"The M1 safety week, which took place between Monday 13 and Sunday 19 May, also recorded the fourth lowest number of collisions of 2019 and second lowest outside school holidays.
The week saw all three of Highways England’s unmarked HGV supercabs take to the M1 to capture dangerous driving, with nearly 200 vehicles being pulled over by police officers during the week."
Perhaps what it demonstrates is that road safety can be improved but does require significant investment. Whilst the week's activity is a positive, does it also reflect how little is done (relatively) for the other 51 weeks of the year!
There is also the "Management Effect".
When you visibly monitor anything you change it, and if you have intervention too you will change it a lot.
Monitoring one road for one week may have reduced the accident rate, but does that mean there was not an increased rate on the other roads people would use to avoid the police presence ?
Is the collisons per week figure for the M1 statistically valid, or does it change by up to 30% week on week ?
Well since this exercise didn't produce a result better than the current best results which were achieved without any intervention I would guess the number of collisions per week varies a lot week to week.
I think this is mostly propaganda about how dangerous people are in a car / van / lorry based on a very small sample and what is probably a very simple and erroneous statistical analysis.
Yes it's good to have a visible police presence but lets not limit it to one road for one week which does nothing except provide a headline for the increasingly political and publicity seeking police service.
People not paying attention while they drive should be pulled over and suffer some consequences of their dangerous and negligent behaviour.
Did this alone cause a 30% reduction in collisions?
Obviously not since this only produced the second lowest collision figure outside the school holidays.
For this exercise to be hailed as any type of success the collision rate should have reduced to a figure significantly lower than has happened without any intervention, or maybe it was successful in ways that don't involve the collision rate such as pointing out to the public that the police are on the roads and stopping negligent drivers. But they aren't really, because they haven't got the resources, and I for one would prefer them to be chasing murderers, rapists, burglars, and reducing public disorder on our streets than pulling people over for being over a speed limit on an empty road (no I haven't been done for speeding recently) with any extra resources they are given.
I think the police to a great job with their limited resources, I think the traffic police do a marginally helpful job but focus on easy and pointless targets too often to meet their conviction targets.
If the traffic police were effective (rather than looking for headlines) there wouldn't be uninsured drivers on the road because the arrest rate for that offence would be very high. How hard can it be to pull over the uninsured driver or the unregistered vehicle in this technologically advanced age of instant information and automatic number plate recognition, but they continue to be a plague on our roads.
Stopping people using phones in cars is a technology fix, and car manufacturers could be incentivised or regulated to make it impossible to use a phone while driving, all they need to do is put a small jammer behind the dashboard.
If it isn't broken, that doesn't mean you can't improve it. (Do three negatives make a positive ?)
Whilst I would never use a phone on a motorway because I'm not completely nuts, if I was a gambling man I'd take those odds.
We often think that when we have completed our study of one we know all about two, because 'two' is 'one and one.' We forget that we still have to make a study of 'and.'
