involved in running a random breath test) and much harder to police the road rules in general, although we do have red light cameras.
I have four basic issues with the campaign against speeding:
- It focuses on a factor which has been identified, at various times, in various jurisdictions, as being quite a minor contributor to accidents fatal or otherwise;
- It is conducted in a way which is offensive to the intelligence of all road users;
- It obscures the far more important discussion of driving technique and skill;
- I do not remember any sensible discussion justifying this focus, merely scattered claims in advertising.
And now here we have another contribution, an opinion piece submitted to the Courier Mail from the chief executive officer of RiverCity Motorway, the organisation running the clusterfuck that is the Clem 7 tollway tunnel:
Speed cameras help keep Clem 7 on the road to safety.
When you read this article, you at first don't notice that it's anything but a news story. Then it dawns on you that it's editorialising a bit, then it gets personal, then you look down the end to notice the byline.
Online, this needed to have been flagged as a column from the very start.
The big problem with this article is illustrated right here:
For those people who don't believe speed cameras are an important road safety measure it is worth looking at the Sydney Harbour Tunnel, which opened in 1992 without speed cameras. In 1997, it became the first road in NSW to have fixed speed cameras installed.I would like you to notice that at no point in those four paragraphs was there any mention of any accident, crash, injury, fatality, minor bingle, brief nudge, complaint, collision or scrape.
This action was taken when it was found that 30 per cent of drivers using the tunnel exceeded the speed limit by 20km/h or more. The highest recorded speed in the Sydney Harbour Tunnel was 199km/h.
After the cameras were installed, the percentage of speeding motorists fell dramatically.
Closer to home, the speed cameras inside the Clem7 are in place to safeguard the people who use the tunnel. Speed cameras are the only practical method for speed enforcement in tunnels.
No logical pathway, in fact, from "For those people who don't believe speed cameras are an important safety measure" to "speed cameras inside the Clem7 are in place to safeguard the people who use the tunnel."
No mention of whether the dramatic fall in speeding in the Sydney Harbour Tunnel was in any way, shape or form associated with a drop in accident rate.
Speeding is wasteful in fuel, reduces safety margins, is potentially rude and, in traffic, hazardous if you puts you at a different speed to everyone else. The faster you hit something the more damage you do, but this bald claim? I'd like to see anyone get this through an undergraduate essay in any science or otherwise research discipline.
So I have to ask: Have people become so used to seeing the proof that they assume it, and skip over the bit in the middle? Or is this just a debate that runs on unthinking consensus, ideological certainty?
If it's run on proof, then more of that needs to come out in the public debate.
At the moment, there are two factors limiting my speed: What I think is safe, and: the likelihood of getting fined and losing licence points.
And a slavish adherence to the big black numbers in the red circle doesn't seem to have anything to do with what I think is safe. Far more important to me is the behaviour of other road users, the quality of the road, how awake and focused I am, the light conditions, the atmospheric conditions, the vehicle I'm on or in, and the likelihood of somebody or something running across the road in front of me.
I have become used to people I overtook back there overtaking me here because my reading of the conditions made me slow down. I'm used to people who do 75 in the 80 zone then doing 75 in the 70 zone. I've become used to people doing 70 in the 80 zone who do 60 in the roadworks 40 zone, crowding me or trying to get past while I'm riding 2 metres from people wielding shovels.
Speeding? That's the least of the things I worry about.
At the end of this abysmal, preaching article there is this:
It is very pleasing that the vast majority of motorists are driving safely through the tunnel.And the only evidence presented is that only .5% of motorists have collected a speeding fine.
It's very difficult to have any faith in the ability of any authority to manage any roads when this is the quality of their debate.
Wednesday, 17 February 2010
How to ruin a perfectly good tool by taking it up-market
A brief diversion, if I may (I'm going to anyway, so: deal), to discuss a subject near to my cynical heart:
The prettification of tools is not inherently bad - just witness a damask steel blade, or a swept-hilt rapier. Hell, even a cavalry sabre from recent centuries is gorgeous, and no less deadly for all the decoration.
And then there are Japanese knives, possibly the greatest thing that country has ever contributed to world culture (I'm biased, I know).
However, when form gets in the way of function, we have serious problems.
Take, for example, one of the most WTF, penis-replacement, pointless aspects of modern Australian culture - the high-performance ute.
Now, the utility was famously invented by an Australian Ford dealer when a farmer's wife asked for "A car that my husband can use to take me to church on Sunday, and his produce to market on Monday."
The result, a truck tray grafted onto a sedan cabin, has now been immortalised not only in Australia, but in America too - when the dealer took his prototype to Detroit to show old Henry himself, Henry was so impressed that the "pick-up truck" (and right there, is a major difference in approach between Australia, where we do them properly, and America, where they are owned by rednecks who shouldn't be allowed to breed) has become so popular that Ford's F-series is one of the biggest-selling vehicles of all time.
Back home, the ute has been a strong seller for Ford and rival Holden ever since, with those brands the only two to hold to the original half-sedan, half-truck concept - everyone else, starting with a clean sheet of paper, has built small trucks with comfy cabins.
The utility part, however, has never been compromised - they are for tradesmen who need to cart around raw materials and tools, they are for owners of large dogs, ceaseless gardeners and people doing massive home renovations.
And they need to stay that way.
The only way, and I stress this the only way, for a ute to look like a display piece is if it's a classic, and there are some truly gorgeous old Kingswood utes, polished to within an inch of frictionless, floating around.
Anything else is a sad, pathetic attempt to look tough and working-man, while actually just being insecure and inadequate.
Take the XR6. There are several traitors to the cause being sold by the factories, but the XR6 happens to be the one I have to drive occasionally for work.
I've bitched about it here, before. About the crap gearbox and the dangerously inadequate visibility.
But now I need to add: It's useless as a ute.
For a start: It gets the leaf-spring suspension from the one-tonne ute which, apart from being a ludicrous choice for a fast vehicle, should suggest that it can take a tonne of load, right?
Just you try it, then. We grabbed the opportunity to collect a large bail of straw, while driving the ute because it overlapped with work hours, so I had to, and although the bail sat within the try, well...
Problem one was that the rear suspension squatted until the ground clearance, which was already pretty poor, started looking alarming. I promptly scrapped it merging back onto the highway from the produce store, then scraped what sounded like the muffler as I left (this is the funny part) a Queensland Transport office.
Then we needed to take it out, and here I can confidently say that it doesn't weigh a tonne, because four of us managed to slide it off the tray, then two of us managed to lift the end still on the ute and flip it over, and we were neither of us exactly burly. In fact, it only felt slightly heavier than a 150kg water tank we helped a builder neighbour of ours move, last weekend.
So: It can't take decent loads without damaging the bodywork on bumps.
Then we have the tailgate. Design fail: The latch to open it is on the inside. We had to close it hard against the hay and then, when time came to open it...
I just barely managed to wriggle my hand down far enough to find the latch, and then we needed to lean against the tailgate to take the pressure off enough for me to be able to pull it all the way across.
Useful doors can be opened from the outside. But no, that would have spoiled the styling.
Shall I mention the tray cover, again?
Yes, I think I will. It's held on with a zip-lock arrangement, all the way around. Leave one tiny bit up, which is easy to do, and tension or wind pressure can peel it off and leave it flapping around behind you. Then, if you're really lucky, it'll lift off entirely before you have a chance to pull over or, if it's very late at night and you're on alone on a motorway, even notice that it's happening.
And finally, we have the tray itself. It's plastic.
It's lined with plastic on the sides, and the base is plastic. It's clearly very tough plastic - I've had hoists and wheelchairs in and out, and it hasn't been scratched yet - but it's still plastic.
It flexes when you push against it. It has seams around the edges which are loose fitting and which seem to exist for the sole purpose of collecting rubbish and being difficult to clean.
In other words, it's less well designed, and less ultimately tough, than decent metal.
The twits.
I don't like this car for many reasons, and I just keep collecting more.
In an attempt to create a performance utility, they have created a committee-designed camel which sinks in loose sand and gets blinded by a decent wind.
Not one of their finest moments, really.
Wednesday, 16 September 2009
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result" - road safety edition.
Excuse me while I rant about blatant idiocy in positions of power.
I am a motorcyclist. Anyone who has ever read this blog may have picked up on this.
This means that I have fairly strong opinions about other road users - if you put yourself in a position this vulnerable, with no safety cage around you and a much lower visual area from any angle, you either die or develop a deep and abiding distrust of everyone else. Why, only yesterday I had three people try to kill me on the ride into Uni - one truck pulled out into my lane too close in front of me, one car dived across into my lane and barely gave me time to brake before they collected my front wheel with their bumper, and one driver pulled away from its STOP sign in front of me while peering the other way looking for traffic in that direction.
Please note that I was not on something tiny like a postie bike - I was on a BMW K100RS which is, in anyone's language, on the hefty side.
So whenever I hear a report of a motorcycle accident in the media, I, being an informed reader, not to mention a Masters of Journalism student, read between the lines for the questions that the journalist didn't ask, and if the aricle says that the bike "struck a car which was pulling out of the shopping centre car park", you can bet that I will assume that the car was at fault and the rider, who admittedly may perhaps not have been paying maximum attention, was left without time to brake or dodge and his family can be consoled, at his funeral, by the knowledge that he was not at fault.
I am not, however, an apologist: I know full well that a great many motorcyclists take truly frightening risks regularly, and that the margins for crashing if you do are slim, and for dying if you crash, not much better.
But then we get this report of ignorant, knee-jerking, panicked policy making from the people presently in power:
Motorcyclists face zero alcohol limit (Courier Mail)
Now, I am all in favour of a zero alcohol limit for pilots, people who drive public transport, and surgeons. But just motorcyclists? Wherefor is your justification?
What we know is that the fatality rate for motorcyclists is ludicrously out of sync with their presence on the roads - the article quotes a fatality rate of 22% of the total, as against powered two-wheeled vehicles making up just 4.5% of all road users.
Ah, but why? Alcohol and speed are very easy things to both police and to blame, but what about being an idiot? What about people not paying attention and driving into another vehicle because they were distracted or not looking, disobeyed road rules, nodded off, had a vehicle failure, had an asthma attack, or misjudged the road and skidded, or hit a patch of oil?
And what about accident investigators who see a squid from a motorcycle tire (it's very easy to lock up the rear in an emergency braking manoeuvre) and tick the box that says "Excessive speed - at fault"?
The most recent comprehensive data for Queensland is from 2004 - this is how long it takes to collect, process, analyse and report on all the data. It can be downloaded as a highly inconvenient PDF from the Queensland Transport statistics page.
Let's just look at fatalities, because the official language and reporting never seems to mention the much greater number of accidents which merely cause property damage, pain and suffering, life-long cognitive or physical disabilities, unemployment and a massive drain on the health and disability care systems.
Out of 289 fatal crashes, 97(34% - one third, for argument's sake) involved alcohol or other drugs, and 52(18%) - less than a fifth - involved speed - please note that speed is not "exceeding the posted speed limit", it is "inappropriate speed for the conditions". Doing 80 in a 100 zone at night during a tropical thunderstorm may still be too fast, and registered as such if the reason you crashed was that your vehicle could not physically brake soon enough to avoid hitting the stalled car in front.
Alcohol/drugs was the most prominent contributing factor, but Inattention at 80(28%) and Disobeyed Traffic Rules with 79(27%) both outranked speed.
What was I saying about easy targets?
Lets look at the Blood Alcohol Concentration (BAC) figures, shall we? And, for simplicity sake, I will only talk about percentages now.
Drivers - 54% of total. Motorcyclists - 13% of total. Hmmmm.
Now, 13% is still a higher proportion of fatalities than of registrations, and at greater than 50% it's much higher than the average, but it's sitll far less than 22% of all fatalities.
I can't seem to find a similar comparison for speed, however. Odd.
So let's look at the 46 fatal motorcycle crashes (with 48 fatalities): 59%(n=27) were single-vehicle crashes, and the motorcyclist was judged to be at fault in 35 out of 46 fatal crashes, which is 76% and, I suggest, far too low a number to be statistically solid.
The next figure is where life gets interesting: Most crashes occurred during daylight hours (67%), from Monday to Friday (52%). Now, what this says to me is: commuting - busy traffic, slow-moving, millions of near-misses every day and unlikely to be alcohol at all, unless there was an office party or sunset is really, really late. And the 48% on the weekend are likely to be a result of overcooking it in the mountains, but that is, of course, pure conjecture.
This suggests that BAC is only really a factor in extreme cases, and that it's simply that much easier to die when you have a drunken crash on a bike than if you're in a big metal cage, and the problem then is not "alcohol" it's "excessive alcohol", which is already illegal.
What's interesting here is that if the motorcyclist is automatically judged at fault in single-vehicle crashes, that means that out of the 19 multi-vehicle crashes, the other vehicle was most at fault in 8 of them. I put it to you that, with such low numbers, that is, as near as damn it, half. And yet I can't remember the last time I heard a police officer say "Drivers are being grossly negligent, and need to learn to look out." No, the closest I can remember is "Motorcyclists need to realise that they're difficult to see", which is tantamount to letting inattentive fools off the hook.
But to return to the article - the Police Commissioner didn't know about the no alcohol plan (uh, guys? Communication?) but had this to say about speeding:
You what? "they're the ones in my view who are at a higher risk of death and injury"? On what do you base this base canard, Mr Atkinson? I have news for you: Physicists realised over a hundred years ago that heads wouldn't suddenly explode if you went much faster than a horse could run, and exceeding the largely arbitrary speed limit does not automatically equal death.
Now, I believe that a fair cop is a fair cop, and if you get caught speeding you should kick yourself for not paying attention and taking due care and attention - I have, myself, needed to do exactly that on four occasions, in total, to date (and yet never once on a motorycle). But equating an attempt to avoid detection while speeding with an increased risk of death appears, to me, to be a leap of logic that sales way over laughable into the rarified atmosphere of stupefied disbelief.
And then there's the response to detecting speeding - RFIDs. Radio Frequency Identification Tags. Oh, come on. We already know from experiments interstate that RFID toll passes don't work for motorcycles - so much so that in Queensland, the new no-cash GoVia (vomit) toll system waives tags for bikes in entirety, dong all identification via, wait for it, photographs of the number plate. Cars get charged a "video identification fee" if they don't have an electronic tag, but bikes don't, because that's the only reliable option.
And they want to get RFIDs working for a speeding bike, using portable equipment? Dream on, I say, dream on. The point about RFIDs is that they're not necessarily powered - otherwise, you have to rely upon people replacing the batteries, or wiring them into the bike. They are usually devices which reflect a radio signal and modify it with identifying information, which automatically halves the effective range.
So - we have a limited response to two safety issues, based upon low and therefore unreliable sample rates using data that is, CSI be damned, not possible to collect in a perfectly accurate and correct manner, and although a zero alcohol limit has the benefit of greater credibility, it's being highly discriminatory.
The United Motorcycle Council of Queensland was quoted as saying yes, that's fair enough, but how about zero tolerance for everyone else, as well?
The UMCQ is, however, not the united body of all motorcycling associations - take a look at the membership list and see what I mean - it starts with the Bandidos, and continues in much the same vein. The UMCQ has a vested interest in being nice to the police in public, and that journalist should be shot for calling upon them as a representative voice of all motorcyclists.
How about the MRAQ as a more legitimate, representative and politically active body?
And how about some reasoned discussion, and sitting down with the groups involved?
And how about considering the current training standards of all road users, while you're at it.
Links:
Article "Motorcyclists face zero alcohol limit" from the Courier Mail online.
Queensland Transport road safety statistics
Original launch report for the K 100RS, if you're interested.
Motorcycle Riders Association of Queensland
I am a motorcyclist. Anyone who has ever read this blog may have picked up on this.
This means that I have fairly strong opinions about other road users - if you put yourself in a position this vulnerable, with no safety cage around you and a much lower visual area from any angle, you either die or develop a deep and abiding distrust of everyone else. Why, only yesterday I had three people try to kill me on the ride into Uni - one truck pulled out into my lane too close in front of me, one car dived across into my lane and barely gave me time to brake before they collected my front wheel with their bumper, and one driver pulled away from its STOP sign in front of me while peering the other way looking for traffic in that direction.
Please note that I was not on something tiny like a postie bike - I was on a BMW K100RS which is, in anyone's language, on the hefty side.
So whenever I hear a report of a motorcycle accident in the media, I, being an informed reader, not to mention a Masters of Journalism student, read between the lines for the questions that the journalist didn't ask, and if the aricle says that the bike "struck a car which was pulling out of the shopping centre car park", you can bet that I will assume that the car was at fault and the rider, who admittedly may perhaps not have been paying maximum attention, was left without time to brake or dodge and his family can be consoled, at his funeral, by the knowledge that he was not at fault.
I am not, however, an apologist: I know full well that a great many motorcyclists take truly frightening risks regularly, and that the margins for crashing if you do are slim, and for dying if you crash, not much better.
But then we get this report of ignorant, knee-jerking, panicked policy making from the people presently in power:
Motorcyclists face zero alcohol limit (Courier Mail)
Now, I am all in favour of a zero alcohol limit for pilots, people who drive public transport, and surgeons. But just motorcyclists? Wherefor is your justification?
What we know is that the fatality rate for motorcyclists is ludicrously out of sync with their presence on the roads - the article quotes a fatality rate of 22% of the total, as against powered two-wheeled vehicles making up just 4.5% of all road users.
Ah, but why? Alcohol and speed are very easy things to both police and to blame, but what about being an idiot? What about people not paying attention and driving into another vehicle because they were distracted or not looking, disobeyed road rules, nodded off, had a vehicle failure, had an asthma attack, or misjudged the road and skidded, or hit a patch of oil?
And what about accident investigators who see a squid from a motorcycle tire (it's very easy to lock up the rear in an emergency braking manoeuvre) and tick the box that says "Excessive speed - at fault"?
The most recent comprehensive data for Queensland is from 2004 - this is how long it takes to collect, process, analyse and report on all the data. It can be downloaded as a highly inconvenient PDF from the Queensland Transport statistics page.
Let's just look at fatalities, because the official language and reporting never seems to mention the much greater number of accidents which merely cause property damage, pain and suffering, life-long cognitive or physical disabilities, unemployment and a massive drain on the health and disability care systems.
Out of 289 fatal crashes, 97(34% - one third, for argument's sake) involved alcohol or other drugs, and 52(18%) - less than a fifth - involved speed - please note that speed is not "exceeding the posted speed limit", it is "inappropriate speed for the conditions". Doing 80 in a 100 zone at night during a tropical thunderstorm may still be too fast, and registered as such if the reason you crashed was that your vehicle could not physically brake soon enough to avoid hitting the stalled car in front.
Alcohol/drugs was the most prominent contributing factor, but Inattention at 80(28%) and Disobeyed Traffic Rules with 79(27%) both outranked speed.
What was I saying about easy targets?
Lets look at the Blood Alcohol Concentration (BAC) figures, shall we? And, for simplicity sake, I will only talk about percentages now.
Drivers - 54% of total. Motorcyclists - 13% of total. Hmmmm.
Now, 13% is still a higher proportion of fatalities than of registrations, and at greater than 50% it's much higher than the average, but it's sitll far less than 22% of all fatalities.
I can't seem to find a similar comparison for speed, however. Odd.
So let's look at the 46 fatal motorcycle crashes (with 48 fatalities): 59%(n=27) were single-vehicle crashes, and the motorcyclist was judged to be at fault in 35 out of 46 fatal crashes, which is 76% and, I suggest, far too low a number to be statistically solid.
The next figure is where life gets interesting: Most crashes occurred during daylight hours (67%), from Monday to Friday (52%). Now, what this says to me is: commuting - busy traffic, slow-moving, millions of near-misses every day and unlikely to be alcohol at all, unless there was an office party or sunset is really, really late. And the 48% on the weekend are likely to be a result of overcooking it in the mountains, but that is, of course, pure conjecture.
This suggests that BAC is only really a factor in extreme cases, and that it's simply that much easier to die when you have a drunken crash on a bike than if you're in a big metal cage, and the problem then is not "alcohol" it's "excessive alcohol", which is already illegal.
What's interesting here is that if the motorcyclist is automatically judged at fault in single-vehicle crashes, that means that out of the 19 multi-vehicle crashes, the other vehicle was most at fault in 8 of them. I put it to you that, with such low numbers, that is, as near as damn it, half. And yet I can't remember the last time I heard a police officer say "Drivers are being grossly negligent, and need to learn to look out." No, the closest I can remember is "Motorcyclists need to realise that they're difficult to see", which is tantamount to letting inattentive fools off the hook.
But to return to the article - the Police Commissioner didn't know about the no alcohol plan (uh, guys? Communication?) but had this to say about speeding:
"Police Commissioner Bob Atkinson said identification was an issue for police trying to enforce the road rules.
"Some really irresponsible motorcyclists as they go through a speed
camera will even reach back and put their hand over the number plate so
the motorcycle can't be photographed," Mr Atkinson said.
"So they're the ones in my view who are at a higher risk of death and injury and they're the ones we really need to stop.""
You what? "they're the ones in my view who are at a higher risk of death and injury"? On what do you base this base canard, Mr Atkinson? I have news for you: Physicists realised over a hundred years ago that heads wouldn't suddenly explode if you went much faster than a horse could run, and exceeding the largely arbitrary speed limit does not automatically equal death.
Now, I believe that a fair cop is a fair cop, and if you get caught speeding you should kick yourself for not paying attention and taking due care and attention - I have, myself, needed to do exactly that on four occasions, in total, to date (and yet never once on a motorycle). But equating an attempt to avoid detection while speeding with an increased risk of death appears, to me, to be a leap of logic that sales way over laughable into the rarified atmosphere of stupefied disbelief.
And then there's the response to detecting speeding - RFIDs. Radio Frequency Identification Tags. Oh, come on. We already know from experiments interstate that RFID toll passes don't work for motorcycles - so much so that in Queensland, the new no-cash GoVia (vomit) toll system waives tags for bikes in entirety, dong all identification via, wait for it, photographs of the number plate. Cars get charged a "video identification fee" if they don't have an electronic tag, but bikes don't, because that's the only reliable option.
And they want to get RFIDs working for a speeding bike, using portable equipment? Dream on, I say, dream on. The point about RFIDs is that they're not necessarily powered - otherwise, you have to rely upon people replacing the batteries, or wiring them into the bike. They are usually devices which reflect a radio signal and modify it with identifying information, which automatically halves the effective range.
So - we have a limited response to two safety issues, based upon low and therefore unreliable sample rates using data that is, CSI be damned, not possible to collect in a perfectly accurate and correct manner, and although a zero alcohol limit has the benefit of greater credibility, it's being highly discriminatory.
The United Motorcycle Council of Queensland was quoted as saying yes, that's fair enough, but how about zero tolerance for everyone else, as well?
The UMCQ is, however, not the united body of all motorcycling associations - take a look at the membership list and see what I mean - it starts with the Bandidos, and continues in much the same vein. The UMCQ has a vested interest in being nice to the police in public, and that journalist should be shot for calling upon them as a representative voice of all motorcyclists.
How about the MRAQ as a more legitimate, representative and politically active body?
And how about some reasoned discussion, and sitting down with the groups involved?
And how about considering the current training standards of all road users, while you're at it.
Links:
Article "Motorcyclists face zero alcohol limit" from the Courier Mail online.
Queensland Transport road safety statistics
Original launch report for the K 100RS, if you're interested.
Motorcycle Riders Association of Queensland
Monday, 27 April 2009
Drivers die in hot cars
Road safety just never goes away as a news item. People continue to die in ludicrous numbers, the police continue to labour under the delusion that hiding speed cameras is an effective deterrent, and the media continue to not point out the obvious questions.
Take the article on the front cover of last Friday's Courier Mail: "Highway hoons on M1 race at triple the speed limit."
Now, obviously, nobody should be surprised if a small group of people decide that a wide, straight, well-maintained section of highway will make for a good bit of late-night fun. What's really interesting, however, is that these "hoons" claim to be "middle-aged professionals and businessmen with the money to afford expensive modifications to their cars."
Question: If you can afford expensive modifications, can't you afford the entry fee for a track-day? Or, say, a dedicated race car and a competition licence?
Are you not, in actual fact, just embarrassed to admit that you can't go around corners very well?
And now we have this one: "Drivers dying in lone crashes, survey reveals."
Apparently, the police have investigated their crash data and noticed that just about half of all fatal accidents have been single-vehicle.
So?
Superintendent Col Campbell's comment, that this "may come as a surprise to those motorists who believed other drivers posed the only danger on the roads" is particularly fatuous.
Yes, most drivers certainly are labouring under the misapprehension that they're fine, it's everyone else who is the problem. But nobody is going to be surprised - if you're convinced that everyone else is an idiot, you won't be surprised that they keep crashing by themselves, will you?
Nobody is going to take these results as a warning to themselves, if they don't already think that they have a problem.
The really stupid part is this:
"We've looked at the causes of single-vehicle fatalities and they are the same causes as multi-vehicle crashes - alcohol, speed, fatigue, not wearing seatbelts, and you can throw inattention in there as well," Supt Campbell said.
I'm sorry, not wearing a seat belt is a cause of a crash, not a cause of getting hurt in the event of a crash?
Language such as this does not promote confidence in the authorities, it really doesn't.
Take the article on the front cover of last Friday's Courier Mail: "Highway hoons on M1 race at triple the speed limit."
Now, obviously, nobody should be surprised if a small group of people decide that a wide, straight, well-maintained section of highway will make for a good bit of late-night fun. What's really interesting, however, is that these "hoons" claim to be "middle-aged professionals and businessmen with the money to afford expensive modifications to their cars."
Question: If you can afford expensive modifications, can't you afford the entry fee for a track-day? Or, say, a dedicated race car and a competition licence?
Are you not, in actual fact, just embarrassed to admit that you can't go around corners very well?
And now we have this one: "Drivers dying in lone crashes, survey reveals."
Apparently, the police have investigated their crash data and noticed that just about half of all fatal accidents have been single-vehicle.
So?
Superintendent Col Campbell's comment, that this "may come as a surprise to those motorists who believed other drivers posed the only danger on the roads" is particularly fatuous.
Yes, most drivers certainly are labouring under the misapprehension that they're fine, it's everyone else who is the problem. But nobody is going to be surprised - if you're convinced that everyone else is an idiot, you won't be surprised that they keep crashing by themselves, will you?
Nobody is going to take these results as a warning to themselves, if they don't already think that they have a problem.
The really stupid part is this:
"We've looked at the causes of single-vehicle fatalities and they are the same causes as multi-vehicle crashes - alcohol, speed, fatigue, not wearing seatbelts, and you can throw inattention in there as well," Supt Campbell said.
I'm sorry, not wearing a seat belt is a cause of a crash, not a cause of getting hurt in the event of a crash?
Language such as this does not promote confidence in the authorities, it really doesn't.
Tuesday, 27 January 2009
Random headline wool-gathering and commentary
I was lying in bed last night, too tired to sleep or concentrate, and squinting at the screen of my phone as I scrolled through page after page of news, scanning the headlines for anything interesting or relevant and tagging it to read later.
Suddenly I realised that my brain had been digesting a headline it had read five items ago, and that it read "NZ man finds US military files on MP3 player" (ABC News Online). Wait, what?
The Nasca lines in Peru are one of the more tiresome of Erik von Daaniken's bits of "evidence" that aliens visited Earth and fostered human civilisation. What he fails to acknowledge, of course, is the strength of commitment that common-or-garden religious belief can engender in all societies, primitive or (apparently) otherwise, and the lengths that a people who built the Sistine Chapel without powertools will go to when a powerful enough leader holds a whip over their heads.
Now it seems that the Nasca/Nazca (wikipedia) lines (Skeptic's Dictionary) may have been the result of endlessly repeated ritual, as the "Peruvians walked walked their prayers into the earth" (New Scientist).
In order to belabour the obvious, the not-new and the tiresomly status-quo, ABC News Online tells us that a Social Service provider says support programs struggling.
The Courier Mail, perhaps unwittingly, vastly strengthens the case for a Parenting Licence or mandatory Parenting Training, as it tells us Parents panned as kids not toilet trained in time for school.
Yet more stating-the-bloody-obvious from the Courier Mail, who trumpet that Mr Risky is aggressive on the roads, survey reveals. This was going to be a complete post by itself, but I really can't be bothered. I don't want to discuss potential procedural issues with the research, so I'll just point out that I don't ignore speed limits at all. I may choose to disobey them after checking the road conditions, my own mental and physical state and what other drivers are doing, but I always know exactly what they are.
Suddenly I realised that my brain had been digesting a headline it had read five items ago, and that it read "NZ man finds US military files on MP3 player" (ABC News Online). Wait, what?
The Nasca lines in Peru are one of the more tiresome of Erik von Daaniken's bits of "evidence" that aliens visited Earth and fostered human civilisation. What he fails to acknowledge, of course, is the strength of commitment that common-or-garden religious belief can engender in all societies, primitive or (apparently) otherwise, and the lengths that a people who built the Sistine Chapel without powertools will go to when a powerful enough leader holds a whip over their heads.
Now it seems that the Nasca/Nazca (wikipedia) lines (Skeptic's Dictionary) may have been the result of endlessly repeated ritual, as the "Peruvians walked walked their prayers into the earth" (New Scientist).
In order to belabour the obvious, the not-new and the tiresomly status-quo, ABC News Online tells us that a Social Service provider says support programs struggling.
The Courier Mail, perhaps unwittingly, vastly strengthens the case for a Parenting Licence or mandatory Parenting Training, as it tells us Parents panned as kids not toilet trained in time for school.
Yet more stating-the-bloody-obvious from the Courier Mail, who trumpet that Mr Risky is aggressive on the roads, survey reveals. This was going to be a complete post by itself, but I really can't be bothered. I don't want to discuss potential procedural issues with the research, so I'll just point out that I don't ignore speed limits at all. I may choose to disobey them after checking the road conditions, my own mental and physical state and what other drivers are doing, but I always know exactly what they are.
Wednesday, 14 January 2009
Blinkers, blinders and bloody-mindedness: road safety
Few things are more indicative of how we, as a species, just aren't built to inhabit complex, multi-cultural and diverse societies than the opinion poll.
The latest example, dealing with matters particularly close to my heart, is this piece of actually fairly good journalism from the Courier Mail: Car drivers cut motorbike riders little slack - research.
To summarise the background: Bikers are dying in greater numbers.
To summarise the poll findings: Car drivers think that bikers have it coming, because they "often witness them breaking the law or taking unnecessary risks".
The bikers' response: "Four out of five motorcyclists (78 per cent) think that car drivers believe they have more right to the roads than riders do ... and 90 per cent say drivers don't look out for them," said AAMI Corporate Affairs manager Mike Sopinski.
And:
Adrian Toscano, from the Motorcycle Riders Association of Queensland, said there were certainly elements of contempt between drivers of two and four-wheel vehicles.
"Every day riders come across people cutting them off, failing to give way, driving while talking on mobiles and even doing thing like eating breakfast, all while travelling at 60km/h," Mr Toscano said.
Let's go back and deconstruct the phrase "often witness them breaking the law or taking unnecessary risks":
As a motorcyclist, I regularly see other riders behaving in a way that I think is stupid, but they're outnumbered by riders who aren't. My perceptions are also different - I don't think that riding between lines of stationary traffic or on the verge is dangerous unless you're going too fast. In fact, it's often safer. I'm pretty sure that most experienced riders who aren't actually policemen will agree.
And then this:
""The wake-up-to-yourself campaign implied to other road users that all riders have a death wish and, as a result, should be treated with contempt," Mr Toscano said."
Which is exactly what I was saying at the time. Queensland is just about the only place in the world which has managed to product statistics showing that riders are at fault in more than half of multi-vehicle accidents, and the entire advertising campaign addressed those at-fault riders, ignoring the shared responsibility of other road users completely.
What's even sadder is that people can watch ads like that, assume that the government know what they're talking about, and leap effortlessly to the conclusion that riders are their own worst enemy, staying serenely confident of that while they forget to check their blind spot and merge sideways, forcing a bike to brake hard, swerve and get clipped by the car in the other lane.
I don't hate car drivers as a group: I just don't trust them as a group, and I recommend that everyone else has the same attitude. If you trust nobody, you'll be ready when they do something stupid, whether or not they have two wheels, four, or eighteen.
Link to Courier Mail article "Car drivers cut motorbike riders little slack - research
The latest example, dealing with matters particularly close to my heart, is this piece of actually fairly good journalism from the Courier Mail: Car drivers cut motorbike riders little slack - research.
To summarise the background: Bikers are dying in greater numbers.
To summarise the poll findings: Car drivers think that bikers have it coming, because they "often witness them breaking the law or taking unnecessary risks".
The bikers' response: "Four out of five motorcyclists (78 per cent) think that car drivers believe they have more right to the roads than riders do ... and 90 per cent say drivers don't look out for them," said AAMI Corporate Affairs manager Mike Sopinski.
And:
Adrian Toscano, from the Motorcycle Riders Association of Queensland, said there were certainly elements of contempt between drivers of two and four-wheel vehicles.
"Every day riders come across people cutting them off, failing to give way, driving while talking on mobiles and even doing thing like eating breakfast, all while travelling at 60km/h," Mr Toscano said.
Let's go back and deconstruct the phrase "often witness them breaking the law or taking unnecessary risks":
- Nobody, and I mean nobody, unless they are a trained observer who is paying attention and taking notes, and not even then, can accurately gauge "often". If you see twenty bikers and two of them are weaving through traffic at speed, the chances are you will say "often" about that 10%, becsause it sticks in your mind and the rest just vanish from memory. This is how stereotypes arise - the human mind likes to simplify life by picking up on nice solid warning signs like "4WD vehicle" instead of analysing all aspects of road behaviour in depth, and unfortunately this tendency gets carried over into all other aspects of life.
- "Breaking the law" is a phrase that gets sadly overused by people who see something they don't agree with. I give this no credence without more details attached to it.
- "Taking unnecessary risks": Such as? Unless you are a rider, or at the very least an above-average driver, such as an advanced driving instructor, I give no credence to the idea that the motorists can actually judge what this is.
As a motorcyclist, I regularly see other riders behaving in a way that I think is stupid, but they're outnumbered by riders who aren't. My perceptions are also different - I don't think that riding between lines of stationary traffic or on the verge is dangerous unless you're going too fast. In fact, it's often safer. I'm pretty sure that most experienced riders who aren't actually policemen will agree.
And then this:
""The wake-up-to-yourself campaign implied to other road users that all riders have a death wish and, as a result, should be treated with contempt," Mr Toscano said."
Which is exactly what I was saying at the time. Queensland is just about the only place in the world which has managed to product statistics showing that riders are at fault in more than half of multi-vehicle accidents, and the entire advertising campaign addressed those at-fault riders, ignoring the shared responsibility of other road users completely.
What's even sadder is that people can watch ads like that, assume that the government know what they're talking about, and leap effortlessly to the conclusion that riders are their own worst enemy, staying serenely confident of that while they forget to check their blind spot and merge sideways, forcing a bike to brake hard, swerve and get clipped by the car in the other lane.
I don't hate car drivers as a group: I just don't trust them as a group, and I recommend that everyone else has the same attitude. If you trust nobody, you'll be ready when they do something stupid, whether or not they have two wheels, four, or eighteen.
Link to Courier Mail article "Car drivers cut motorbike riders little slack - research
Tuesday, 6 January 2009
This is why Clarkson patronises us.
Due to a massive corporate sponsorship deal, tax breaks for non-profit service organisations, and an 18,000km lifecycle, my new employer actually makes a profit on using XR6 Falcons as company cars.
Now, I'm pretty sure they'd make a profit on using base-model Falcons as company cars as well, but what fun would that be?
What this means, however, is that for one week out of every three, I have an XR6 ute in my driveway. Strictly, it need hardly be said, for business purposes only.
There's just one problem.
It may be ungrateful, rude and possibly even sacrilegious to say this, but:
I don't think it's a very good car.
There is no feel from the steering whatsoever. The styling makes it really difficult to work out where the corners are. Visibility from the cabin is horribly compromised, particularly over your right shoulder, and through the left A-pillar. The throttle pedal is soft and imprecise. The suspension is crude (I mean, it has the 1-tonne suspension, which means leaf-springs. Haven't they been phasing those out of bargain-basement trucks?). The gearbox is slow to react and slow to shift.
I actually prefer the way my partner's 1994 Commodore wagon drives, to the way this brand new sports-model Falcon ute drives.
Talk about a let-down.
Oh yes, and one more thing: It has the world's most stupid tray cover. It's rubberised fabric, and it's held down not by the good old-fashioned elastic rope around hooks, or even by clips. It's held on by what I can only describe as a giant zip-lock bag arrangement. There's a plastic lip around the edge of the cover which clips over a lip on the edge of the tray. It's very easy to not completely close it, and it's a fearful pain in the arse to get on. Who the hell thought that would be a good idea?
Now, I'm pretty sure they'd make a profit on using base-model Falcons as company cars as well, but what fun would that be?
What this means, however, is that for one week out of every three, I have an XR6 ute in my driveway. Strictly, it need hardly be said, for business purposes only.
There's just one problem.
It may be ungrateful, rude and possibly even sacrilegious to say this, but:
I don't think it's a very good car.
There is no feel from the steering whatsoever. The styling makes it really difficult to work out where the corners are. Visibility from the cabin is horribly compromised, particularly over your right shoulder, and through the left A-pillar. The throttle pedal is soft and imprecise. The suspension is crude (I mean, it has the 1-tonne suspension, which means leaf-springs. Haven't they been phasing those out of bargain-basement trucks?). The gearbox is slow to react and slow to shift.
I actually prefer the way my partner's 1994 Commodore wagon drives, to the way this brand new sports-model Falcon ute drives.
Talk about a let-down.
Oh yes, and one more thing: It has the world's most stupid tray cover. It's rubberised fabric, and it's held down not by the good old-fashioned elastic rope around hooks, or even by clips. It's held on by what I can only describe as a giant zip-lock bag arrangement. There's a plastic lip around the edge of the cover which clips over a lip on the edge of the tray. It's very easy to not completely close it, and it's a fearful pain in the arse to get on. Who the hell thought that would be a good idea?
Tuesday, 2 December 2008
No, it really is about revenue raising
Queensland police, who appear to have noticed that their current speeding deterrents aren't working, are considering publicising the locations of mobile speed cameras, in an attempt to get people to slow down (Courier Mail).
Now, there are many arguments over the use of sneakily hidden (and don't ever try to argue that they aren't - hiding behind bushes, in gulleys beside the road, over the crest of hills...) speed cameras to monitor speed limits. There are at least as many arguments over what the speed limits should be, and how much speeding actually contributes to the road toll, but let's not go there right now. The main complaint, in detailed form, can be summarised thusly:
$30 million
So: Every year, speed camera fines add up to somewhere in the region of $30 million, and people are still speeding, and the road toll keeps on climbing. Now, while I'm not in favour of conspiracy theories which claim that the government is doing this deliberately in order to make as much money as possible (medical costs from accident victims, let alone care costs, probably exceed that each year), do you think I would be justified in claiming that we can see here the mark of incompetence?
Now, let's get back to the more contentious issue of whether the police should be doing anything about speeding at all.
Please note, from the article:
"A similar move in 2001 by South Australian police corresponded with a sharp drop in the level of speeding detections.
"But no independent analysis of the program had been done to link the drop with publicity of camera sites."
Notice what's missing? No mention at all of accident rates, or even safety in general, vague terms.
The entire article is talking about speeding, and narry a mention of "every K over is a killer" to be seen.
Which leads me to these three conclusions:
Here's a thought: train drivers properly. Maybe when they're able to judge safe speeds, distances, and the behaviour of other road users, they might not exceed those limits quite so much.
Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot. That would require the government doing something pro-active and innovative, when it's so much easier to just try and punish, when any matric-level psychology student could explain that punishments don't work.
What I particularly love is the way that the Courier Mail is spinning this: "Revenue to fall". Oh no, if the police try something which might have an impact upon speeding, the government will be worse off!
Are they trying to be sarcastic? That's my job...
Now, there are many arguments over the use of sneakily hidden (and don't ever try to argue that they aren't - hiding behind bushes, in gulleys beside the road, over the crest of hills...) speed cameras to monitor speed limits. There are at least as many arguments over what the speed limits should be, and how much speeding actually contributes to the road toll, but let's not go there right now. The main complaint, in detailed form, can be summarised thusly:
- There is no deterrent effect to random speeding fines turning up in the mail a couple of weeks after the event.
- Therefore, there're obviously not serious about actually stopping people from speeding.
- Therefore, they're not actually interested in the road toll.
- Therefore, cameras are a revenue-raising exercise.
$30 million
So: Every year, speed camera fines add up to somewhere in the region of $30 million, and people are still speeding, and the road toll keeps on climbing. Now, while I'm not in favour of conspiracy theories which claim that the government is doing this deliberately in order to make as much money as possible (medical costs from accident victims, let alone care costs, probably exceed that each year), do you think I would be justified in claiming that we can see here the mark of incompetence?
- Item: People are still speeding
- Item: The road toll is getting worse.
- Item: They've only just now started trying something different.
Now, let's get back to the more contentious issue of whether the police should be doing anything about speeding at all.
Please note, from the article:
"A similar move in 2001 by South Australian police corresponded with a sharp drop in the level of speeding detections.
"But no independent analysis of the program had been done to link the drop with publicity of camera sites."
Notice what's missing? No mention at all of accident rates, or even safety in general, vague terms.
The entire article is talking about speeding, and narry a mention of "every K over is a killer" to be seen.
Which leads me to these three conclusions:
- Incompetent or bored and careless journalists
- A new editorial direction from the Courier Mail
- South Australia didn't see a change in accident rates coinciding with this drop in speeding offences detected.
- It's not the speed that's the problem, it's the incompetence of the drivers
- The way people react to an approaching speed camera (braking, taking eyes of the road to glance at the speedometer, nervous twitch of the steering wheel, flashing lights at oncoming drivers who get distracted, etc.) causes crashes.
Here's a thought: train drivers properly. Maybe when they're able to judge safe speeds, distances, and the behaviour of other road users, they might not exceed those limits quite so much.
Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot. That would require the government doing something pro-active and innovative, when it's so much easier to just try and punish, when any matric-level psychology student could explain that punishments don't work.
What I particularly love is the way that the Courier Mail is spinning this: "Revenue to fall". Oh no, if the police try something which might have an impact upon speeding, the government will be worse off!
Are they trying to be sarcastic? That's my job...
Monday, 27 October 2008
Note to budding superheros: Lycra melts and offers no protection. Wear bike leathers.
I have an idea for a vigilante-style superhero comic.
It's called "Driver Education Rider and his side-kick, Orbiting Hyper Death Space Ray".
It works something like this:
If I had any drawing talent at all I'd do a couple of episodes, for the hell of it.
P.S.: I toyed with the question of whether he should be "Driver Education Rider" or "Driver Re-Education Rider", but since most drivers in need of re-education don't appear to have been educated in the first place, I settled on DER.
It's called "Driver Education Rider and his side-kick, Orbiting Hyper Death Space Ray".
It works something like this:
- Driver Education Rider is riding through traffic, minding his own business, when a large 4WD forces him to take evasive action by merging into him.
- DER pulls up next to the 4WD at the lights.
- DER: "Excuse me sir, but did you see me when you changed lanes back there?"
- Driver: "Huh?"
- DER: *PUNCH*
- DER: "DER to Orbiting Hyper-Death Space Ray. Did you see that blue vehicle pull out of that side-street?"
- OHDSR: "Sure did, skipper!"
- OHDSR: *VAPORISE*
- DER: "Good work, boy!"
- OHDSR: "Arf! Arf!"
If I had any drawing talent at all I'd do a couple of episodes, for the hell of it.
P.S.: I toyed with the question of whether he should be "Driver Education Rider" or "Driver Re-Education Rider", but since most drivers in need of re-education don't appear to have been educated in the first place, I settled on DER.
Monday, 13 October 2008
That's not answering the question at ALL
Time for another: Rant by Request! Also: Rant by Proxy!
Televised car ads.
These are so infuriating that a week ago my girlfriend, in lieu of throwing something at our two grand flatscreen, said "I will buy the first car that has an ad which tells you something!"
Car ads seem to come in three flavours:
Ditto number 2, which has the added sins against its name of not being faintly entertaining as a piece of video art, and insulting my intelligence.
Number 3 goes beyond insulting my intelligence and goes into an incompetent rendition of the French Knight's taunting from Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail.
The format essentially runs like this: "Our new Fred GS has more power than the Frankelhoffer GL, more airbags than the Dogrooter SX, more rear leg room than any of the Boxsters, a longer warranty than the Fishwife CSi...." And so on.
Which, I suppose, leads me to assume that every competitor not named in each category has a better rating, which puts the car you're advertising second last at everything, by default. And I'm hardly going to buy a car which is second last at everything important, am I?
No, if you go down the comparison route then you open yourself up to me staring at the screen and saying "Yes, but your car is ugly as shit."
About the only "comparison" that's safe is when you win an award. Car Of The Year from anybody who has a decent reputation (Wheels, the collected total of European magazines, that sort of thing). That says something. Not much, admittedly, because I doubt very much that Wheels applied the Wolfhound Test or had my attitude towards badly designed controls, but it says something.
No, I'm afraid that if you're going to say anything at all in a car ad, your options are quite limited:
All a dick-size competition will reveal about you is that you're insecure and trying to hide something.
All a nicely shot piece of video art says is that spent money on the advertising that should have been spent on that nasty cheap-feeling bit of plastic that covers up the fuse-box.
Televised car ads.
These are so infuriating that a week ago my girlfriend, in lieu of throwing something at our two grand flatscreen, said "I will buy the first car that has an ad which tells you something!"
Car ads seem to come in three flavours:
- Nice music, fancy photography, no voice-over or text which tells you anything more informative than a.) the brand, and b.) the model, both of which you need, because it was shot in a way that made it extremely difficult to differentiate that car from any other, or make out the number of doors, or work out if they were advertising a car or the horse that keeps getting in the way of the camera.
- Voice-over which throws in a lot of what sounds like information, but is actually just either a.) obvious just from looking at the thing ("With a 4-wheel drive heritage") or b.) so much par for the course that only the opposite would be worth mentioning ("An optional diesel engine"), or b.) nonsense that only sounds like English but actually isn't ("Power for when you need it most")
- Voice-over which attempts to swamp you with information which, if you pay close attention, you will realise is about as useful and relevant as the phrase "Part of a complete diet" or "May help prevent cancer of the left middle finger, if you're an Aquarius".
Ditto number 2, which has the added sins against its name of not being faintly entertaining as a piece of video art, and insulting my intelligence.
Number 3 goes beyond insulting my intelligence and goes into an incompetent rendition of the French Knight's taunting from Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail.
The format essentially runs like this: "Our new Fred GS has more power than the Frankelhoffer GL, more airbags than the Dogrooter SX, more rear leg room than any of the Boxsters, a longer warranty than the Fishwife CSi...." And so on.
Which, I suppose, leads me to assume that every competitor not named in each category has a better rating, which puts the car you're advertising second last at everything, by default. And I'm hardly going to buy a car which is second last at everything important, am I?
No, if you go down the comparison route then you open yourself up to me staring at the screen and saying "Yes, but your car is ugly as shit."
About the only "comparison" that's safe is when you win an award. Car Of The Year from anybody who has a decent reputation (Wheels, the collected total of European magazines, that sort of thing). That says something. Not much, admittedly, because I doubt very much that Wheels applied the Wolfhound Test or had my attitude towards badly designed controls, but it says something.
No, I'm afraid that if you're going to say anything at all in a car ad, your options are quite limited:
- Brand
- Model
- Engine choices
- Price
- Seating and space
- Awards (but be careful. "Most likely to be stolen and used in a ram raid", for example, might not work in your favour.)
- Performance, but if you go on about 0-60 times I really will switch off. Fuel economy is good, proof of handling and ride prowess is good, saying that you are .5seconds faster to the speed limit than anyone else is irrelevant.
All a dick-size competition will reveal about you is that you're insecure and trying to hide something.
All a nicely shot piece of video art says is that spent money on the advertising that should have been spent on that nasty cheap-feeling bit of plastic that covers up the fuse-box.
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