A DfT strategy paper claimed speed was "a major contributory factor in about a third of all road accidents". The "excessive and inappropriate speed" that helped "to kill about 1,200 people" each year was "far more than any other single contributor to casualties on our roads".
The source given for this claim, to be repeated as a mantra by ministers and officials for years to come, was a report from the government's Transport Research Laboratory, TRL Report 323: "A new system for recording contributory factors in road accidents".
Not many people would have looked at this report, since it was only available for �45. But some who did were amazed. The evidence the report had cited to support its claim that speed was "a major contributory factor in about a third of all road accidents" simply wasn't there. Many other factors were named as contributing to road accidents, from driving without due care and attention to the influence of drink; from poor overtaking to nodding off at the wheel. But the figure given for accidents in which the main causative factor was "excessive speed" was way down the list, at only 7.3 per cent.
So startling seemed the government's exaggeration of the TRL's figures, based on data provided by eight police forces, that it set off an increasingly fractious debate. A leading role in this was to be played by Paul Smith, an engineer turned road safety expert, who was so shocked by the government's misuse of its own experts' statistics that in 2001 he set up a website, (www.safespeed.org.uk) dedicated to analysis of why, in his view, the government's misconceived policy, far from making Britain's roads safer, could only make them more dangerous.
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still want to blame speed muppet