Yes How much of the £115 Million goes back into road safety?

Found some more interesting figures on the ‘BRAKE’ charity site:

In 2005-2006 the estimated total spend by all local authorities on dedicated road safety schemes was £135 million and the estimated spend on education, training and publicity for road safety was £37 million.

In 2000, the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety (PACTS) published a report on road safety spending in Great Britain. The report provided a breakdown of annual road safety spending activities, which can be seen below.

Public and Private Sectors £2,177m

Total Public Expenditure £944m

Ambulance and hospital services £474m (Health Service)

Enforcement £271m (£255m Home Office; £14m DETR direct; £2m DETR non-direct)

Local safety engineering £90m (£24m Las; £60m DETR direct; £6m DETR non-direct)

Driver and vehicle licensing £73m (£58m DETR non-direct; £15m DETR direct)

Education £29m (£27m Las; £2m DETR direct)

Transport of dangerous goods £7m (DETR direct)

Total Private Expenditure £1232m

MOT and other roadworthiness testing £683m

Driver/rider training and testing £469m

Driver licensing £38m

HGV/PSV operator licensing £27m

Enforcement £15m

The PACTS report highlighted that a large proportion of public sector spending was spent on measures relating to post-collision services, rather than prevention of incidents. This included Health Service expenditure on dealing with road crash victims, and Home Office expenditure on policing and court costs.

Interesting to see how much of ‘our’ money is spent ‘picking-up-the-pieces’ and prosecuting those who end up in court through accidents.

Would you also propose to shot all pheasants? 😉

I ran one over the other day…does that help? 😮

Don’t forget about mink that is establishing itself all along our waterways and decimating the water-rat population…I saw one myself a couple of years ago. It doesn’t help that some deluded ‘animal rights’ people released hundreds into the New Forest a while back.

At least farming them is now banned in the UK so it may be possible to eradicate them completely.

…about the only place I wouldn’t want to be for long is the flight engineers position up in the pylon between the engines. A position which I don’t think is used in modern operations (though I may be wrong.)

On original marks of PBY weren’t the throttles in the flight-engineer’s position…with none in the cockpit?

Another Undercarriage that looks extremely complex is on the B52, I Had a good look at it at Duxford and thought it was quite clever in the way it must have worked.

Both mainwheel units on the B-52 ‘castor’ at an alarming angle so the aircraft can land/take-off into wind in conditions that a ‘fixed’ u/c wouldn’t allow.

Not sure what the limits are but I’ve seen head-on video of a B-52 ‘side-slipping’ down a runway at about 20° to the centreline! 😀

Yes, a bit of a bodge-up to get it into service quickly I suppose.

Still at least the angle-of-attack (right?) of the wing was not changed so that it didn’t fly with its nose down and it’s **** in the air…like the Whitley! 😀

Lack of disabled access (mandatory on all public transport by about 2015)…plus they stopped making them in 1969! 😀

Maybe the government should scrap the fines and only put points on the licences of those who speed (and who register their car correctly of course). 😉

The ‘lost’ revenue could be recovered by a 0.5% rise in fuel duty but of course that would penalise everybody and not just the speeders.

Some sobering figures:

Revenue from speed cameras (2006): £115 million

Revenue from fuel duty (2004-2005): £23300 million

And no, I haven’t added a few too many zeros!

Anybody still think it’s all about the money? 🙂

If only the He177 had gone to four engines (I mean four nacelles) as quickly as the Lancaster (Manchester) did. 😉