Peter W Jones MInstP
Some weeks ago the esteemed UK Royal Automobile Club released a report from some of their leading experts which pointed out that Road Accident Investigation in the UK was fundamentally flawed because the Police Investigators placed too much emphasis on the detection of “law breaking,” with a determination of the fundamental causes of road accidents given a subsidiary or non existent place.
Professor Glaister also pointed out that
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In the last eleven years 337 people have died in UK air accidents.
In the same period 114 have died in train accidents.
And 53 people have been killed in UK territorial waters or on UK registered vessels.
For each of these accidents there was provision for an exhaustive inquiry by the Air, Rail or Marine Accident Investigation Branches.
Yet astonishingly, when it comes to accidents on the nation’s roads – where almost 36,781 people died over the same span of time – there is no provision for a similar body to uncover what happened and then make safety recommendations to prevent the same type of thing reoccurring
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See reference 1 below
In the UK, and I suspect in a great many other countries, Accident Investigators are almost entirely recruited from serving police officers due no doubt to the nature of the job. I think that there is an urgent need to give consideration to recruiting further Accident Investigators with graduate qualifications (at least) in Mechanical and other branches of Engineering and/or Physics. Each Police force needs at least one highly qualified engineer who can give a lead in rectifying the flaw that the RAC have discovered in the UK accident investigation process.
The current system seems to be working well as it determines who is to blame for accidents and I think it would make better use of existing officers and their resources if their ranks were supplemented, rather than have a new organisation superimposed as the RAC now propose.
Over a period of some years it seems to me that the Police Authorities have changed their policy and recruited a number of graduates, some of whom have performed very well and reached prominent positions. We would not have reached the current critical position reported by the RAC if adequate numbers of these graduates had been engineers or physicists recruited specifically for Accident Investigation or similar posts where appropriate knowledge was essential.
There is now a clear aim for professional engineers in the EU
and that is to reach “Chartered Status” (C Eng). The type of graduate special entry that I am referring to for police accident investigations would therefore need to have the appropriate academic qualifications to enable them to work towards CEng.
Local Police Authorities also need to review policies for the recruitment of serving police officers to posts as accident investigators. I do not serve as a local council representative on a police authority so have no inside knowledge of the current policies, but for several years I was an Affiliate of the Institute Traffic Accident Investigators (The “Training Grade” of membership) and became very familiar with procedures as I read their journals and news letters and attended some training sessions/seminars as well as exchanging much information via their private ( ie not officially linked to the ITAI) website/scientific chat room.
www.itai.org is the official internet site for the ITAI.
All I wish to draw attention to can be confirmed by looking at the public inter net site. It is not clear from this site whether any initial relevant qualifications must be held before entering into the ITAI “training grade.” I know that no relevant academic qualifications were required in the past and am rather disturbed to see that this has possibly not been altered. For many years Nurses wishing to work towards qualification as a State Registered Nurse had to have at least 5 “C” grades at GCE “O” level (including Biology), whereas for the comparable job today GCE “A” levels are likely to be a requirement.
The ITAI is a body which is quite independent of the Police or local or National Government; I only quote their web site as the requirements are very likely similar to those of the Police Authorities.
It is always possible that the Accident Investigators’ qualifications are set by National Government, as is the case for teachers. However, it is equally possible that due to some strange administrative error neither the Police Authorities or the Justice Department (formally the Home Office) have ever looked into this matter.
When this question is investigated I hope it will be agreed that Police Officers transferring to Accident Investigation must have at least 5 GCSE “C” grades or above and these must include English, Maths and Physics.
Over the last six years I have spent a great deal of my retirement looking at the safety of one small section of the motoring industry:- trailers, particularly the high aspect variety such as HGV’s and Caravans. In 2005 I produced a report on this matter for the Institute of Traffic Accident Investigators (ITAI). This arose because a group of concerned members had encouraged me (via a restricted inter net access site for accident investigators) to research this matter. The report (see Ref 2 below) was not presented to the 2005 ITAI Conference as it was felt that the ITAI did not wish to be the first body to draw attention to this problem ( this was the reason given to me in private by an ITAI official). I should point out that almost all ITAI members are existing or former UK Police Road Traffic Accident Investigators. The ITAI is one of the bodies that validates accident investigators qualifications.
The recent RAC report concerning UK Police Accident Investigators prompts me to reveal the main reason (as I saw things) that gave rise to a number of ITAI members asking me to investigate ( see Ref 3 below). I was “leaked” details of the tyre marks made on the road in a typical caravan snaking accident. (When a caravan “snakes” it exhibits lateral oscillations which can grow in intensity until the caravan eventually over turns.)
Over a period of many years it had been assumed that “burst caravan tyres” was the primary cause of “snaking” but following an analysis of the above “accident” tyre marks I was able to show that it was more probable that the snaking caused the tyres to burst. I was also able to report that Bath University wind tunnel research had shown that a large high sided vehicle overtaking a caravan could destabilise same. Bath University had also shown that strong winds can cause high sided trailers to “snake/oscillate,” but they have not researched caravan/trailer over run brakes. The latter is to be expected as I was able to show using only elementary Physics that this type of brake actuating mechanism can be very unreliable and at times dangerous.
The over run brake system, plus the friction based stabiliser fitted to nearly all new caravans, is more expensive than the electric brakes used in the USA for over thirty years.
The above only concerns trailers, but as some of them are huge and there is intense industry lobbying to have the size increased this matter should be understood by everyone who drives. I have never heard of a snaking caravan accident setting off a multi vehicle accident, but it is a further event waiting to happen unless the causes are tackled.
NB
MANY PEOPLE WHO ARE READING THE ABOVE ARE OVERLOOKING THE IMPORTANT LATE OCTOBER 2009
EDIT SHOWN BELOW.
References.
(1) The third item of
www.20six.co.uk/roadtrafficaccidents
headed “Flawed Police Road Crash Investigations.”
Also see end of this section for a reference to racfoundation.org
(2)
www.20six.co.uk/roadtrafficaccidents and www.caravanaccidents2.wordpress.com
were published on the web in early 2007 and at that time contained mainly the report I wrote for the ITAI in 2005. This can be found now by scrolling down to find the original index.
(3) See paragraph 601
www.caravanaccidents2.wordpress.com
EDIT: LATE OCTOBER 2009
There seems to be a blogging problem and I cannot get this blog to accept an update so I have placed same in
Edit 2/12/09
The main purpose of the racfoundation.org having a press conference was to promote Dr Elliots’ paper.
To view the paper Google “Dr Chris Elliot.”
