Driving offences

Copyright @ 2010, Taylor & Francis Group. This material is posted on this site with the permission of the publishers.This chapter on driving offences will largely follow the template of earlier chapters except that owing to their vast number, a limited selection only will be examined based on their high volume, seriousness and public concern. The first section will define what driving offences are, how they developed alongside the emerging car culture, and it will consider the contemporary landscape. The second section will give a general overview of patterns and trends, those most likely to engage in road traffic offending, and kinds of explanations voiced by drivers and theoretical approaches used. The next three sections will follow a similar pattern and focus on speeding, bad driving – mostly dangerous and careless offences, and impaired driving – mostly drink-driving but mentioning drug-driving and fatigued driving. In addition, contemporary debates and key issues concerning each will be considered, along with official responses to each offence category comprising court-based penalties and other measures. The final section will draw the key threads and themes together, noting the danger of work-related driving. Given that up to a third of all road traffic collisions involve somebody at work at the time accounting for up to 20 fatalities and 250 serious injuries every week (DfT and HSE, 2003), the importance of reducing traffic offending is clear

Techno-surveillance of the roads: High impact and low interest

Copyright © 2010 Palgrave Macmillan. This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Crime Prevention and Community Safety. The definitive publisher-authenticated version Crime Prevention and Community Safety 10(1): 1-18 is available online at the link below.Road crashes and road crime are huge international problems produced by global society’s increasing dependence on motorised transport. To help reduce these crash and crime statistics, roads technology is rapidly developing to prevent the former and deter the latter. This technology largely works by vehicle surveillance, and as with surveillance technology used in other arenas of crime prevention, drawbacks and dangers go along with the safety and security enhancing aspects. This paper reviews some key emerging roads technologies, the theoretical concerns raised by them and how, through various theoretical frameworks, they could be explored by the discipline of criminology. It urges that the surveillance aspects of road crime prevention and the study of vehicle-related crime more generally would benefit from criminological consideration and be theoretically rewarding. Moreover, in view of the centrality of the roads in contemporary life and the extent of global harm caused there, it contends that criminology should engage with this terrain

Vehicle-related crime and the gender gap

Although vehicle-related offending and traffic offenders are of interest to some behavioural psychologists, criminologists have been less enthused and their concern has been largely restricted to crime to vehicles rather than crime by drivers or wider society. Both disciplines have, however, largely ignored the contribution of women to vehicle-related offending statistics, mirroring the pattern seen in regard to mainstream offending. This paper attempts to plug the gap by considering the relative contributions of men and women to motoring conviction data and self-report offending studies. To some extent it also does this by age, where evidence for a ‘ladette’ style of driving among young women is examined from the conviction data. In general, a gender gap similar to that in mainstream crime is noted, and key theoretical explanations that could account for this are assembled. Implications for improving road safety and research are then considered given this gap and emerging support for the non-homogeneity of female driving styles

Research and policy: Have we got the balance right?

Since the shift towards reliance on evidence-led policies the amount and salience of road safety research commissioned by government and other public bodies has increased substantially. This paper examines research knowledge that has helped to inform recent policies contained in the 2005 Road Safety Bill and Consultation Paper on Offences involving Bad Driving and considers whether the balance between research and policy is about right, whether more research is needed or whether missed policy opportunities from research can be identified. Focus is on the offences of unlicensed and uninsured driving, speeding, impaired driving (drink, drugs and other medical aspects) and bad driving, where much research has been targeted. Concern is expressed to ensure adequate resources are made available to provide the enforcement capability required to police new, modified and still troublesome offences and policy-makers are asked to consider gender differences when assessing public support for changes to traffic law enforcement policy. The paper concludes by asserting the value of recent research in steering current policy towards practices likely to help in casualty reduction but regrets the failure to proceed with some bolder moves supported by research

Gender differences in responses to speed cameras: Typology findings and implications for road safety

Automated speed cameras in England and Wales have become a very common means of enforcement of speed limit breaches in most police force areas, but they are not without controversy despite the majority of public opinion behind them. Research in the mid-1990s showed that drivers responded to speed cameras in one of several key ways, and the typology of responses produced was linked with drivers’ characteristics. Now that women comprise more than 4 out of 10 licensed drivers in England and Wales, it is timely to revisit the earlier research by considering the gender characteristics of the driver typology, and this paper contrasts the results longitudinally with those obtained from a 2003 survey that inter alia explored similar issues. The implications for road safety of the behavioural and attitudinal differences noted by gender (and age) are discussed, especially in the context of risk-based control policies and the term ‘drivers’. This latter aspect is achieved by way of a brief analysis of national newspaper articles

Speed limit enforcement as perceived by offenders: Implications for roads policing

Copyright@ 2010 The Authors. This is the post-print version of the article. The final published version may be accessed at the link below.Getting caught for speeding is an emotive issue. This paper analyzes an unexpected source of data captured by unprompted comments left at the end of a questionnaire by a sample of British drivers who all had penalty points on their licences, many for speeding.The paper’s relevance to roads policing is that perceived fairness of police procedures is crucial in shaping public support, and comments made by this sample of offending drivers indicated that speed limit enforcement through the operation of the speed camera system was often seen as unfair. Since roads policing is closely linked with this and with many drivers having penalty points on their licences, the views of such drivers could be instructive, given the continuing reliance on camera technology and the need for police to offer public reassurance. Finally, the implications for roads policing are considered.The data used in this paper are derived from a study funded by the Department for Transport (DfT)

The effects of speed cameras: How drivers respond

This study set out to examine the effects and effectiveness of various strategies related to the deployment of speed cameras, and to explore how different types of driver responded to cameras and perceived their operation. Recommendations for best deployment were to be considered. It was carried out between 1993 and 1996 after the Road Traffic Act 1991 authorised the use of automatic speed devices for the detection of offences. A series of 12 surveys arranged in five sets and having some cross-sectional and some longitudinal elements was undertaken together with some depth interviews, and self-report measures predominated. Five police forces helped to set up the research. In total 6879 drivers took part. The particular interventions focused upon comprised camera signing alone; two kinds of publicity campaign linked with speed camera deployment; prosecution following detection by speed camera; and the effects of cameras when first installed and over time.The Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions

Roads policing: Current context and imminent dangers

© The Authors 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of CSF Associates: Publius, Inc. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: [email protected]. The final version of this paper can be accessed at the link below.This paper will argue that roads policing is the public face of the police for many citizens and thus enjoys an elevated profile. Yet the delivery of roads policing services requires urgent care and attention. As was the situation a century ago, potential and actual conflict with the driving public could be close at hand as more reliance is placed on enforcement technology and more drivers become criminalised and their vehicle movements logged. Indeed, it will be contended that unless great care is taken, such could be the public disaffection with traffic law enforcement and monitoring policies that the legitimacy of the police itself could be challenged. After a brief update of recent developments concerning roads policing nationally and internationally, the second section will underline the ways in which roads policing provides a crucial service. Details follow of dangers lying in wait for the service if the pressing enforcement issues around roads policing are allowed to drift. Finally, some suggestions are outlined to help inform discussion of these matters that could simultaneously facilitate achievement of other key roads policing objectives

Globular Cluster Formation in the Virgo Cluster

Metal poor globular clusters (MPGCs) are a unique probe of the early universe, in particular the reionization era. Systems of globular clusters in galaxy clusters are particularly interesting as it is in the progenitors of galaxy clusters that the earliest reionizing sources first formed. Although the exact physical origin of globular clusters is still debated, it is generally admitted that globular clusters form in early, rare dark matter peaks (Moore et al. 2006; Boley et al. 2009). We provide a fully numerical analysis of the Virgo cluster globular cluster system by identifying the present day globular cluster system with exactly such early, rare dark matter peaks. A popular hypothesis is that that the observed truncation of blue metal poor globular cluster formation is due to reionization (Spitler et al. 2012; Boley et al. 2009; Brodie & Strader 2006); adopting this view, constraining the formation epoch of MPGCs provides a complementary constraint on the epoch of reionization. By analyzing both the line of sight velocity dispersion and the surface density distribution of the present day distribution we are able to constrain the redshift and mass of the dark matter peaks. We find and quantify a dependence on the chosen line of sight of these quantities, whose strength varies with redshift, and coupled with star formation efficiency arguments find a best fitting formation mass and redshift of $\simeq 5 \times 10^8 \rm{M}_\odot$ and $z\simeq 9$. We predict $\simeq 300$ intracluster MPGCs in the Virgo cluster. Our results confirm the techniques pioneered by Moore et al. (2006) when applied to the the Virgo cluster and extend and refine the analytic results of Spitler et al. (2012) numerically.Comment: 13 Pages, 13 Figures, submitted to MNRA

Does the threat of disqualification deter drivers from speeding?

Road Safety Research Report, number 96, is available from the National Archives: Department for Transport, and can be accessed from the link below.It has long been recognised that driving speeds that are excessive and inappropriate to the conditions are a major contributory factor in road accidents, and a major issue for road safety. Restraining driving speeds has proved to be a difficult task, given the improvements over the years in both vehicle performance and road design. Within the traditional ‘three Es’ countermeasures of engineering, education and enforcement, recent years have seen the introduction of a wide range of engineering measures designed to bring about speed reduction, but these tend to be restricted to specific parts of the road network. New technologies such as Intelligent Speed Adaptation (ISA) offer considerable promise, but mainly in the medium or longer term. Similarly, educative efforts to induce attitude and behaviour change in this context are bearing fruit, yet this is a long-term rather than short-term project. For the foreseeable future, enforcement will remain the principal means of influencing speed, by setting speed limits and imposing sanctions on drivers who are caught exceeding them. The number of licence endorsements has increased enormously in recent years. However, over the same period the number of disqualifications resulting from ‘totting-up’ points has decreased. This would seem to indicate that many drivers who accumulate up to 11 penalty points are either acting as if deterred by the threat of disqualification, or are avoiding disqualification in some other way. The extent to which penalty points act as a deterrent for the benefit of road safety in general is therefore an important issue, and this report describes work that has been carried out to study this issue by TRL and Brunel University, under contract to the Department for Transport