The Boiling Frog: Speeding Data 'Misleading'

Monday, 30 August 2010

Speeding Data 'Misleading'

I meant to blog on this last week when it appeared on my local news, but forgot. Obo has jogged my memory.

On 1st August all speed cameras in Oxfordshire were turned off, well technically they were turned off over a period of a few days - prosecutions stopped on 1st August. So some of them still worked. I'm waiting for the first case of the council chancing their arm with an August prosecution. Anyway it didn't take long for some safer roads campaigners to start bleating:

Last week, Thames Valley Safer Roads Partnership said a roadside camera on the A44 in Woodstock had seen an 18.3 per cent increase in speed offences since the switch-off compared to the average number caught this year.

At the same time a radar inside a second camera in Watlington Road, Cowley, registered an 88 per cent rise in offences when compared with figures in 2008 and 2009.

Speeding offences up eh? What about traffic accidents, casualties, deaths? Are they up? Thames Valley Safer Roads Partnership seem strangely silent on that one. But even these figures are not all they seem:

The partnership said the figures for 2010 were not available, as the camera had been switched off due to roadworks.

When the Oxford Mail requested 2008-9 data for the Woodstock camera – to make an equal comparison to the Watlington Road camera – the partnership said the figures were not readily to hand.

Now, the Oxford Mail having obtained the information, the figures actually show speed offences fell by four per cent when comparing the figures since the switch-off to offences in 2008-9.

So it takes a FOI request to prove they're misleading. But they insist:

...there was no deliberate attempt to mislead the public about the figures.

“I don’t think there’s anything we have done that is disgraceful or lies and damn lies.

“As we have always maintained, these remain limited data sets and there is a great deal more study that will need to be undertaken to determine what the increased risk at decommissioned camera sites is.”

Yes of course, which is why August isn't over yet but you couldn't wait to issue that 'shock horror' rise of 18%. Compare that to the pro-camera argument, that 11 months was too early to tell when Swindon didn't show any rise after a year of switching them off.

2 comments:

Fascist Hippy30 August 2010 at 18:56
These people need to be severely dealt with, I hope I live long enough to see it happen.

T.T. is spot on, they are lying (brainwashed by what passes as an education system) scum!
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TheBoilingFrog31 August 2010 at 09:58
TT: can't say I disagree.

FH: It would be a delicious irony if they were run over by a milk float ;-)
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"Once the interlude of [WWI] was over, [countries] all went back to the rules and customs of traditional parliamentary democracies. I felt out of my depth."
(Jean Monnet 'Father of Europe')

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(Tony Blair 1998)

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The single currency is the greatest abandonment of sovereignty since the foundation of the European Community: the decision is of an essentially political nature".
(Felipe Gonzalez, a Spanish former PM, 1998)

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(European Council conclusions, 2001)

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(Kenneth Clarke MP, 2002)

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businesses means more employment".
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(Former Energy Secretary, Chris Huhne, former CBI Director General, Lord Adair Turner, et al., 2002)

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(Former Business Secretary, Lord Peter Mandelson, 2003)

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(Centre for European Reform Director, Charles Grant, 2001)

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(Then TUC Secretary General, John Monks, 2003)

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(Former Labour Party leader, Neil Kinnock, 2002)

"The euro may well come to be regarded in the coming years as part of the answer to saving the City from permanent decline. It was easy to dismiss the fledgling euro as a ‘toilet currency’ before we realised our own economic growth was built on sand".
(Lib Dem leader, Nick Clegg, 2009)

"Obviously joining a currency that everybody in Europe - including soon all the new European Union members - are using, a currency that American and Japanese and overseas businesses understand, has to make sense".
(Then UK Europe Minister, Denis MacShane, 2003)

"The euro, despite gloomy predictions from anti-Europeans, has proved to be a success".
(Former Lib Dem leader, Charles Kennedy, 2002)

"In reality the economic integration between Britain and the Continent is so close, and we have confirmed this because we all belong to the common market, that it can't be good in the long run to stay out of such a cardinal element as the currency union".
(Then German Finance Minister, Hans Eichel, 2002)

"There are no real benefits and some real costs to the UK of monetary independence... it makes sense from a financial stability perspective for the UK to contract out monetary policy to the ECB".
(Citigroup Chief Economist, Willem Buiter, 2007)

"Taking part in EMU would improve policy and performance enough to eliminate many of the strains that sceptics predict would emerge without the safety valve of devaluation".
(BBC Trust Vice Chairman, Diane Coyle OBE, 1997)

"The euro is like a breastplate that will become more and more resistant. The stability of the currencies within its area is without question".
(Then EU Monetary Affairs Commissioner, Yves Thibault de Silguy, 1998)

"The strict rules attached to the euro could emerge as one of the best ways to persuade the markets that we will put Humpty Dumpty back together again, put the public finances in order".
(Lib Dem leader, Nick Clegg, 2009)

"The question of entering the euro is worth a lot more to Britain than the wild anti-federalist fantasies peddled by those who think Britain should have nothing to do with Europe. Nobody of any consequence in Europe wants to create a federal super-state".
(Former Business Secretary, Lord Peter Mandelson, 2003)

The British Government Knew The Consequences In 1971

Foreign and Commonwealth Office 30/1048 - 1971

...the transfer of major executive responsibilities to the bureaucratic Commission in Brussels will exacerbate popular feeling of alienation from government. To counter this feeling, strengthened local and regional democratic processes within the member states and effective Community regional economic and social policies will be essential.

Parliamentary sovereignty will be affected as we have seen. But the need for Parliament to play an increasing (if perhaps more specialised) role may develop. Firstly, although a European Parliament might in the longest term become an effective, directly elected democratic check upon the bureaucracy, this will not be for a long time, and certainly not in the decade to come. In the interval, to minimise the loss of democratic control it will be important that the British Parliamentarians should play an effective role both through the British membership in the European Parliament and through the processes of the British Parliament itself.

Test

Monday, 30 August 2010

Speeding Data 'Misleading'

2 comments:

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