Are We Policing the Rule, or Managing the Risk?
Imagine the same type of accident kept happening on a building site. A competent safety investigation would not simply install a camera, record every breach and fine the worker each time it happened.
The obvious questions would be different. Why is this happening? Is the training sufficient? Can the risk be engineered out? Does the rule itself address the thing actually causing the accidents?
Punishment might still have a place where somebody deliberately ignored a clear safety requirement. Nobody would seriously suggest, however, that punishment alone amounted to effective risk management.
Road safety presents an interesting comparison.
Britain is extremely good at detecting certain mistakes
England and Wales recorded almost 2.94 million motoring offences in 2024, excluding Metropolitan Police figures. Around 2.54 million, or 86%, were speed-limit offences. Another 596,782 motoring offences were recorded by the Metropolitan Police once cancelled cases are excluded. GOV.UK
Those numbers do not mean millions of motorists simply received fines. Around 51% of cases outside the Met resulted in driver retraining; a basic 'speed awareness course', 37% in a fixed penalty notice and 12% proceeded towards court action. The system therefore already contains a mild educational component. GOV.UK
Speed is particularly easy to measure. A calibrated camera can determine whether a vehicle was travelling at 74 mph or 84 mph with considerable precision. The resulting offence is objective, recordable and capable of being processed at enormous scale.
Many other characteristics of poor driving are much harder to automate plus this limit can penalise someone for driving at 72mph on a clear, dry, open motorway, yet wouldn't have an issue with someone doing 68mph in heavy rain & traffic.
A camera cannot readily determine whether somebody has failed to appreciate a developing hazard 300 metres ahead. It cannot easily measure poor anticipation, unnecessary lane changes, weak motorway discipline, (and there's a lot of middle-lane hoggers about) inappropriate following distance (tailgaters), lack of understanding of vehicle dynamics or an over-reliance on driver-assistance technology.
Technology is beginning to address some of these things, although speed remains unusually simple to quantify.
That raises a question worth asking:
Have we concentrated road-safety policy on behaviour that is easiest to measure, rather than necessarily all of the behaviour that is most important to improve?
Speed matters, although the number does not tell the whole story
None of this removes speed from the equation. Additional speed increases kinetic energy, extends the distance travelled during a driver's reaction time and can increase both stopping distance and collision severity. Excessive or inappropriate speed can plainly turn an avoidable incident into a catastrophic one.
The engineering question begins one stage earlier.
Why did the collision become likely in the first place?
A driver may be travelling within the posted limit while following another vehicle too closely. Another may fail to see stationary traffic developing ahead. Someone else may enter a bend legally but considerably too quickly for the available grip. Each driver is technically compliant with the numerical speed limit at that instant.
Their risk may be considerably higher than that of another motorist travelling modestly above the limit on an empty, dry motorway with good visibility.
That does not make exceeding the limit legal. It illustrates something different: legal speed and appropriate speed are not always the same measurement.
What drivers actually do is interesting
Department for Transport measurements provide an unusually useful insight here because they are not simply statistics about motorists who have been caught speeding.
The DfT uses automatic traffic counters at selected locations where external factors such as junctions, sharp bends, steep gradients and speed cameras are excluded as far as practicable. The purpose is to examine the speeds drivers choose under relatively free-flowing conditions. GOV.UK
During 2024, 44% of cars measured on motorways exceeded the 70 mph limit under those conditions. GOV.UK
That statistic should not be interpreted as evidence that 44% of drivers are dangerous, nor that the speed limit should automatically be higher. It does suggest something socially interesting: when motorists are relatively free to choose their speed, almost half choose something above the statutory maximum.
Persistent behaviour on that scale deserves examination rather than a simplistic conclusion in either direction. One interpretation is that an extremely large number of motorists routinely make the same unsafe decision. Another is that the legal threshold and motorists' perception of an acceptable motorway speed have gradually diverged. Reality could contain elements of both.
When widespread non-compliance becomes a safety question of its own
Engineers frequently look for repeated patterns. One isolated failure might be operator error. A thousand similar failures raise questions about the system as well. The same principle can be applied carefully to road behaviour.
A rule does not become wrong simply because lots of people break it. Drink-driving restrictions would be an obvious example where popularity or social acceptance would tell us very little about whether the behaviour is safe.
Persistent mass non-compliance can still contain useful information. Perhaps drivers misunderstand the risk. Perhaps the environment encourages behaviour inconsistent with the rule. Another possibility is that the rule has become a poor proxy for the underlying risk it is intended to control.
A serious investigation should be capable of considering all of those possibilities.
Road safety has become very good at compliance
The criminal justice figures reinforce the sheer scale involved. There were 812,000 prosecutions for motoring offences in England and Wales during 2025, a ten-year high. Almost all sentences for motoring offences, 95%, were fines, with an average fine of £327. GOV.UK
Enforcement clearly has an important role. Drink-driving, dangerous driving, mobile-phone use, deliberately extreme speed and other serious behaviours require meaningful deterrence.
The question is whether deterrence and compliance have gradually become too dominant in the broader conversation about competence. The conventional approach often asks: Did the driver break the rule? An engineering approach additionally asks: Why did the dangerous situation develop? Those questions overlap, although they are not identical.
The things we cannot easily photograph may matter just as much
Consider two drivers approaching slowing motorway traffic.
Driver A is travelling at 75 mph, watching far ahead, maintaining a substantial gap and already recognising that traffic is beginning to compress.
Driver B is travelling at exactly 70 mph, using adaptive cruise, sitting comparatively close to the vehicle ahead and looking principally at the car immediately in front.
One has committed an easily measurable offence.
The other may present the greater developing collision risk.
The example is deliberately simplified, and it does not legally excuse Driver A's speeding. It demonstrates the limitation of using one measurable variable as a complete description of safe driving.
Good driving contains countless elements that are difficult to capture numerically: vision, anticipation, judgement, spacing, smoothness, mechanical sympathy and the ability to recognise when circumstances are changing. The difficulty of measuring them does not make them less important.
Perhaps collisions deserve more engineering and less assumption
Us motor engineers see the consequences after things have gone wrong; damage patterns can tell a story. Impact direction, energy transfer, wheel displacement, suspension damage, secondary contact and the relationship between visible and hidden damage can all help reconstruct what actually happened.
The same principle applies further upstream. Road safety becomes more sophisticated when it treats a collision as a failure to investigate rather than simply an offence to categorise. Was speed inappropriate? Was observation poor? Was the driver's following distance inadequate? Did road layout contribute? Did weather change the available grip? Was the vehicle unsuitable or poorly maintained?
Did the driver simply lack the experience required to recognise the developing situation? Sometimes the answer will unquestionably be excessive speed. Sometimes speed will have increased the severity while another failure actually initiated the event. The distinction matters if the objective is preventing the next collision.
Imagine applying the building-site approach to the road
A strong health-and-safety culture does not wait for the same injury to happen repeatedly and congratulate itself on identifying who breached the rule each time.
It studies near misses, repeated behaviours, equipment, human factors and the environment. Controls are then changed according to the risk discovered. Road safety should increasingly operate in the same way.
Modern vehicles already generate enormous amounts of information. Road infrastructure is becoming increasingly connected. Telematics can identify harsh braking, sudden steering inputs, following behaviour and recurring locations where drivers repeatedly encounter difficulty. Artificial intelligence will make patterns within that data easier to identify.
The opportunity therefore exists to become considerably better at investigating why motorists get into trouble, rather than becoming indefinitely better only at recording when they cross a numerical threshold.
Enforcement and engineering should complement each other
The interesting argument is not that Britain should stop enforcing speed limits, but that enforcement represents only one part of a mature safety system.
Training, road design, vehicle technology, intelligent infrastructure, appropriate speed, driver competence and analysis of recurring collision patterns belong alongside it. Millions of recorded offences demonstrate that Britain has built a remarkably effective system for detecting non-compliance.
The next question is whether the same sophistication could be applied to understanding the behaviours that lead to collisions before they occur.
Punishment asks who broke the rule. Engineering asks why the failure occurred.
If the objective is genuinely fewer collisions, road safety probably needs to keep asking both.
