Do accidents move down the road
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JUST as a corset pushes the unwanted from one place to another, so, according to Middlesex Polytechnic researchers, does the treatment of accident blackspots. A study of 133 sites in 16 London boroughs showed that accidents at them decreased by 22 per cent over the three years after safety measures had been taken, but rose by 10 per cent on neighbouring link roads and junctions.
Ken Huddart, the Greater London Council's chief traffic engineer, is not impressed by the proposition. There is, he says, not enough evidence to support it.
Meanwhile, an insurance company has published statistics on the incidence of accidents to various classes of driver. Entertainers have a 22.9 per cent annual risk of a pile-up, followed hotly by journalists with 21.1 per cent. I was beginning to think that the outlook for entertaining journalists must be pretty bleak when a "friend" assured me that I was in no danger on that account.