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Strathclyde Safety Camera Partnership is a joint-working initiative to help reduce the number of road crash casualties at recognised accident locations in the West of Scotland. It was one of eight pilot safety camera schemes established across Great Britain in 2000. Initially, only the Glasgow area was covered in the trial run by Strathclyde Police and Glasgow City Council.
The partnership has since expanded across the whole of Strathclyde Police Force area to include the trunk and local authority roads of North Lanarkshire, South Lanarkshire, Argyll & Bute, East Dunbartonshire, West Dunbartonshire, Renfrewshire, East Renfrewshire, Inverclyde, East Ayrshire, North Ayrshire, South Ayrshire as well as Glasgow City.
The Partnership operates a combination of fixed, mobile and red light camera sites across the area plus the SPECS average speed camera system which was installed on the A77 in July 2005. It operates within the rules and guidelines of the Scottish Safety Camera Programme. Road Casualties Road accidents are an ever-present part of modern life. In the last half-century more than 300,000 people have been killed and 17 million people injured on Britain’s roads, with tens of millions more involved in damage-only accidents. The price to society of not preventing these accidents - in terms of medical costs, lost output, grief and suffering, damage to vehicles and property, policing and administration – was estimated at £18 billion for 2004 alone. Driver behaviour is seen to be the over-riding cause of crashes, with actions such as lack of attention, driving too close and bad overtaking all being common faults. Speed remains a major contributory factor in crashes and the link with excessive speed increases in line with the severity of injuries sustained by the people involved. Safety cameras have a clear role in discouraging drivers from speeding in areas where there has already been a history of crashes involving death or serious injury. The heartening news in Strathclyde and in Scotland as a whole is that the road accident trend is decreasing, as the efforts made into improving road safety appear to be paying off - Scotland has already met the Government’s 2010 casualty reduction targets. Safety cameras and casualty reduction The effect of speed on the resulting severity of injuries in road crashes can be clearly seen when looking at statistics from safety camera sites.
This is seen in the personal injury crash statistics covering three years data before and after installation of camera sites introduced between 2000 and 2005. Three years is the standard comparison period for evaluation of road safety measures. There has been an overall decline of 37% in personal injury crashes. However, for crashes involving serious/fatal injuries the fall is much more significant at 61%. It is a fact that the energy built up through a vehicle’s speed can have a devastating effect on the human body in the event of a collision. Our advertising campaign, ‘It’s 30 for a Reason’ stresses that message. A few miles an hour can make all the difference between life and death to a pedestrian struck by a vehicle.
While it would not be claimed that cameras are solely responsible for the difference in the above figures, there can be little doubt that they are having a significant effect on road safety. | 
