Examintion of Witnesses (Questions 100-119)
MS CYNTHIA
BARLOW, MS
MARY WILLIAMS
OBE, MS PAIGE
MITCHELL, MR
KEVIN DELANEY
AND MR
MALCOLM BINGHAM
8 MARCH 2006
Q100 Clive Efford: ISA being?
Mr Delaney: Intelligent speed
adaptation. Some of them would probably welcome it. What drivers
want is a broad mix of effective traffic management, including
enforcement.
Q101 Clive Efford: I just wanted
to ask you, Mr Delaney, I hear a lot of car driver lobby groups
make that argument, but in practice it does not seem to make any
sense to me because we do not tend to see road cameras down residential
roads, they tend to be on main roads where you would not have
any other method of traffic management to reduce speed. Is that
not true?
Mr Delaney: I accept that. Human
beings are not always logical.
Q102 Clive Efford: Car drivers perhaps
more than others.
Ms Williams: I think that adds
to what I was going to say, which is that in those residential
areas we do of course need to see a mix of measures, which does
include the other aspect we have not talked about which is engineering.
There would need to be, for example, school safety zones and residential
safety zones. We have pockets of pilot home zones around the UK
but we do not see these rolled out routinely across communities
like other European countries such as the Netherlands. We do not
see safety zones outside all schools where we have reduced the
limit to 20 miles an hour, which would be common in other European
countries. We do not even have crossings outside some schools
and outside some schools we cannot even recruit school crossing
patrols because it is just too dangerous. You do need that combination
of measures because I do think that does help a driver to understand
why there is a camera there, and hopefully in future it will be
possible to put a camera there and there will not be these ridiculous
rules on casualties.
Q103 Clive Efford: The most dangerous
drivers outside all my schools are the parents.
Ms Williams: I am not arguing
with that and of course we need to get parents outside their cars
and walking to schools.
Q104 Clive Efford: They seem to think
that the yellow zigzag lines are there just to create their own
private parking space. 20 mile per hour zones are being rolled
out. Do you have any view on how that is going?
Ms Williams: One of the problems
with 20 mile per hour zones is that local authorities have been
given the power to implement them but the Department for Transport
has not retained the responsibility to audit how many there are.
We are about to do a survey on this issue, but certainly there
are many local authorities who are not rolling out 20 mile per
hour zones.
Ms Mitchell: We have done some
work on that in development, and the aspirations of local authorities—and
we did a pretty broad coverage of the entire UK—are extremely
limited in comparison to practice on the Continent. This was established
by the Commission for Integrated Transport European Best Practice
Survey about six years ago. In the cities where cycling, walking
and public transport are high in the priorities of mode choice
there is usually a blanket area coverage of 20 mile per hour speed
limits, 30 kph, and in the best practice areas it is about 65
to 80% of the road network. Our most widely covered city now is
about 26% and that is Kingston-upon-Hull. Most authorities are
looking at around 15% of the network in 15 years and that is mainly
restricted to residential roads. One of the problems is the expense
of engineering measures, which would be reduced if cameras could
be used to enforce 20 mile per hour speed limits. The other problem
is that we do not give enough money to road safety spending anyway.
It needs to have a much higher priority in the transport budget
because it has got one of the highest rates of return, if nothing
else.
Q105 Clive Efford: Ms Barlow, you
said earlier on that you felt that it was too easy for people
to avoid conviction for speeding on roads.
Ms Barlow: Yes.
Q106 Mr Efford: I was quite intrigued
by that comment. Could you briefly set out for us where you think
we could tighten up on the enforcement through the courts?.
Ms Barlow: This particular firm
that I spoke to a couple of weeks ago managed to find very tiny
loopholes in the way evidence is gathered, the way samples are
taken, those sorts of things, which are enough for a case to be
thrown out. This particular firm, as I said, has got a very high
success rate which inevitably runs alongside a very low success
rate in terms of the Crown Prosecution Service, so I do think
that there is a lot of work to be done on just making sure that
all the systems are properly monitored and properly followed so
that people are not able to get off serious driving charges just
on the basis of procedural irregularity. It is a nonsense. Could
I just say I would be grateful if all of the motoring organisations
could be persuaded to take a much more responsible approach to
behaviour on the roads, in the sense that speeding is the leading
one, but so many people seem to regard being caught for speeding
as simply being unlucky rather than breaking the law, and that
same attitude is going in other directions as well. We know that
there are prosecutions for manslaughter cases on the books where
firms are regularly forcing their drivers to exceed the proper
number of hours. We know that there is a very high percentage
in the road haulage industry of drivers falling asleep at the
wheel. There are things that you can do about that but it depends
on everybody who uses the roads accepting their responsibility
for the rights of other road users, and at the moment they are
not; it is a very selfish attitude.
Ms Williams: If I can add to Cynthia's
comments with some figures on driver tiredness, for example. In
the basic compliance check in 2003-04, which is the latest one
I have got here, more than one in five trucks had paperwork offences
and the biggest set of breaches was drivers' hours rules. To talk
about how enforcement has increased in this area (because today
is about enforcement and technology) there has been a slight increase
in the last decade in the number of traffic examiners who do enforcement
for drivers' hours rules, but only by 36 officers for the whole
of the UK. It is my understanding from liaising with VOSA and
other agencies that this is a major area of concern. There are
fleets in the UK which are doing enormous good works to improve
their risk management in all sorts of ways, to make sure their
drivers are not tired or are not stressed and do not have other
medical problems or whatever, but there is still a significant
proportion of the industry that needs to be tackled with significantly
more enforcement, and I think it is important for this inquiry
to remember VOSA's enforcement levels, as I am sure you will be
doing.
Mr Bingham: Could I pick up on
that because there were several obvious references to the industry.
The Freight Transport Association some years ago won the Prince
Michael Award for Safety for the fatigue campaign which they ran
with a number of police forces across the country. What I am trying
to say is that as a trade association and as a motoring organisation
we do take these things seriously. We have had campaigns on drink
and drugs. We have had campaigns on speed. We have had a campaign
called "Well Driven". We had a campaign last year to
try and reduce the number of bridge strikes across the country,
which is a problem area. We do take all these issues seriously.
Statistically, HGVs are the safest vehicles on the road and that
is not our statistics, that is Department for Transport statistics.
The FTA has been working with VOSA for a while now on a number
of service level agreements on speed enforcement, initially on
depot enforcement but now on roadside enforcement, and we are
aware of problem areas. What we believe VOSA needs to do (we believe
that VOSA thinks this as well but they may need to answer that)
is to more effectively target their enforcement. You will inevitably
get some figures that come out of that as a result of that which
will show high infringements because they are targeting their
enforcement more effectively.
Ms Williams: This is the compliance
check I am talking about. It is the random testing check I am
talking about.
Chairman: I think we ought not to disagree
amongst ourselves when things are going well! Have a go at the
ones who are not here who are not concerned. Certainly the road
industry generally needs to accept that good enforcement protects
them and it is to their benefit for the same reason that we are
so concerned about corporate manslaughter. We are not ever in
this House, I hope, producing laws for the good but for those
who, frankly, who are not always good. Mr Goodwill?
Q107 Mr Goodwill: I have got two
questions. First of all to Mrs Mitchell with regard to the 20
mile per hour limit. Do you think we will be able to secure more
20 mile per hour limits and motorists would respect them more
if they were made time-limited so they did apply at 2 o'clock
in the morning but did apply when children were arriving at school?
Ms Mitchell: No because I think
variable speed limits are confusing. I also think that vulnerable
road users (who are not just children) should have the right to
use the highway any time they like, just like drivers can. There
is really no reason to go much faster than 20 miles an hour in
built-up areas. I think there is some indication that there is
already quite a lot of support for 20 mile per hour speed limits.
There was some work done in a survey in London which found very
high support (I think around 78%) which went up when people learned
more about the casualty severity that surrounds collisions in
urban areas, and there is also some evidence that motorists themselves
think that 30 miles an hour is too high. I think we need to be
clear about what we are trying to do in transport systems, clear
about the role of speed in doing that, clear about equity on the
road network and exposure to death and injury and how that affects
the decisions we make, and then explain to people why we are doing
things, and then find out what kind of problems we have after
that.
Ms Williams: That is right. We
should not be curfewing vulnerable road users and we should not
be legitimising any argument that, "Oh well, it was late
at night and no-one was about—apart from that drunk bloke
I happened to hit."
Q108 Mr Goodwill: A question to Mr
Bingham: a lot of the accidents that occur, for example on the
A64 in North Yorkshire, are due to dangerous overtaking. Correct
me if I am wrong but the speed limit for HGVs on single carriageway
trunk roads is only 40 miles an hour which means there is a lot
of frustration from motorists travelling behind those vehicles.
Given the better technology in trucks and better braking systems
et cetera, and given that actually quite a lot of trucks are travelling
at 50 anyway, do you think there is some argument to increase
the speed limit for trucks on trunks roads or A roads from 40
to 50?
Mr Bingham: We had a discussion
on this internally within the Association a year ago and I think
there are arguments on both sides, but the main argument I seem
to get is from car drivers who have a problem overtaking trucks
rather than truck drivers who are trying to stick to speed limits.
I accept that sometimes that does not happen as well and that
could be dealt with in-vehicle technology. It is very difficult
to argue about increasing speed limits and the Freight Transport
Association is on record that we do not necessarily agree with
that stance[4]
Chairman: Thank you very
much. Mr Martlew?
Q109 Mr Martlew: Just on the 20 mile
per hour limit, would it not be a better system if we presumed
that all roads are 20 miles an hour unless they are signed differently?
Ms Mitchell: Yes that is what
we think.
Q110 Mr Martlew: For example, on
residential areas it would be unless there was a 30 mile an hour
sign, and that would be a way to bring it in throughout this country?
Ms Mitchell: That is right. We
think that should be the default limit, and that there are roads
which could stand a higher limit but only if there was provision
made along the road for cyclists and pedestrians.
Q111 Chairman: We have very little
time so I am going to ask a few questions quite quickly. In France,
drivers are notified within 48 hours of their speeding offence.
Is that a good idea?
Ms Mitchell: We think it is.
Ms Barlow: Yes.
Q112 Chairman: Have you made any
assessment at all of how much that would cost?
Ms Mitchell: No, but digital systems
tend to be cheaper though.
Q113 Chairman: I see. Are you satisfied
that the police have made progress in the use of data recorders
in crash investigations?
Ms Mitchell: No.
Q114 Chairman: So what is wrong?
Ms Mitchell: Well, there are several
problems.
Q115 Chairman: They are not going
fast enough?
Ms Mitchell: On the data recorders
there is a problem about accessing the data because it is not
consistent and as far as I know from TRL—this is simply
a personal communication—it is very, very difficult to get
EDR data from a vehicle and it is usually only in a very high
profile crash, and it is expensive.
Q116 Chairman: So we are suggesting
that that should be an area that ought to be actually investigated
more energetically?
Ms Mitchell: Absolutely, yes.
Q117 Chairman: Fatigue please, gentlemen.
What role should technology play in preventing fatigue-related
crashes?
Mr Delaney: Before we get to the
technology, I think there is a big role here for education. What
we need to do is to explain to people that whilst it is alright
to feel tired when you are on a train, it is alright to fall asleep
in front of the television; fatigue is a killer when you are behind
the wheel of a car. Far, far too many people are out there driving
on the roads when they should actually be doing anything other
than being behind the wheel of a car, and that is a message we
have not begun to get across yet. We need to begin with education
and then thereafter technology does have a role. Technology can
detect such things as eye movements and lack of eye movements
and so on and so forth. Technology can intervene, but, if you
like, that is almost too late. The big battle is to get across
to drivers the importance of fatigue. Far too many drivers believe
that you are tired when you actually start to nod off whereas
the reality is that you have become tired anything up to an hour
before then.
Ms Barlow: Could I just say that
one of the trade unions is trying to persuade the freight transport
industry to adopt sleep apnoea testing for drivers, to do routine,
periodic testing for obstructive sleep apnoea, because this is
known to be a particular illness that drivers are prone to. Because
of the sedentary nature of their job they are more likely to have
extra weight on the waist and extra weight on the neck and therefore
are more likely to suffer from obstructive sleep apnoea and the
firms have got to be responsible for periodic testing of drivers
for that.
Q118 Chairman: Thank you very much.
Can I ask the FTA finally what do you mean by "aligning policing
the road network on the same basis as management of the network"
?
Mr Bingham: We have a national
strategic road network operated by the Highways Agency. We have
seen different standards applied across the country, or at least
our members see that, of different police forces and different
emphases on the way that they are enforcing road traffic issues.
What we would like to see is an alignment across that strategic
network, at the very least amongst the police forces to have a
standard that is recognised throughout the country. I think that
is a matter of putting together best practice in certain areas,
and perhaps there is a role for ACPO to play as the advisers to
the police forces, and the freight industry can certainly play
a part in it with its experience of different standards.
Chairman: Thank you very much. Can I
just apologise to you all if we do seem to be rushing a bit this
afternoon and explain that your evidence is of great importance
and it is not to be regarded as being an indication that we are
not taking you very seriously indeed. I am very grateful to you
all. Thank you for coming.
4 We would welcome an increase in speeds on certain
single carriage roads under certain conditions, such as where
car drivers take undue risks in overtaking trucks limited to 40
MPH, and where a road has a bad safety record due to this. Back
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