In Scotland there were 298 road deaths in 2003. Across the planet annually around 1.2 million people die and around 50 million are injured or disabled in road traffic collisions (Peden et al, 2004). Measures to reduce the speed of traffic are seen as essential to reducing road casualties (Crombie, 2002; Pilkington & Kinra, 2005). For car drivers in highly motorised societies levels of speeding behaviour vary systematically with driver gender, with driver age, with driver exposure measures such as reported annual mileage, with trip purpose and time pressure, with vehicle performance and size and with indices of driver personality (see Lancaster and Ward (2002), Stradling et al (2003) for reviews). Research has also shown that road traffic accident (RTA) involvement is associated with having been detected speeding for both car drivers (Rajalin, 1994; Cooper, 1997; Stradling et al, 2000, 2003; Gebers and Peck, 2003) and powered two wheeler riders (Ormston et al, 2003; Stradling and Ormston, 2003). In Scotland, around 181,000 speeding offences were recorded by the police in 2003. This paper combines data from two recent studies of Scottish car drivers, one conducted for the Scottish Executive and one for the Strathclyde Safety Camera Partnership. Both surveys involved in-home interviews with quota samples of drivers conducted by NFO Social Research (now TNS). Details of sampling strategy and sample demographics are given in Stradling et al (2003) and Campbell and Stradling (2003). Data from 1088 drivers from the first survey and 1101 from the second, who held a current driving licence, had driven within the previous year and who cited ‘car’ as their main vehicle when driving are combined here to give a picture of the current speeding behaviours and collision involvement of Scottish drivers. The paper concludes by suggesting that Speed Awareness Courses will prove the most enduring remediation for drivers detected speeding. (Author/publisher)
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