Catford South and Whitefoot Road Hump Scheme

Let's consider this claim in the context of Catford South and Whitefoot North

How does a claim of 500 deaths a year in 2002 stack up against the potential benefits of road humps? After all, if road humps save so many lives, surely if 500 people could be a drop in the ocean? It appears not. in 2002, we had 30,000 road humps in London. 500 deaths across 30,000 humps works out at one death for every 60 humps every year. The recently-deployed Catford South scheme has 371 humps. Everything else being equal, this could result in 6.18 deaths per year amongst the scheme population of around 20,000. That is actually feasible. If each person has only one time-critical ambulance call in their lifetime, the Catford South and Whitefoot North population would need 285 time-critical ambulance call-outs per year. If the death rate from time-critical call-outs is increased by 2.5% as a result of humps, we have our 6 fatalities per year. So, in order to break even in terms of lives saved, the Catford South road hump scheme has to save 7 or more lives a year. We need to know, how many people die on the roads of Catford South every year, and estimate the number of lives saved.

All these statistics are available from the London accident unit. I have figures for the last 10 years. (If you would like to verify the figures, the Catford South and Whitefoot North scheme covers nearly all roads bordered by Bromley Rd, Brownhill Rd, Verdant Lane and Whitefoot Lane). The figures show two road fatalities in the last 10 years for the area. Both boys, one 13 & the other 15 years old. (Update: 20th October 06, The official data is in fact inaccurate. A victim's parent has informed roadhumpcampaign.org that the 15 year old was a girl. I will of course request the official data is corrected). One was run over by a bus on Sandhurst Road, the other by a car bypassing humps on Bellingham road, on Daneby Road. It is possible humps could have saved one of these fatalities, but at the same time, were a contributory factor. Let's give humps the benefit of the doubt and assume that in Catford South, they will reduce the level of road fatalities in Catford south by one every ten years. So we have humps causing 61 fatalities every 10 years, and saving one fatality every 10 years. That is a nett death toll of 60 people dying every 10 years because of road humps in Catford South alone.

A properly comissioned and executed study into the actual number of deaths caused by road humps is long overdue. Why haven't we had one?

Summary of potential fatalities in Catford South from road deaths and ambulance delays:

17 people may have died so far as a result of the Catford South and Whitefoot North road hump scheme. This counter will be updated regularly to reflect the current death toll since 10th January 2006. The counter will be updated on Fri 9 Jan .

This scheme covers around 50 roads with 371 humps. The plan covers almost every road in the area bounded by Bromley Road, Verdant Lane, Whitefoot Lane and Brownhill Road. It will affect thousands of properties and and about 20,000 residents. This is almost 10% of Lewisham. I have tried to tabulate all locations below. There are almost certainly errors and omissions in ths list as I have hand typed it. Please let me know if you find any: