John Avison: French for slow

Jun 25 2009 by John Avison, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

French for slow

I APPLAUD Clr David Sheard’s initiative in setting up speed warning signs on Wakefield Road.

It’s true they look a bit like shooting range targets: let’s hope they aren’t used as such. As Clr Sheard said, they have a lot of these things in France.

Anything that attempts to reduce the number of deaths on Wakefield Road is to be welcomed.

However, there’s no evidence that they work. Even if there are fewer deaths on a stretch of road where they are installed, there can be no absolute proof that some other factor wasn’t at work.

I recently drove 2,270 miles across France. Neither my wife nor I saw a single speed camera. Come to think of it, we saw just two police patrol cars. The occupants of one of these were attending the scene of an overturned van.

Statistics don’t help in this case. France has 29m cars (2003) on 514,605 miles of road; the UK has 32m (2003) cars on 265,543 miles of road. So the density of traffic is about twice as high in Britain as in France.