Thursday, August 18, 2005
GOVERNMENT HIDES PROOF THAT SPEED TRAPS CAUSE DANGER
This was from US site www.thenewspapaper.com & I haven't seen it elsewhere. It is perfectly reasonable to think that speed traps cut accidents. It is quite proper for the government to spend our money finding out. What is not in any way prsper is for the government to find out that they are wrong, suppress the report & continue pushing the lie that we need more such traps.
I did an earlier article about a minister writing to a critic thanking him for pointing out that there figures did not show speed as a cause of accidents & how he was going to fiddle them.
This is grossly improper & leads to the conclussion that ANY government figures whatsover will be fixed when convenient. Very Orwellian.
With a fairly honest government the responsible
Minister would be fired. With a very honest government so would the civil servants.
With Bliar nobody will even get their knuckles rapped:
............................................................
8/16/2005
Secret UK Study: Speed Cameras Increase Injury Accidents
Full text of suppressed UK government study shows speed cameras increase accidents 31 percent on freeways, 55 percent in work zones.
The UK Department for Transport funded, then suppressed, a study that shows a 55 percent increase in injury accidents when speed cameras are used on highway work zones and a 31 percent increase when used on freeways without construction projects. According to the Transport Research Laboratory, the "non-works [personal injury accident] rate is significantly higher for the sites with speed cameras than the rate for sites without."
An analysis of this data, buried on page 43 of the report, yields the following result:
Effect on Personal Injury Accidents
Enforcement Type Construction Zone No Construction
Conventional speed cameras 55% increase 31% increase
Speed-averaging cameras (SPECS) 4.5% increase 6.7% increase
Police patrols 27% reduction 10% reduction
View Table 3.18 in original format
Although the Department for Transport's Highways Agency funded the study, no information regarding these results was ever made public until a Freedom of Information Act request was honored earlier this month. The Transport Research Laboratory attempted to suppress the UK taxpayer-funded study further by charging £40 (US $72) for access to the results. Moreover, the study's executive summary calculates only the aggregate accident rate including the benefit of manned police patrol cars in the work zones. The significant decrease in accidents from a human police presence was used to offset the increase in camera accidents.
"It is outrageous that this sort of information has been hidden from the public," said Safe Speed road safety campaign founder Paul Smith whose FOIA request uncovered the study's existence. "We have all seen strange driver behaviour where fixed speed cameras operate. This report highlights the dangers. We're not surprised to see this information -- we have know for years that speed cameras were the wrong road safety strategy, and it's a huge relief to see the truth coming out so clearly"
The TRL study compared accident reports covering 29 highway construction zone projects over 730km of road from November 2001 to July 2003 with an equivalent period without the construction zones, controlling for changes in traffic volume. In the US, the state of Illinois plans to implement a similar freeway work zone speed camera program within the next few months.
The full text of this taxpayer-funded public policy document is available in 620K PDF format at the source link below.
Source: Safety Performance of Traffic Management at Major Motorway Road Works (Transport Research Laboratories, 8/5/2005)
I did an earlier article about a minister writing to a critic thanking him for pointing out that there figures did not show speed as a cause of accidents & how he was going to fiddle them.
This is grossly improper & leads to the conclussion that ANY government figures whatsover will be fixed when convenient. Very Orwellian.
With a fairly honest government the responsible
Minister would be fired. With a very honest government so would the civil servants.
With Bliar nobody will even get their knuckles rapped:
............................................................
8/16/2005
Secret UK Study: Speed Cameras Increase Injury Accidents
Full text of suppressed UK government study shows speed cameras increase accidents 31 percent on freeways, 55 percent in work zones.
The UK Department for Transport funded, then suppressed, a study that shows a 55 percent increase in injury accidents when speed cameras are used on highway work zones and a 31 percent increase when used on freeways without construction projects. According to the Transport Research Laboratory, the "non-works [personal injury accident] rate is significantly higher for the sites with speed cameras than the rate for sites without."
An analysis of this data, buried on page 43 of the report, yields the following result:
Effect on Personal Injury Accidents
Enforcement Type Construction Zone No Construction
Conventional speed cameras 55% increase 31% increase
Speed-averaging cameras (SPECS) 4.5% increase 6.7% increase
Police patrols 27% reduction 10% reduction
View Table 3.18 in original format
Although the Department for Transport's Highways Agency funded the study, no information regarding these results was ever made public until a Freedom of Information Act request was honored earlier this month. The Transport Research Laboratory attempted to suppress the UK taxpayer-funded study further by charging £40 (US $72) for access to the results. Moreover, the study's executive summary calculates only the aggregate accident rate including the benefit of manned police patrol cars in the work zones. The significant decrease in accidents from a human police presence was used to offset the increase in camera accidents.
"It is outrageous that this sort of information has been hidden from the public," said Safe Speed road safety campaign founder Paul Smith whose FOIA request uncovered the study's existence. "We have all seen strange driver behaviour where fixed speed cameras operate. This report highlights the dangers. We're not surprised to see this information -- we have know for years that speed cameras were the wrong road safety strategy, and it's a huge relief to see the truth coming out so clearly"
The TRL study compared accident reports covering 29 highway construction zone projects over 730km of road from November 2001 to July 2003 with an equivalent period without the construction zones, controlling for changes in traffic volume. In the US, the state of Illinois plans to implement a similar freeway work zone speed camera program within the next few months.
The full text of this taxpayer-funded public policy document is available in 620K PDF format at the source link below.
Source: Safety Performance of Traffic Management at Major Motorway Road Works (Transport Research Laboratories, 8/5/2005)
Sunday, August 14, 2005
FORMER ETHNIC MAP OF FORMER YUGOSLAVIA
It has been pointed out to me that the pre-war & post-war distribution of population in Yugoslavia proves unambiguously who the victims of ethnic cleansing were & that this proves the media have lied.
Quite true this map shows the point.
Had the NATO powers decided to destroy Yugoslavia but to do so along ethnic lines this would have been almost within the traditions of the more thuggish Great Powers of Metternich & other liberals. The fact that they decided to split it on deliberately non-ethnic lines & to correct nature by genocide & ethnic cleansing is what really puts Clinton, Kohl etc on a par with the Nazis. It will be seen that a legitimate Moslem Bosnian state would have been about a 3rd of NATO's protectorate (or less since the Bihac Moslems made their views plain by rising against their "national" leader & allying with the Serbs. It is equally clear that if limited to their national territory Croatia would be 2/3rds its current size & that the Dalmations who, being culturally linked to Venice, were never exactly loyal Zagreb nationalists, would probably have chosen to remain in Yugoslavia.
While it has been said that Yugoslavia was never real in fact the successor states are the ones which do not have any real demographic justification (except possibly Slovenia) & could not have been maintained except by NATO violence.
The map actually underemphasises the degree of ethnic mixing since it shows only the largest grouping in each area. It also underemphasises the degree to which ethnic cleansing has been almost purely an anti-Serb phenomenon, something which every remotely honest newspaper & TV station admit but no UK or US one does. This is because the Serbs under Milosevic (the "butcher of Belgrade") largely did not cleanse their own territories, for example the said Belgrade currently has 200,000 Moslem inhabitants, 70,000 of them Albanians.
Rather than "deserving" their enemies this makes the Serbs positively saintly (possibly to much so - evolution gave us feuds & hatreds because, according to game theory, turning the other cheek is a poor survival strategy). One can make a very good case that had Milosevic & Karadic not been so decent & peace-loving as to repeatedly trust western cease fire guarantees & give their enemies ceasefires when they were winning they would not have lost. This, of course, means that the NATO/Nazi powers have achieved their conquests at the cost of losing any future trust from any nation, which I personally think was worth, on its own, more than running Kosovo.
There are Moslems in Belgrade. If the USA had had the entire population of New York murdered & of California turned into refugees does anybody think it would be safe to be a Moslem in the rest of the country. For the UK it would be London cleansed & Birmingham murdered. We have seen seen Americans beating up Sikhs after 9/11 & Brits killing a Muslim recently for attacks which, proportionately are barely pinpricks.
Incidentally in case anybody thinks this map, being from a Serb site, is biased here is one created by our German Nazi friends in 1939 but I didn't use it because a lot of the Serbs aren't there anymore.
Quite true this map shows the point.
Had the NATO powers decided to destroy Yugoslavia but to do so along ethnic lines this would have been almost within the traditions of the more thuggish Great Powers of Metternich & other liberals. The fact that they decided to split it on deliberately non-ethnic lines & to correct nature by genocide & ethnic cleansing is what really puts Clinton, Kohl etc on a par with the Nazis. It will be seen that a legitimate Moslem Bosnian state would have been about a 3rd of NATO's protectorate (or less since the Bihac Moslems made their views plain by rising against their "national" leader & allying with the Serbs. It is equally clear that if limited to their national territory Croatia would be 2/3rds its current size & that the Dalmations who, being culturally linked to Venice, were never exactly loyal Zagreb nationalists, would probably have chosen to remain in Yugoslavia.
While it has been said that Yugoslavia was never real in fact the successor states are the ones which do not have any real demographic justification (except possibly Slovenia) & could not have been maintained except by NATO violence.
The map actually underemphasises the degree of ethnic mixing since it shows only the largest grouping in each area. It also underemphasises the degree to which ethnic cleansing has been almost purely an anti-Serb phenomenon, something which every remotely honest newspaper & TV station admit but no UK or US one does. This is because the Serbs under Milosevic (the "butcher of Belgrade") largely did not cleanse their own territories, for example the said Belgrade currently has 200,000 Moslem inhabitants, 70,000 of them Albanians.
Rather than "deserving" their enemies this makes the Serbs positively saintly (possibly to much so - evolution gave us feuds & hatreds because, according to game theory, turning the other cheek is a poor survival strategy). One can make a very good case that had Milosevic & Karadic not been so decent & peace-loving as to repeatedly trust western cease fire guarantees & give their enemies ceasefires when they were winning they would not have lost. This, of course, means that the NATO/Nazi powers have achieved their conquests at the cost of losing any future trust from any nation, which I personally think was worth, on its own, more than running Kosovo.
There are Moslems in Belgrade. If the USA had had the entire population of New York murdered & of California turned into refugees does anybody think it would be safe to be a Moslem in the rest of the country. For the UK it would be London cleansed & Birmingham murdered. We have seen seen Americans beating up Sikhs after 9/11 & Brits killing a Muslim recently for attacks which, proportionately are barely pinpricks.
Incidentally in case anybody thinks this map, being from a Serb site, is biased here is one created by our German Nazi friends in 1939 but I didn't use it because a lot of the Serbs aren't there anymore.
