@Steve
>>David Wilson, do you work for the DfT?"
Nope.
Not now, or in the past, or for any related organisation, camera partnership, etc, or in any paid or otherwise job anything to do with transport or road safety (or climate change, for that matter), or via any more tenuous connection you could dream up.
>>"Granted there must be many ‘David Wilsons’ in the world, but the numerous coincidences makes it is very difficult to believe this is merely an amazing fluke !!"
No doubt you'll continue to believe whatever you want.
However, hardly an 'amazing fluke'. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that for someone looking for an anonymous name slightly less obvious than 'John Smith', it'd be hard to do much better.
And IIRC, the only things I read and linked to were things that came up very early on Google with whatever obvious search terms I threw in.
>>"Furthermore, I was genuinely taken aback with your unusual level of knowledge of the Four Year Report - this amount of knowledge would be very much appropriate for a DfT road accident statistics manager."
That's deeply flattering, though I'm not sure how it squares with what I said last week.
Had I actually been any kind of expert, even with only a fraction of my faculties working (as is currently the case, only more so), I'd hardly have asked what the difference between the two tables was, would I?
Equally, if I was some DfT statistician sneaking out to do some background supporting of work I was involved in, how likely would I be to use my own name?
All I did was skim the report and look at the table you pointed my to, and then look a bit more at a few sections. If I could do that in the state I was in, I imagine most Register readers could do at least as well.
Finally, if I was a senior DfT statistician, don't you think I'd know what the speeding conviction / accident risk correlation was, and be able to produce it if it was useful, or have not mentioned it in the first place if it wasn't?
>>"Jeepers creepers! Are you being serious? You are the only person I know who has interpreted such claims in such a nonsensical manner (and I’ve argued this with a lot of people). For you to make such an interpretation would require the assumption that all such reduction claims are factoring RTTM, and always were even before any RTTM study had been done, let alone quantified; that is of course just silly!"
Steve, Steve, Steve.
Just stop and look at what I was effectively saying:
The average person, not caring or thinking or even *knowing* about RTTM, trends, etc, if told that fixed cameras cut accidents at their sites by X% might well be expected to think of that as "X% compared to if there hadn't been a camera there"
That's an entirely natural, intuitive approach - that to measure the effectiveness of doing something, it's best to compare it to not doing that thing, over the same time period.
If no-one you've talked to has ever suggested that to you before, you really should try arguing weith some more challenging people.
Or just stop and wonder what table H8 was *for*.
Or just admit that your '5:1 exaggeration' is itself rather a twisting of reality, and abandon it - you can't honestly claim the moral high ground compared to people jumping on the most positive looking number if you're doing the same thing in the other direction.
It doesn't matter that the average person knows nothing about RTTM, trends, etc, because they'll just think that whoever worked out the numbers *had* somehow been able to work out what the accident rate would have been if cameras hadn't been there, which does rather seem to be what was done for table H8.
>>"I won't be surprised if you don't even try to reply before this forum closes."
I'm sorry to disappoint you (again).
I just thought it was extending a courtesy to point out I would be away for some days, and that I might not be in a position to reply to anything you subsequently wrote.
Obviously, you chose to read that, and then write in such a way that if I didn't reply, you could come away feeling like you'd scored another point.
I'm surprised you feel you need such small victories.
However, I'll give you another bite at the cherry, if it means so much to you.
I'm still feeling like crap, you seem determined to take a thickly extreme view of pretty much everything I write, and I doubt I can be *bothered* to reply to anything else you come up with
Feel free to make what smug capital you want out of that.
I honestly couldn't give a flying ****, especially as there's probably no-one reading this now apart from me and you.