Interesting article (if it is all to be believed):

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/road-safety/2749419/Speed-cameras-the-twisted-truth.html

In 1991 the government launched its first £1 million TV ad campaign centred on the dangers of speeding (“Kill your speed, not a child”). In 1992 the police were given a new weapon when the first speed cameras were installed in west London.

By September 1994 government spending on TV ads was running at £2.7 million a year, now centred on the slogan that was to become familiar: “Speed kills”. In 1997 the yearly advertising budget reached £3.5 million. Cameras were now proliferating the length and breadth of the land. Police patrols, except on motorways, were being reduced. In 1999, as income from penalties for offences recorded by cameras soared towards £100 million a year…

The government…..would now take action, with a strategy that “will focus especially on speed”. A DfT strategy paper claimed speed was “a major contributory factor in about a third of all road accidents”. The “excessive and inappropriate speed” that helped “to kill about 1,200 people” each year was “far more than any other single contributor to casualties on our roads”.

The source given for this claim, to be repeated as a mantra by ministers and officials for years to come, was a report from the government’s Transport Research Laboratory, TRL Report 323: “A new system for recording contributory factors in road accidents”.

Not many people would have looked at this report, since it was only available for £45. But some who did were amazed. The evidence the report had cited to support its claim that speed was “a major contributory factor in about a third of all road accidents” simply wasn’t there. Many other factors were named as contributing to road accidents, from driving without due care and attention to the influence of drink; from poor overtaking to nodding off at the wheel. But the figure given for accidents in which the main causative factor was “excessive speed” was way down the list, at only 7.3 per cent.