BMJ  2005;330 (12 February), doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7487.0-h

Editor's choice

The case for slowing down

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

"Forty-eight years old, profoundly asleep at nine thirty on a Friday night—this is modern professional life." Henry Perowne, neurosurgeon and central character of Ian McEwan's new book, Saturday (p 368), "hits the [hospital] corridors with an impatient stride his retinue struggles to match," considers each glass of wine on Saturday a gamble in case he is called to an emergency, and suffers an unfortunate road rage incident. BMJ readers will have shared many of Perowne's experiences, including road rage—if you don't encounter this once a week in London you can't be driving properly. Might road rage be better considered as a collision avoided—a preventive measure? Traffic collisions already account for 1.2 million deaths and 50 million injuries each year worldwide.

Speed cameras are a controversial way of reducing these collisions. Motoring organisations and the general media portray speed cameras as a cash cow for the police, an unreasonable . . . [Full text of this article]

Kamran Abbasi, acting editor

(kabbasi@bmj.com)


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