From then on, despite a continuing rise in the number of vehicles, the fatal accident figure steadily dropped, at an average rate of more than five per cent a year. By 1980 it had fallen to slightly more than 6,000. By 1993 it was below 4,000. Britain's roads were the safest in Europe. In France and Germany, the annual death toll was more than 9,000. In Portugal it was well over three times as high.
Then the rate of decline suddenly slowed. Over the next decade the total fall was smaller than in any of the years between 1990 and 1993. Four times the yearly figure actually rose. So what had changed?
The most obvious difference in the mid-1990s was a radical shift in road safety policy. Ministers and officials had become persuaded that by far the most important single factor in causing accidents was speed. The main focus of police road safety strategy, designed to cut the accident rate further, now became the rigorous enforcement of speed limits, backed by a growing army of speed cameras.
Yet it was at this very time that the fall in the accident rate markedly slowed. Although millions of motorists were caught by the new "safety cameras", which were soon costing them more than £100 million a year in fines, the number of people dying on Britain's roads was no longer declining at anything like the same rate as before.
Inevitably road-safety experts connected the two. Had this slowing of the decline in deaths been caused by the switch in policy? If the policy had not been changed, they asked, might 7,000 lives have been saved? Had not this new fixation with "speed", to the exclusion of almost everything else and supported by highly dubious statistics, taken on many of the familiar characteristics of a scare?
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