When my local newspaper published an article about Bradford's most dangerous roads I was instantly intrigued as to how that fit in with speed enforcement cameras (both fixed and mobile). We are constantly told by the authorities that speed cameras and mobile vans are used on stretches of road that are known to be dangerous even if the general consensus is that they are placed where they can make the most money... Us Brits are a cynical lot, aren't we?
Another common issue that comes up a lot in our forums is that you can make statistics say anything so my aim for this article is NOT actually to have a conclusion – I simply want to point out the facts and see what conclusions you, our readers, come to.
In response to the article I have gone through the locations that were released by West Yorkshire Casualty Reduction Partnership and mapped these alongside our CamerAlert Speed Camera Database (as well as the official speed-enforcement areas). What I found was quite interesting – 8 of the top 10 most dangerous roads in Bradford did not have any speed-enforcement at the areas in question. Straight away my mind said "so that proves that speed cameras make roads safer" but neither the SCP nor the reporter mentioned this. The article did, however, state that "Nine of the top ten roads for number of accidents have speed enforcement cameras on them." This didn't match what I was seeing, so I looked into it a bit more and their wording is quite clever: they say ‘roads' as opposed to the actual area they are looking at. For example #8 Whetley Lane does not have any enforcement areas but Mayo Avenue and Killinghall Road both do – these areas are miles away from each other but are all the A6177.
Why aren't they shouting out about how much more dangerous roads without speed cameras are instead of implying that they already have speed enforcement and the roads are still dangerous? Without doing any research into it, this almost gives the "speed cameras are there for the money" camp a good argument.
Without further ado, here are the top 10 most dangerous roads in Bradford (NB: I've been unable to obtain the finer details for #6-10, only the total number of accidents):
1) Great Horton Road, Great Horton
2) Skipton Road / North Street, Keighley
3) Haworth Road, Heaton
4) Manningham Lane, Manningham
5) Leeds Road, Bradford
6) Barkerend Road, Barkerend
7) Leeds Road, Thornbry
8) Whetley Lane, Bradford
9) Killinghall Road, Bradford Moor
10) Allerton Road / Pearson Lane, Allerton
When I set about looking into this I was planning on it being a "speed cameras don't make things safer" article. As it happens, it looks like it is the complete opposite – but surely it can't be that simple otherwise the SCP would be shouting from the rooftops – so what other facts are stopping them from doing so? Why are they implying that these roads are already speed-enforced? Are they fearful of criticism about why they haven't already targeted these areas or worried about extra workload? Surely if our safety is the number 1 concern, then these areas should be monitored.
So, what does all this actually tell us? If I'm perfectly honest I don't actually know. You can make statistics say anything really and here are a few possible conclusions:
1) 8 out of 10 of the dangerous roads have no speed-enforcement therefore speed-enforced roads are safer
2) 2 out of the 10 most dangerous roads have speed-enforcement so this shows it makes no difference
3) Speed is not really a contributing factor to road safety – otherwise these areas would already be speed-enforced
Have you driven around Bradford? Do you know these areas? Feel free to add your own conclusions and comments in the forum.
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