FINALLY, what many road safety experts have been insisting for years has been borne out by the Department of Transport itself: that inattention by drivers rather than excess speed is the major cause of accidents. Not by a small margin either. Not concentrating properly on the road was found to be the most contributory factor in 32% of all accidents in the year 2005. Exceeding the speed limit accounted for just 5% - though going too fast for the road conditions contributed to 26% of fatal accidents. Supporters of speed cameras will say that even 5% justifies their existence. But critics, including the Safe Speed Campaign and this newspaper, who believed the government's simplistic single-solution approach to road safety was actually counter-productive, have also been insisting for years that cameras could themselves be a contributory cause of accidents by distracting drivers. This view also now seems to have been largely vindicated by the DoT's findings. Everyone concerned - not least this newspaper - wants to see road deaths reduced as far as is humanly possible, but the argument has always been how best to achieve this. By insisting that "speed" is the main culprit which can safely be left to cameras to enforce, many police forces until now have taken resources away from patrolling roads looking for bad, incompetent and dangerous driving. Other more effective and cheaper (but non-revenue raising) calming methods have also been dismissed. No, we were told, speed kills regardless of road or weather conditions or the competence of the driver. Now that the lie has been given to this lazy thinking, it is incumbent on the government to act quickly to address the real cause of road accidents and deaths. Too much time and too many lives have been wasted and lost already because those entrusted with our safety insisted that they alone knew best - that they had a monopoly on wisdom. Well they didn't. For all the speed cameras now littering the roads and criminalising all and sundry, 3,201 people were killed on Britain's roads last year - just 1% fewer than in 2004. These findings are not a licence to break speed limits, but they prove what we've been saying all along. It's bad drivers who kill - and they can be driving well inside the limits when they do. The government must instruct our police forces to act on this new information without delay. | 
