On Tue, 21 Mar 2006 20:06:20 +0100, you wrote:
Strangely, he has actually been cited by a couple of
reputable
publications, including the BBC, which perhaps mistook him as a
spokesperson for motorists? Really a very strange character though,
especially the constant references to having spent 5000 hours
"researching". He also claims to be an "advanced road safety
enthusiast"...whatever that is.
Smith is a strange one alright. He was OK up until a three-month
disappearance from the usual Usenet forums he frequented - presumably
the illness which killed his one-man business - but since then he has
rebranded himself as a "full time road safety campaigner". This is
also what ran up the debts which - incredibly - his supporters are
paying off for him. If he's telling the truth about that, of course.
He always worked back from the conclusions, as many activists do, but
what really gets me is this bizarre "one third of fatalities" claim,
which is very eyecatching and has got him a lot of publicity.
Now he can point to some successes for the anti-camera brigade (which
of course he claims as vindication) like issues with hand-held camera
accuracy and the Government bringing in the three-coffin rule, it
gives an impression of a solid campaign headed for success. Even a
stopped clock is right twice a day, of course, but you can almost see
the goalposts shifting as he takes you from "some cameras are faulty"
to "cameras are faulty" to "camera convictions are unjust" to
"use of
cameras is wrong". Another favourite is to go from "speeds less than
the limit can be dangerous" through "1mph over the limit is not
inherently dangerous" to "speeding is not dangerous", all the time
justifying it with careful interpretation of figures which say the
exact opposite :-)
One TRL report - an experimental accident reporting technique, is
Solid Gold Gospel Truth, because it gives speed as a minority cause of
collisions (which is a misrepresentation anyway, as many other causes
also implied excessive speed) but all the TRL reports which say
driving too fast is dangerous - i.e. all of them - are "flawed" and
even "fraudulent". His absurdities are not held up to scrutiny
because we have no mechanism for official sanctions against lies told
on the Internet. He reports camera partnerships to the Advertising
Standards Authority, who would have a field day with his website, but
they can't touch him because he has never published a brochure, flyer,
poster, paid advert or anything else they regulate.
He has stated that 100mph plus on single-carriageway roads is
"perfectly safe", that there is nothing wrong with parking in disabled
bays, that he can't see why the disabled should get special treatment,
and so on. And as usual with this kind of person, proving him wrong
never actually results in him stopping saying something. So even
after the charts and figures were analysed in great detail and it was
shown that his supposed loss in trend applies only to road users and
roads unlikely to be affected by cameras, he still carried on (and
carries on) making the claim. Old Lenin knew what he was talking
about when he coined that phrase about a lie told often enough :-)
But you can see why he's popular with a certain class of driver,
because there is *so* much evidence that they are dangerous and
selfish that they will latch onto anything which says otherwise.
And to be fair most of our articles on road safety and speed limits
are affected by the same libertarian mindset. The constant references
to the fastest roads being the safest (with qualifications noting that
this is the result of design, grade separation, very few junctions and
so on being quietly removed), the way it's always Germany's Autobahns
which are held up as a model, although the speed-limited British
motorway network is far safer, and the M25 with its variable speed
limits safer still - well, you know all this stuff. Sometimes it
makes me ashamed to be a driver. Ah well.
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG