Speed camera poll scrapped due to ‘wrong result’
The Yorkshire safety camera partnership, or casualty reduction partnership, as they like to be called, have pulled a poll off of their website because most of the votes on the poll were not in favor of speed cameras. The poll was initially put up on their website and asked for a yes, no or don’t know answer on the subject of speed cameras effectiveness at saving lives on Britains roads.
After a number of votes had been cast the number of ‘no’ votes outweighed the ‘yes’ votes with a staggering 94% of people stating that they didn’t think the speed cameras were effective. Shortly after this the partnership pulled the poll stating that spammers had voted many many times in order to artificially affect the results.
This action was met with a barrage of complaints against the partnership who responded by saying “The poll was 74% in favour one day and - literally - 94% against the next”. It’s not impossible for the results to change like this and still be genuine. After all, the partnership state that they only have 5,500 visitors to their site each month, hardly a high traffic website by anyones standards. On day one of the poll after the first person has voted we would expect to see a 100% result for one of the options. If by day two a further twenty people vote the results could change to a few percent short of the exact opposite. With such a low traffic website it’s quite feasible to see huge swings in the results caused by genuine votes.
On their comments page the partnership reveal a number of favorable statistics that suggest huge public support for their cameras. Yet if their polling systems are so open to spamming and abuse, as they suggest, how on earth can we be expected to take any of these figures seriously? Indeed if their online polling system is so open to spam and abuse why are they being allowed to conduct research in such a diabolical and unprofessional way? How many of their facts and figures have been drawn from similar polls in the past which could easily have been abused be people wishing to influence the results?
Like many of the ‘partnerships’ that run the speed cameras in Britain Yorkshire have changed their name to a ‘casualty reduction partnership’ presumably due to the negative sentiment now felt for the phrase ’safety camera’.
Despite the many dubious poll results seen on the ‘casualty reduction’ websites the department for transport figures from 2005 state that only 5% of road traffic accidents are caused by a driver exceeding the marked speed limit, with 12% attributed to “traveling too fast for the road conditions”
Filed under: The Politics of Motoring