Speed cameras and statistical ignorance

A new study shows that government claims about lives saved by speed cameras are overstated. This is ammunition against the free-spending little people who run our local authority highways departments. As recession closes in, councillors and others who have been rubber-stamping big budgets are going to have to start questioning what the money is for and why it is necessary to spend it.

Researchers at Liverpool University have knocked Government claims that 100 lives a year are saved by speed cameras. Whilst speed cameras do reduce accidents, the numbers are exaggerated. The research shows a fall in accidents of 19% compared with the claimed 50%.

Does this matter very much, you might ask. After all, this Government belches out false statistics daily and has, indeed, devoted more energy to rigging the apparent outcomes of initiatives than it has on the initiatives themselves. It does matter, and for reasons which go beyond the actual facts behind this research and beyond motoring. Money is wasted in vast quantities on things which make little difference; things which really do matter are neglected in favour of those which yield apparently good outcomes; the police, who need all the friends they can get at the moment, are tarred with the fall-out of policies to which they do not necessarily subscribe; and any little surviving regard for government (as opposed merely to this Government) takes another pasting.

Verboten to photograph the Fuhrer

We used to mock the Germans for the devotion to the outward forms of authority. Back in the days when everything was allowed which was not forbidden, and when Britons were allowed to make their own assessments of risk, we laughed at Fritz because he would do nothing without a notice to tell him he was allowed to and felt adrift if his next step was not laid out in a manual.

All announcements and no information at FGW

It would be useful (for the passengers at least) if the people who run First Great Western stations were to spend some time standing around on platforms, like the rest of us have to, totting up the ratio between the endless announcements thrown at us and the information actually conveyed by them.

They would find that, like the notices erected by the dumb animals who work in local authorities, and the stream of nannying advice poured over us by government and its many agencies, the value of the messages is in inverse proportion to their quantity.

Condemning the sludge in the public service pond

I do not often run ad hominem attacks on public servants. It is often hard to distinguish between their personal failings and those of the system which they work in and, for the most part, it would be like criticising the dog because his treadmill malfunctions, or beating one of those bovine creatures who push a pole round a well because the water dries up. We employ whole offices of people like that – whole departments of state in the case of DEFRA or the Home Office – and can’t really complain because dull unthinking drudges perform dull unthinking tasks in dull unthinking ways.

Politicians are different, of course. They solicit our votes by their claims to competence, honesty and personal charm, and if Ed Balls fails on all three counts, it is proper to say so. Caroline Flint cares about us all so much, but we don’t care for her and I hope she knows it (although she, of course, has more in common, intellectually speaking, with the pole than with the ox which pushes it, and may not notice the general air of mockery and contempt which attends her every pronouncement).

Few no smoking signs in New York

Why do we need all the no smoking signs? Is it because Caroline Flint was herself too dim to manage without signs everywhere, or is it just corrupt government spreading its patronage to buy votes?

New York is famously not short of signs and notices. I cannot put my finger on why, but they do not offend in the same way as they do over here. That may in part be that the context suits them better, but somehow they generally seem more useful. A high proportion of them actually convey information which people need.

New York has much the same laws about smoking in public places as we have. What it does not have is screaming notices to tell you about it. Those places which had such signs anyway – food shops for example – still have them, but there is no equivalent of the statutory obligation to display a sign in every doorway.

Passenger information at Reading Station

It has been a continuing feature of my journeys through Reading Station over 30 years or so that the information given to passengers is too little, too late and usually wrong. The slightest deviation from the timetable throws the whole system into confusion. Both the station and most of the services are controlled by First Great Western, so deviations from the timetable are the norm.

I am usually resigned to this, having decided long ago that getting worked up over the incompetence of railway employees is a way to an early grave. This resignation, which is now widespread, is of course one of the reasons why the railways never improve (the other is that they have us over a barrel – we have to keep using them at whatever price they charge and however poor the service, so there is no incentive for them to get any better).

No no smoking signs needed

Another post Matthew Parris – no more signs, please commends an article by Matthew Parris in the Times of 16 June 2007, called “No smoking. No this. No that. And no more signs, please”. This is one of a proposed set of posts on the plague of signs and notices.

Let us start with the smoking ban. I am against it anyway on the twin grounds that I smoke and that it is hypocritical of the government to preach choice whilst outlawing it. The point at issue here, however, is just the signs. It is a blanket ban, applicable in all indoor public places. One of the reasons given by the proponents of a blanket ban was the potential difficulty which would otherwise exist of defining where you could and where you could not smoke. The full ban does at least have the merit of simplicity.

So why do we need notices everywhere, including churches where no-one would dream of smoking? Let’s start at the top, with strutting Supernanny Caroline Flint. Flint is on a roll at the moment, her bossy I-know-better-than-you attitude in tune with New Labour’s illiberalism and, sadly, with an increasingly supine populace. Having won the smoking ban itself, it is predictable that she would want to rub it in with notices, making the display of them as much an offence as smoking itself.

Matthew Parris – no more signs, please

Matthew Parris has the knack of writing passionately on subjects where few would disagree with his view but no-one will do anything about it. He does the big controversial things too, but his forte is the unregarded topics which adversely our affect our lives and our environment, either without our noticing them or which we notice with resigned certainty that nothing will be done.

His Times article on Saturday was headed “No smoking. No this. No that. And no more signs, please”. His starting point is that the smoking ban requires notices to be stuck up in every enclosed public place, including cathedrals. There are many things you are not allowed to do in cathedrals – arson, murder and sex amongst them – but there is no requirement nor practice that notices be stuck up to warn the public of this. Why should a blanket ban on smoking – which all are presumed to know about and which has never been common practice in cathedrals anyway – require anything more than murder by way of notices?