GoSafe has backed a report produced by Road Safety Support which urges police forces to make changes to their speed camera enforcement strategies in order to reduce road deaths and injuries.
Teresa Ciano, GoSafe Partnership Manager, has expressed her support for the 'Raising the Game - Enforcement Strategy' document that was publicly released last week.
GoSafe, which is a member of Road Safety Support, adopted a wide area, more flexible approach to mobile safety camera enforcement, which the report recommends, a year ago.
Teresa Ciano, said:
“Raising the Game comes just over 10 years following the end of the Department for Transport (DfT) safety camera programme. Many partnerships continued and evolved in different guises since then, but without that overarching consistency of a national set of guidelines.
We have got the opportunity now to regroup and unite to raise our game. The national safety camera programme in the 90’s and noughties had great success in achieving road casualty reduction and improving the safety on our roads. We haven’t seen the same levels of improvement since the end of the programme, and the Raising the Game Strategy comes at a time when the DfT are looking at how casualty reduction moves forward and we can focus on making every day a day without a road death.
In Wales, we were happy to adopt the wide area, flexible element of the strategy over the last 12 months.’ We call it the “3R strategy” - meaning Right time, Right place, Right reason. The use of data to inform our deployments according to operational risk whilst removing that element of predictability of enforcement at the “usual” locations means that we can maximise the compliance with the speed limit everywhere.
The increase in levels of speeding during the COVID-19 pandemic reflects the theory that where people perceive there is not likely to be enforcement, it encourages speeding and therefore increases road safety risk and this strategy moves us towards our aspirations for no deaths on our roads.”
Latest DfT casualty data shows that there were 1,752 UK road deaths in 2019, which is similar to the levels reported since 2012.
‘Raising the Game’ highlights the complacency among drivers in relation to speed camera use in recent years, and urges forces to adopt the new approach in order to reduce the number of people killed or seriously injured.
It recommends an urgent step change in order to increase the perception of speed camera detection, to jolt motorists into driving more carefully on all roads – not just those where they expect to see a camera.
Mobile speed camera vans, which are highly visible and can be utilised over a wider area, should be used to support traditional roads policing efforts, the report states.
Mobile cameras can detect offences over a greater range and can be moved around frequently, delivering far greater general deterrence to the motoring public.
‘Raising the Game’ was written by Road Safety Support’s enforcement experts, who have worked in speed camera operation in the UK since the 1990s. It explains how many UK police forces are still using a similar criteria that was developed back in 1992 when speed cameras were first introduced in the UK.