Pocket GPS World - SatNavs | GPS | Speed Cameras

Benjamin Disraeli famously said: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

The Department for Transport (DfT) released figures earlier in the week which gave details of the perceived effectiveness of some speed cameras. These figure were drawn from local authorities who recently started publishing data on accidents and casualties on particular stretches of road before and after the installation of speed cameras in their particular areas.

The national press picked up on this with headlines from The Telegraph such as "Speed cameras fail to cut accidents" and "Speed cameras do not cut accidents... they create them, study finds" from the Daily Mail. It wasn't a study by the way, it was just a release of simple data.

However, some may feel that the Guardian have produced a more measured reaction to the story headlined: "So speed cameras can cause accidents? The maths just doesn't add up".

They argue that, statistically speaking, random factors could lead to a situation where the number of accidents increase after the installation of a speed camera saying "This will happen even if the probabilities of an accident happening have actually gone down".

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