All posts by Macfivenews

Motoring and travel journalist, opinionated gob on a stick
Motoring news

Drivers back speed cameras at schools

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UK static speed or safety camera which motorist have backed outside schools

Drivers have backed the use of speed cameras outside schools. During Road Safety Week the UK’s largest independent road safety charity, IAM RoadSmart, highlighted findings from its annual Safety Culture Study.

This has found that 82 per cent of the British driving public are in favour of using speed cameras to automatically fine drivers travelling more than ten miles per hour over the limit near schools.

However, the survey of 2,000 motorists went on to highlight that attitudes towards speeding on motorways were significantly different, with only 63 per cent of drivers supporting the use of cameras to detect those driving ten miles per hour above the limit on motorways.

Worryingly, it also identified that just under half of all motorists (46 per cent) think it is acceptable to drive at 80 miles per hour on the motorway, while as many as one in four believe it is acceptable to do so at speeds greater than 80 miles per hour.

And while acceptance of motorway speeding remained broadly consistent among drivers aged 17 to 69, there was a noticeable increase among those who travel longer distances. A staggering 56 per cent of those who cover more than 10,000 miles on the road each year believed it acceptable to reach speeds of 80 miles per hour or more on the motorway.

Neil Greig, Policy and Research Director at IAM RoadSmart, said: “It is reassuring to see that the majority of motorists we surveyed are in favour of using speed cameras to improve road safety outside schools. Speeding in towns may be universally disliked, but it is clear that we still have a long way to go before the same message gets through on motorways.

“Speeding causes more than 4,000 casualties each year on UK roads – that’s an average of 11 people a day killed or seriously injured. So it is extremely disappointing to see such apparent acceptance of speeding on motorways, and we need to do more to create a fundamental shift in attitude and behaviour here.”

Motoring

Volvo put to the crash test

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  • Going . . . a Volvo Cars about to be dropped off a crane
    Going . . . a Volvo Cars about to be dropped off a crane
  • Gone . . . The Volvo crumples under the impact
    Gone . . . The Volvo crumples under the impact

It is the most extreme crash test ever executed by Volvo Cars, and a crucial one. Extrication specialists often use cars crashed at the Volvo Cars Safety Centre to hone their life-saving skills.

To allow rescue services to prepare for any possible crash scenario and to simulate the forces that erupt in the most extreme crashes, beyond what can be simulated with ordinary crash testing, Volvo Cars recently took equally extreme measures. For the first time, it dropped several new Volvos multiple times from a crane, from a height of 30 metres.

This approach helped create enough damage to adequately simulate the damage found in the most extreme crash scenarios: think of single-car accidents at very high speed, accidents whereby a car hits a truck at high speed, or accidents whereby a car takes a severe hit from the side.

In such situations, people inside the car are likely to be in a critical condition. Therefore, the priority is to get people out of the car and to a hospital as quickly as possible, using hydraulic rescue tools known in the industry as the ‘jaws of life’. Extrication specialists often talk about the golden hour: they need to release and get a patient to the hospital within one hour after the accident has happened.

All findings from the crashes and the resulting extrication work will be collected in an extensive research report. This report will be made available free of use to rescue workers elsewhere, allowing them to benefit from the findings and further develop their life-saving capabilities.

Usually, rescue workers get their training vehicles from scrapyards. But these cars are often up to two decades old. And in terms of steel strength, safety cage construction and overall durability, there is a vast difference between modern cars and those built 15 to 20 years ago. And new Volvos are made of some of the hardest steel found in modern cars.

This makes it crucial for rescue workers to constantly update their familiarity with newer car models and review their processes in order to develop new extrication techniques. In other words, these training sessions can mean the difference between life and death. So at the request of the rescue services, Volvo Cars decided to step things up a notch.

“Normally we only crash cars in the laboratory, but this was the first time we dropped them from a crane,” says Håkan Gustafson. “We knew we would see extreme deformations after the test, and we did this to give the rescue team a real challenge to work with.”

A total of 10 Volvos, of different models, were dropped from the crane several times. Before the drop, Volvo Cars safety engineers made exact calculations about how much pressure and force each car needed to be exposed to in order to reach the desired level of damage.