We have received a response (below) from West Midlands Police to our concerns about large numbers of mis-reported injury crash details on the very roads the council have made low speed, ie 20mph, zones nearly a decade ago. This zoning was aimed at making neighbourhoods safer for the most vulnerable road users, copying the hugely successful results of 30kph zoning across many European cities over recent decades in reducing pedestrian injuries.
As our previous blog reported* police crash reports in our data samples showed high levels of errors regarding speed limits on the roads – with nearly 90% of pedestrian injuries occurring on 20mph roads being mis-reported* as being 30mph roads. The concerning implications of this are two fold.
Firstly that aggregated data provided to priority setting bodies like the Police and Crime Panel and the Police Commissioners Office would wrongly indicate that there was no evidence of any serious problems with dangerous speeding in low speed neighbourhoods. Accordingly priorities and resources to combat dangerous speeding are inappropriately focused solely on higher speed roads (which is currently the focus, much to the disadvantage of the most vulnerable classes of road users) .
The second worrying implication is that when an officer mis-records the speed limit at the scene of a crash, there will be less appetite for considering driver culpability – particularly speeding in the circumstances leading to the crash. The sampled STATS19 crash records showed far higher likelihood of pedestrians being accused of making errors than driver culpability. This is simply not credible. Few “competent and careful” drivers obeying a 20mph speed limit can fail to avoid slow moving pedestrians. Moreover we know from multiple speed surveys that over 80% of drivers in 20mph zones do not exercise care and willfully exceed the speed limit by amounts that may pose little danger to themselves, but can be life-changing to vulnerable road users.
The response from WMP however treats this issue solely as a data entry problem – requiring better training of officers using the STATS19 crash recording system. It overlooks the key point of – highly probable – culpable driving behaviours needing better investigation at the the crash and appropriate follow up to provide justice for victims.
We will be writing back to WMP to suggest they review not only data entry training, but also providing a level of investigation that respects the rights of pedestrians to use streets without intimidation and injury.
Birmingham Living Streets campaign group 