On Monbiot on speed cameras

Monbiot has written an excellent article (as though he has any other kind, the bastard) on speed cameras in the UK. Specifically the fact that they work, and that people who say that they don’t invariably sacrifice good analysis at the alter of their own recklessness and selfish libertarianism.

Last week the transport minister Jim Fitzpatrick said he intends to double the penalty for drivers who break the speed limit by a wide margin. This means that people could lose their licences after committing just two offences. The papers are furious. The petrolheads have called for a petition which “will get as big a response as the road pricing one.”

Yes it’s brave, but not quite as brave as you might think. Despite endless attempts by the media to trivialise it, an RAC survey reveals that 62% of drivers still regard speeding as a serious offence. Even more surprisingly, 82% of British people surveyed approve of speed cameras, and the percentage has risen slightly since the mid-1990s. There is a genuine silent majority here, which is rarely represented in the media.

Please bear in mind that I am leaving out his endnotes as I go (his references can be found with his article).

My interpretation of this is that the doubling of the penalty is a function of this “silent majority” (a term I tend otherwise to dislike, co-opted as it most often is by Tory/Conservative/Liberal/Republican racists – Liberal referring to the Howard government), rather than deterrence: re-doubling the number of speed cameras would do that.

Monbiot spends some time criticising the BBC and their programme Top Gear (about which the less said the better, other than that it is petrol-head/hoon-legitimising utter waste of spectrum). Then to the interesting parts:

In Saturday’s Telegraph, Christopher Booker and Richard North published a long article appropriately titled “Speed cameras: the twisted truth”. A sharp decline in the death rate on the roads suddenly slowed down in the mid-1990s. They attribute this to the government’s new focus on enforcing the speed limits, especially by erecting speed cameras. What they fail to mention is that deaths started falling sharply again in 2003, after the number of speed cameras had doubled in three years.

They use similarly selective data to argue that there is no evidence that cameras have reduced deaths even at the spots where they are deployed. They hang their case on an oversight in a government report published in 2003. The report claimed that the accident rate had fallen by 35% where cameras had been installed. Booker and North rightly observe that it had failed to account for a statistical effect called “regression to the mean”. There might have been an abnormal blip in the accident figures, which would have returned to background levels of their own accord. The truth, they maintain, is that “speed cameras actually increased” the rate of accidents.

But what Booker and North fail to tell their readers was that in 2005 the government conducted a new analysis, which took account of regression to the mean. The new figures showed an average reduction of 19% for collisions which caused deaths or injuries after speed cameras had been installed.

Not to pass up some decent statistics. The government’s report found statistically significant reductions in Killed or Seriously Injured and Personal Injury Collisions (KSIs and PICs – their terms of art):

Overall,

Eco 145 students: confidence intervals! Everyone else: when a 95% confidence interval is entirely negative (positive) the effect being estimated is statistically significantly likely to be negative (positive). I.e. irregardless of those ‘blips’ to which people best ignored like to refer.

The report itself is quite impressive. Specifically, they found that:

• Vehicle speeds were down– surveys showed that vehicle speeds at speed camera sites had dropped by around 6% following the introduction of cameras. At new sites, there was a 31% reduction in vehicles breaking the speed limit. At fixed sites, there was a 70% reduction and at mobile sites there was a 18% reduction. Overall, the proportion of vehicles speeding excessively (i.e. 15mph more than the speed limit) fell by 91% at fixed camera sites, and 36% at mobile camera sites.
• Both casualties and deaths were down – after allowing for the long-term trend, but without allowing for selection effects (such as regression-to-mean) there was a 22% reduction in personal injury collisions (PICs) at sites after cameras were introduced. Overall 42% fewer people were killed or seriously injured. At camera sites, there was also a reduction of over 100 fatalities per annum (32% fewer). There were 1,745 fewer people killed or seriously injured and 4,230 fewer personal injury collisions per annum in 2004. There was an association between reductions in speed and reductions in PICs.
• There was a positive cost-benefit of around 2.7:1. In the fourth year, the benefits to society from the avoided injuries were in excess of £258 million compared to enforcement costs of around £96 million.

Top Gear really is a stupid programme.

“Hurricanes Katrina and Rita produced the largest single forestry disaster on record in the US”

Satellite imaging has revealed that hurricanes Katrina and Rita produced the largest single forestry disaster on record in the US – an essentially unreported ecological catastrophe that killed or damaged about 320 million trees in Mississippi and Louisiana.The die-off, caused initially by wind and later by weeks of pooling of stagnant water, was so massive that researchers say it will add significantly to the global greenhouse gas build-up. Ultimately it will put as much carbon from dying vegetation into the air as the rest of the nation’s forest takes out in a year of photosynthesis.

I had been wondering about this. Trees are basically waiting to exhale: yout cut one down, it dies, it releases the carbon dioxide that it had held as a living plant. Then, sure, you burn it and matter become worse. The logging, though, generates its own CO₂ problem (I believe George Monbiot taught me that). I didn’t think it would come to 320 million trees, though.

To make matters worse:

… the drowning of so many trees has opened vast and often fragile tracts to several aggressive and fast-growing exotic species that are already squeezing out environmentally productive native species.

Efforts to limit the damage have been hindered by the ineffectiveness of a $US504 million ($569 million) federal program to help Gulf Coast landowners replant and fight the invasive species. Congress appropriated the money in 2005 and added to it this year, but officials concede it got off to a slow start and only $US70 million has been promised or dispensed so far. Local advocates blame bureaucratic hurdles and low compensation rates.

“This is the worst environmental disaster in the United States since the Exxon Valdez accident … and the greatest forest destruction in modern times,” said James Cummins, the executive director of the conservation group Wildlife Mississippi.

“It needs a really broad and aggressive response, and so far that just hasn’t happened.”

The lead author on the study (forthcoming in Science) is Jeffrey Chambers. His website contains some discussion of the work:

Dramatic variability in Katrina-induced mortality in the Pearl River basin. Cypress-tupelo swamp forests in swales and other low-lying sites experienced little damage whereas adjacent bottomland hardwood forest suffered extremely high mortality (high resolution aerial imagery from LSU’s GIS Information Clearinghouse). Initial results from this project will be published in the 16 Nov 2007 issue of Science.

The Louisiana State University’s GIS site is pretty bloody impressive. With a 20Tb database, I imagine it’d want to be.

One wonders whether, with more information on the ecological consequences of the hurricanes still occurring (rather than the trees being considered a write-off), more/better attention/financial support will be given to the problem.

China, the dollar, and what does Goldman Sachs know that Sec. Paulson doesn’t?

So Goldman’s chief U.S. economist Jan Hatzius is out discussing the “lending shock” to come:

The impact of the U.S. mortgage market crisis on the underlying economy could be “dramatic” as leveraged investors may need to scale back lending by up to $2 trillion, according to investment bank Goldman Sachs.

…

… unlike stock market losses, which are typically absorbed by “long-only” investors, this mortgage-related hit is mostly borne by leveraged investors such as banks, broker-dealers, hedge funds and government-sponsored enterprises.

And leveraged investors react to losses by actively cutting back lending to keep capital ratios from falling — A bank targeting a constant capital ratio of 10 percent, for example, would need to shrink its balance by $10 for every $1 in losses.

“The macroeconomic consequences could be quite dramatic,” Hatzius said in the note to clients. “If leveraged investors see $200 billion of the $400 billion aggregate credit loss, they might need to scale back their lending by $2 trillion.”

“This is a large shock,” he said, adding the number equates to 7 percent of total debt owed by U.S. non-financial sectors.

Hatzius said such a shock could produce a “substantial recession” if it occurred over one year, or a long period of sluggish growth if it occurred over two-to-four years.

That’s basically the simple deposit multiplier, working backwards (and outwards). Don’t be surprised if, as this becomes a problem, the Fed starts following the lead of the Brits and begins messing with the structure/rules of fractional deposit banking. Given that they’ve bent some very sensible rules already (I should check to see how temporary that change became), I shouldn’t be the least bit surprised. We’re not their friends, after all – Wall Street is.

I realise that I have a bad attitude about Paulson – but this is precisely among the reasons why. He acts, now, as though he was never around when all of this shit was being aimed at the fans in the first place. All he seems to do now is big up the dollar while everyone else can plainly see that (a) it’s sinking, and (b) nothing is being done about it. Quite the opposite.

China has cooked up an answer: trying to re-export our own inflation, are you? Well:

Chinese lunchtime television on Friday gave ordinary people a basic tip on how to play the currency markets: sell the dollar!

A state news program, quoting unnamed “wealth management experts,” told residents with dollar accounts on the mainland to convert their holdings into yuan or a range of other foreign currencies, including the pound and the euro.

The Chinese people, as individuals, hold less than USD200bn of the stuff, we’re told – not a patch on the potential of a USD1.4tr sovereign wealth fund that the Chinese people, as a government, have on hand. That is properly frightening. It is not a good sign, though. For a start, if China is telling its own people to drop dollars, is there something they know that they aren’t telling us?

Not that I blame them (a reference again to Paulson and his – one should say former – cronies). I mean, just who are we, anyway, to lecture anybody on transparency?