Continue reading »]]> On 30 June and 1 July Oxford Brookes University is holding a History of Road Safety Symposium (http://ah.brookes.ac.uk/conference/history_of_road_safety_symposium). History, as they say, is written by the victors.

The concluding speaker is Rob Gifford, Executive Director of the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety. The title of his presentation is “How parliament came to love seat belts.”

PACTS offers historians this view of its victory in securing Parliament’s love of seat belts, which culminated in the passage of the law (on its website at http://www.pacts.org.uk/newsletters.php?id=2).

“DfT Celebrates 25th Anniversary of the introduction of seatbelts

On the 31st January 2008, the 25th anniversary of the law change which made front seatbelt wearing compulsory was celebrated. PACTS itself was set up by Barry Sheerman MP as part of the fight to get mandatory seatbelt wearing turned into legislation. Eight years later it became compulsory for all backseat passengers to use seatbelts and it is estimated that since the introduction of the first law change in 1983, seatbelts have prevented 60,000 deaths and over 670,000 serious injuries.”

I have been challenging the PACTS view of seat belt history since before it was history – http://john-adams.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2006/SAE%20seatbelts.pdf – but to no avail.

My interest was re-stimulated by the absurd claims made by PACTS in celebration of the 25^th anniversary of its achievement. I have challenged the claim in a number of blogs about seat belts on my website – http://www.john-adams.co.uk/category/seat-belts/ – including four open letters to the Executive Director of PACTS.

A “History of Road Safety Symposium” is an excellent idea and the programme includes some excellent contributors. It is a great pity that it will be undermined by giving the final slot to a celebration – unopposed – of the discredited seat-belt law.

Continue reading »]]> 1. Simple assertion.

An example can be found in the current issue of The Economist by the journal’s Science and Technology correspondent writing under the name of Babbage (http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/02/road_safety).  Babbage notes that the US fatality rate has been “inching down over the past half century” and then proceeds to explain why: it is the result of “the wholesale introduction of safety belts and air-bags, as well as tougher drunk-driving laws.”  This provoked me into posting the following comment on Babbage’s article.

“Babbage disappoints. He notes that in the US the fatality rate per 100m vehicle-miles had “been steadily inching down over the past half century.” He goes on “For that, traffic authorities everywhere can thank the wholesale introduction of safety-belts and air-bags, as well as tougher drunk-driving laws.”

The “inching down” has been going on for much longer than the last half century – it began with the Model-T – and long pre-dates seat belts, air bags and drunk-driving laws. In Britain the “inching” rate has been about 5% a year since 1950 and the death rate per 100m vehicle kilometers is now about one twentieth of the 1950 level. The contribution of seat belt and drunk driving laws to this “inching” is statistically undetectable – see “Managing Transport Risks: what works?” (http://john-adams.co.uk/2010/12/02/managing-transport-risks-what-works/).

The inching-down with increasing levels of motorization, noted by Babbage, is a social learning process first described by Reuben Smeed in 1949. It is manifest in countries at all levels of motorization and appears to have little connection with technical or legal safety interventions. Today countries with low levels of car ownership are achieving kill rates per vehicle, with modern imported cars with 100 years of safety technology built into them, as high or higher than were achieved with model-Ts 100 years ago. The inching-own process is now widely labeled, in honour of its discoverer, as the manifestation of Smeed’s Law – try Google.”

2. Suppression of evidence.

Culling files recently in the course of moving house I came across some correspondence with the World Health Organization. In 1986 they had commissioned an article by me on seat belt legislation for The International Digest of Health Legislation. I assumed that the invitation was the result of things that I had already published on the subject:

* http://john-adams.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2006/SAE%20seatbelts.pdf
* http://john-adams.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/significance.pdf
* http://john-adams.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/risk%20and%20freedom.pdf, chapter 5.

The article I submitted summarized the evidence and arguments of these earlier essays. I assumed they knew what they were commissioning.

I received a prompt reply from someone with the title “Chief, Health Legislation”:  “I would like to inform you that, for editorial reasons, your review will not appear in the International Digest of Health Legislation. Even though, under the terms of the contractual agreement with you, copyright in the text is vested with the Organization, we have no objection to the review being submitted by you for publication elsewhere, subject to the proviso that no mention is made of the fact that the review was commissioned and an honorarium was paid by WHO.”

From that day to this (http://www.who.int/roadsafety/projects/manuals/seatbelt/en/) the WHO has campaigned for seat-belt legislation. No mention should be made of evidence that casts doubt on the efficacy of such legislation – that would undermine the efficacy of its campaign for more legislation.

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I have been invited to contribute a chapter to a book called Risk Theory Handbook to be published by Springer. Publication is scheduled for a year from now, so there is still time to make changes/corrections/improvements. Comments are welcomed. Here is the abstract.

Abstract

What does a transport safety regulator have in common with a shaman conducting a rain dance? They both have an inflated opinion of the effectiveness of their interventions in the functioning of the complex interactive systems they purport to influence or control. There is however a significant difference. The clouds are indifferent to the antics of the shaman and his followers. But people react to the edicts of a regulator and frequently not in the way the regulator intends. There are two different kinds of manager involved in the management of transport risks: there are the “official”, institutional, risk managers who strive incessantly to make the systems for which they are responsible safer, and there are the billions of individual fallible human users of the systems, each balancing the rewards of risk against the potential accident risks associated with their behaviour. Conventional road safety measures rest on a model of human behavior that assumes that road users are stupid, obedient automatons who are unresponsive to perceived changes in risk and who need protecting, by law, from their own and others’ stupidity. The idea of risk compensation underpins an alternative model of human behavior: that road users are intelligent, vigilant, responsive to evidence of safety and danger and, given the right signals and incentives, considerate.

The full paper can be found here.

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I am grateful for a question posted today by Carsten Jasner in response to an earlier post of mine – Seat belts again. It has prompted another look at the data:

“Very interesting! But when the number of car occupant deaths increases while the number of all road user deaths decreases – how can the number of pedestrians and cyclists [deaths] also increase?”

Figure 1, all road accident deaths (excluding motor cyclists), shows that a well-established downward trend was interrupted (by the seat belt law?) and replaced by a slightly rising plateau. After the seat belt law (arrow) total deaths did not fall below the 1983 level until 1991.

Figure 1

(Source of statistics: http://www2.dft.gov.uk/adobepdf/162469/221412/221549/227755/rrcgb2009.pdf)

For many decades, as car ownership increased in Britain the number of people moving about in cars also increased while the numbers moving about on feet or bicycles, and exposed to the risk of road accidents, fell sharply. Part of the decline in walking and cycling can be explained by the shift to car travel; another part by the fact, that as the volume of metal in motion increased, children were withdrawn from the threat, while vulnerable adults, especially cyclists, withdrew themselves. Figure 2 shows a dramatic decline since 1930 in the ratio of pedestrians and cyclists killed to car occupants killed – from 5.95 in 1935 to 0.47 in 2006.

Figure 2

Figure 3 zooms in on more recent years. Between 1970 and 1982 the ratio dropped from 0.96 to 0.81. In 1983, the first year of the seat belt law, the ratio jumped sharply to 1.00, before resuming its historic downward trend, but it did not drop below 0.81 until 1989. This sharp jump is of course exactly what one would expect in the light of the decrease in car occupant deaths and increase in pedestrian and cycling deaths coinciding with the seat belt law noted earlier. The step change in the trend suggests that each year since 1983 the seat belt law continues to deserve credit for the deaths of vulnerable road users, who but for the law would still be with us.

Figure 3

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To Robert Gifford

Executive Director, The Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety

Dear Rob

Failing a response, I propose to draw this one-sided correspondence to a close. I believe that I have established:

a. that the claim that seat belts have saved 60000 lives since the implementation of the seat belt law is nonsense, and

b. that it is your (PACTS’) view that a measure that could be demonstrated to save the lives of motorists would be OK so long as the number of vulnerable road users killed as a result is smaller. I pressed you on this point in open letters 2 and 3 and you have not, as yet, denied it.

When you sent me the paper by Richards et al that I discussed in my third open letter you said the paper “highlights the difference between the number of lives saved overall through the use of seatbelts and the number saved through the implementation of legislation in 1983.” I take it from this that you accept these “highlights” as validation of the claim still on your website that seat belts have saved 60000 lives since 1983.

In my third open letter I said that with such a sudden large increase in the wearing of seat belts (140%) one should see a sudden large downward step in the established downward trend. I asked “Where is it?” I have found it! I was looking in the wrong place.

In the graph below I have reconstructed the analysis of Richards et al that highlights the difference between the number of lives “saved” overall through the use of seatbelts and the number “saved” through the implementation of legislation in 1983.

To accept the claim in the paper by Richards et al that seat belts saved 2500 lives in 1983 you have to believe that 1869 extra lives were saved by seat belts compared to the year before. Since you cannot see such a dramatic effect in the graph of actual fatalities you are forced to believe that in 1983, coinciding with the implementation of the law, there was some dramatic increase in danger on the roads that, but for the seat belt law, would have killed 1869 more car occupants. Even people who can believe six impossible things before breakfast would find that a bit of a stretch.

Why am I doing this? Why am I trying to resolve this issue via open letters on my website? I have no personal desire to cause embarrassment, but earlier attempts to sort this out via personal emails have run into the sand.

In a parliamentary debate in 1979 William Rodgers, then Secretary of State for Transport, claimed “On the best available evidence of accidents in this country – evidence which has not been seriously contested – compulsion could save up to 1000 lives a year” (Hansard, March 22, 1979). This clearly did not happen, but the myth has grown and PACTS has been complicit in this growth.

Consider the following more recent parliamentary exchange in a debate about compulsory cycle helmets:

Mr. Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab): There are some who would accuse my hon. Friend of extending the nanny state. Does he agree that the same arguments were used in the 1960s and 70s against the wearing of seat belts, and that the legislation passed in that respect has reduced the number of deaths and the personal tragedy experienced by families whose members would otherwise have died on the roads?

Mr. Martlew: My hon. Friend is perfectly right. We have always seen a knee-jerk reaction against such measures, whether on the wearing of seat belts or preventing drink-driving, but, after a while, such things become common sense and we wonder why we did not do them before. (Hansard 23 Apr 2004 : Column 529)

Your website proclaims that PACTS was set up “as part of the fight to get mandatory seatbelt wearing turned into legislation.” The “success” of the seat belt law might fairly be described as PACTS’ foundation myth. It is not a bit of harmless exaggeration.

You have accepted that the law caused an “appreciable” number of extra deaths among pedestrians and cyclists. Further, as we have seen above, the myth is now being invoked to promote another myth about the efficacy of cycle helmet legislation. So profoundly embedded in the parliamentary mind is the “success” of their seat belt law that no one saw reason to question the assertion of Mr Jones. A compulsory helmet law would significantly impair efforts to promote cycling and kill the London cycle hire scheme; no potential user of the scheme would want to put on a sweaty helmet that did not fit, and no scheme has been proposed to provide clean well-fitting helmets for spontaneous users. For a comprehensive over-view of the cycle helmet law debate please visit nohelmetlaw.org.uk.

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To Robert Gifford

Executive Director, The Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety

Dear Rob

Thank you for sending me a paper claiming that seat belts have saved 57000 lives in the UK between 1983 and 2007.  Is this the source of the 60000 claim posted on  your website in 2008?

I have discovered that the paper you have sent me (by DC Richards, R Hutchins, RE Cookson, P Massie and RW Cuerden) is accessible on line at http://cdm266301.cdmhost.com/cgi-bin/showfile.exe?CISOROOT=/p266401coll4&CISOPTR=3062&filename=3063.pdf starting at page 223. (Not entirely straightforward; this link takes you to the conference website – a search for “Richards” will take you to the paper. It is a large file, about 10mb and takes a while to download.)

The paper documents an increase in seat belt wearing rates for drivers of well over 100%. I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the data represented in their Figure 6.

Figure 6. Effect of seat belt legislation on seat belt wearing rates for car drivers

It then estimates that seat belts are 61% effective in preventing fatalities in crashes. The fact that wearing a seat belt considerably improves one’s chance of surviving a crash is also not disputed.

It then calculates (their Figure 5) how many lives have been saved by seat belts since the UK law came into effect.

Figure 5. Number of car occupant casualties prevented by seat belts

It also presents a graph showing how many fatalities remain. (their Figure 4)

Figure 4. Fatal and serious car occupant casualties

And herein lies a mystery.

Richards et al have charted a large increase in the use of a safety measure that provides significant protection in crashes. This measure they claim saved over 2500 lives a year (and rising!) in the first 8 years of the law. With such a sudden large increase in the adoption of such an effective safety measure one should see a large downward step in the established downward trend. Where is it? One cannot see any effect in the graphs here and here . Richards et al don’t even look for it; their graphs don’t start until 1983. They appear remarkably uncurious about why it should be that in the first eight years after the law the more lives seat belts were saving (Figure 5), the more car occupants were being killed (Figure 4). And they display no interest in the possibility of risk compensation: “factors such as any change in driving behaviour for occupants who do / do not wear a seat belt were not taken into account” (p 229).

Further they make no comment on the fact that the reduction in driver fatalities that did occur in 1983 (the year in which evidential breath testing was introduced) consisted almost entirely of drivers with alcohol in their blood.

Great Britain driver deaths by place and alcohol level in dead driver. Source: Broughton and Stark 1986

Three questions:

1. Do you consider that the paper by Richards et al validates the 60000 claim still on your website?

2. If so can you explain the absence of the large downward step that should appear in the graphs here and here ?

3. Can you explain why seat belts were so extraordinarily selective in saving the lives of drivers who had been drinking?

Finally you say:

“I do not wish to be drawn into the debate about the benefits/disbenefits of cycle helmets. PACTS’ aim must be to improve the safety of all classes of road user and tackle the issue of the disproportionate risk placed upon those least able to protect themselves.”

It was not my intention to draw you into a debate about the benefits/disbenefits of cycle helmets; the PACTS report on this subject seems to me to be admirably clear and balanced. But I am interested in PACTS’ aspiration to “tackle the issue of the disproportionate risk placed upon those least able to protect themselves.”

I am seeking confirmation of a point I raised in my last open letter. From your Significance article it appears that it Is PACTS’ position that a measure that saves the lives of motorists is justified so long as the number of vulnerable road users killed as a result is smaller. Is this your position?

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To Robert Gifford

Executive Director, The Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety

Dear Rob

I’m sorry but I must persist. The power and endurance of the myth that PACTS and RoSPA have built around the seat belt law takes a lot of deconstructing. So long as belief in the efficacy of the law persists it will continue to serve as one of the principal arguments of the campaigners for compulsory cycle helmets.

Seat belts and helmets are routinely linked. Injury lawyers argue helmetless injured cyclists risk having their compensation reduced for contributory negligence in the same way that unbelted motorists would. (see also here) Earlier this year the Mississippi Senate threw out a bill to repeal the State’s mandatory cycle helmet law on the grounds that “the helmet requirement was similar to the state’s seat belt law, designed to protect people from avoidable injuries.”

You say in response to my earlier letter “While I entirely accept that the piece on our website referring to the estimate of 50,000 lives [60000 actually] could have been more appropriately worded, I cannot share the view that seat belts have not been an effective contribution to casualty reduction.”

Short of a complete public retraction I cannot imagine an “appropriate” way to refer to the 60000 claim. The claim that the seat belt law has saved 60000 lives is ludicrous. I accept that the number was not your invention, but so long as it remains on your website, it strongly implies to the reader that PACTS considers the claim to be valid.

I ask you to re-read this passage on your website:

“On the 31st January 2008, the 25th anniversary of the law change which made front seatbelt wearing compulsory was celebrated. PACTS itself was set up by Barry Sheerman MP as part of the fight to get mandatory seatbelt wearing turned into legislation. Eight years later it became compulsory for all backseat passengers to use seatbelts and it is estimated that since the introduction of the first law change in 1983, seatbelts have prevented 60,000 deaths and over 670,000 serious injuries.”

As most parliamentarians, and the rest of the world, will read it, PACTS is celebrating its role in saving 60000 lives. Indeed this piece of self congratulation identifies the seat belt law as the foundation stone of your organization.

In your article five months later in Significance (June 2008, sadly available free only to those with institutional access to electronic journals) you concluded that in the first year of the law it had saved not 2400 lives but 164 net. Here (for those without access to electronic journals) is Table 1 from your article.

In your article from which this table is taken you say: “The best estimates … are that extra deaths to vulnerable road users did accompany the introduction of mandatory wearing of seat belts.”

In your response to my article advocating repeal of the seat belt law you do not comment on my point that most of the decrease in car driver deaths in 1983 consisted of drivers who were over the alcohol limit (down 14%), and that this coincided with the introduction of evidential breath testing. Do you think that this change in the law with respect to drinking and driving had no effect?

In your Significance article you are clear that you believe the law has saved the lives of people in cars at the expense of vulnerable road users: “The picture shows a clear reduction in death and injury to car occupants, appreciably offset by extra deaths among pedestrians and cyclists.”

You then proceed to defend the law as follows: “It would … be a severe constraint on the use of safety measures if any measure were to be ruled out for which the larger number of deaths and injuries saved were differently distributed among road user groups from the smaller number resulting from the measure … The wearing of seat belts is therefore not exceptional among safety measures in that extra deaths and injuries that may arise from wearing occur in part (only in part because, if wearers drive more riskily, some of the extra deaths and injuries will occur to vehicle occupants) to different road user groups than those among which deaths and injuries are prevented—though the difference is perhaps sharper for belt wearing than for many other measures.”

I take this passage to mean that you think a measure that saves the lives of motorists is OK so long as the number of vulnerable road users killed as a result is smaller.

In the light of that argument I would welcome your comment on this analogy: an Organ Harvester Lottery in which healthy people will be selected at random to “donate” organs to people in need of them. One heart and one liver could save two lives at the cost of one – slightly better than the ratio that you argue justifies keeping the seat belt law. Throw in two kidneys and you get a four to one ratio of lives saved to lives lost. This is a gruesome but not wholly inappropriate analogy given the myth circulating at the time - (and still) that the success of the seat law was responsible for increasing the shortage of donor organs.

I do hope that you will take the trouble to comment on my website. Now that the campaigners for compulsory cycle helmets are on the march again that part of their “evidence” invoking the “success” of the seat belt law needs renewed scrutiny.

Best wishes

John

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To Robert Gifford

Executive Director, The Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety

Dear Rob

This claim made over a year ago is still on the PACTS website:

“On the 31st January 2008, the 25th anniversary of the law change which made front seatbelt wearing compulsory was celebrated. PACTS itself was set up by Barry Sheerman MP as part of the fight to get mandatory seatbelt wearing turned into legislation. Eight years later it became compulsory for all backseat passengers to use seatbelts and it is estimated that since the introduction of the first law change in 1983, seatbelts have prevented 60,000 deaths and over 670,000 serious injuries.”

I have demonstrated the claim to be nonsense: click here and here. A while ago I invited you to post a comment on this demonstration of nonsense on my website. You have declined to do so, so I now issue a more public invitation.

Borrowing from Churchill – the lie has got all way round the world before truth has got its pants on. If you Google the claim you get thousands of hits. Legislators like to believe their laws make a difference. If the BBC, the DfT, PACTS, RoSPA and Google all tell them their seat belt law has saved 60000 lives they will be inclined to believe it.

Why does it matter? The Association of Paediatric Emergency Medicine and the College of Emergency Medicine are now lobbying vigorously for a law that would make cycle helmets compulsory for children, and ultimately for all cyclists . Campaigners for cycle helmet laws routinely cite the “success” of the seat belt law. Their argument is seductively simple: seat belts and helmets reduce injuries in crashes; seat belt laws have saved lives and so would a helmet law.

The PACTS website is one of the ways in which your advisory council conveys advice to parliament. On this issue it has misled parliament. If parliamentarians are misled about the “success” of their seat belt law they are in danger of making the same mistake with a helmet law. I suggest that if you cannot refute my demonstration that the claim that the seat belt law saved 60000 lives is false, you should not just quietly remove it from your website, but retract it in a highly public manner.

The PACTS 2004 Parliamentary Briefing on cycle helmet use and effectiveness presents the case against compulsion in a clear, balanced and convincing way. It would be a great pity if it were to be undermined by pro-compulsion campaigners citing other PACTS “evidence” for the efficacy of the seat belt law.

I know it is difficult to admit to a clanger. But if you had devoted a moment’s thought to it you would have noticed that the DfT’s claim that the seat belt law had saved 60000 lives was preposterous. If you and RoSPA persist in endorsing the DfT’s claim you will assist in the promotion of a further nonsense that will inhibit efforts to increase cycling.

Best wishes

John

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Now in retirement and culling my files in the process of downsizing I came upon the following letter from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents dated 7 July 1981 shortly before Parliament was to vote on a seat belt law, and encouraging Parliament to vote for the law:

“TO ALL MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT

Dr. Adams has recently published a paper advancing the thesis that the wearing of seatbelts may actually increase road accidents by encouraging a sense of false security. … His paper presents road accident trends in several foreign countries to support his view. His paper requires detailed analysis. … For the time being his thesis remains unproven.”

25 years on RoSPA claims that the law has saved 60000 lives. Has it?

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Yesterday when I showed Mayer Hillman the graphs in my last blog on this subject he complained that they displayed the statistics for all road user deaths and not the statistics for those affected by the seatbelt law, i.e. people in the front seats of cars.

My excuse was that at the time I produced the graphs, almost 20 years ago, I was focused on total numbers because of the evidence that the law coincided, in Britain and elsewhere, with increases in the numbers of pedestrians and cyclists killed. Also, at that time no one was claiming that the law had saved anything remotely approaching the recent claim by the Government, RoSPA and PACTS of 2400 lives saved per year.

But stung by Mayer’s insistence that the claimed saving of 2400 lives per year was more than the total number of car occupants killed, I went back to the numbers.

The graph below shows the data for the same period for car occupants only. I asked the computer to fit a line to the data up to and including 1982 (the year before the law came into effect, small red arrow) and it produced the downward sloping trend displayed. When asked to fit a line to the statistics after the seatbelt law the computer replied with an upward trend. When the claimed 2400 lives saved is displayed on the graph it shows that the law should have brought impressive numbers back from the dead. The claim would appear to be based on the work of creationist statisticians.