Dear Sir,
I am concerned about the impact and changes that may result from and are clearly intended by the signatories of the PACTS (Parliamentary Advisory Committee on Transport Safety) letter to your paper dated the 8th May.
Isn’t it about time we confined comment on the life and death issue of road safety to experts as opposed to a collection of people of diverse backgrounds and professions who are not driving experts, have never dealt with road accidents or prosecuted after them or had any hands on involvement with the input and production of accident statistics? Worse than that, some of the signatories actually have agendas separate from road safety as well as direct financial interest in road safety policy.
Until recently, the main parliamentary advisor for PACTS was an ex school teacher and teacher’s union official of whom one transport minister recently wrote that being a registered charity was good enough to advise parliament on matters of life and death as well as prosecutions of thousands of drivers!
PACTS statements, who, despite their important title are, after all, merely a lobby group, are often openly unappreciative of road transport. Their frequent faulty and selective comparisons of road safety against rail and air are an example. Ignoring that plane and train drivers are highly qualified and monitored, don’t generally have opposing traffic or millions of people mingling with them and given that PACTS omit road accidents to and from airports and railway stations as part of rail or air journeys too, - drivers wouldn’t be on that road at that time except for their rail and air journey- none of this augers well for our parliamentarians, desperate for expert impartial advice, or for the claimed sentiment expressed in the letter either
So how does all this manifest itself in the letter to your paper?
It starts off seemingly with noble intentions. But we have already noticed how aggressive policy towards UK’s drivers is so often cloaked in benign spin and sound-bite. ‘Speed kills!’, ‘Shared space’, ‘Calming’, ‘Safety cameras’ ‘It’s 30 for a reason’ and so on; a wolves in sheep’s clothing approach. How smoothly the ‘Global Road Safety Week’ and ‘275000 pedestrians killed every year globally’ is abandoned to undermine the UK’s superb record in comparison which it dismisses with some dubious stats by comparing 2010 figures, an all time low and a predictable regression to the mean, with a rise the following year of 12 %. That rise was expected even before it happened.
Why no mention that, after at least 300 billion driver miles a year, there’s less death on the road from all causes than from by accidents in the home and much less than from NHS failure too?
Obesity is the fault of driving according to these eminent writers yet we all know that it’s more about the food, the lack of sport and sporting activity in schools and much more sedentary entertainment. I could point out that if it’s health we are concerned with, it costs around £3 billion a year for every one mile per hour UK’s road transport is slowed and regulated, often on flawed rationale, (about £30 billion a year) and ask how many lives could be saved if that were in the NHS, emergency services, the police and A & E? But because our society has been created by and dependant on, fast moving, load carrying, non manpower road transport for thousands of years, we would all die very rapidly without it. How unhealthy would that be for the community?
Globally? In the countries where road safety is at its worst, the populations generally have far much more to worry about; malnutrition, disease, violence, despotism. But why is it that road safety initiatives always seems to be where road safety is already good and where all the money is?
To get things into perspective, one of the signatories, in their emotive manner of staying in business, tells us that: ‘Someone somewhere in the world dies in a road accident every 30 seconds.’ But we know that, in the UK, it’s only every 11262.857 seconds so the point of the letter here, where all the money is, is what exactly?
Wishes
Keith Peat
Founder: Drivers’ Union. www.youdrive.co
