Forest Journal reporter Karen Bate interviews H&IoWSCP spokesman Julian Hewitt, (centre) and PC Martin Lockyer, family liaison officer. DA5834P1MOTORISTS must kill their speed before they kill a pedestrian or cause a serious accident - that is the message from Hampshire Police.

Hitting a pedestrian while driving at 35mph is twice as deadly than at 30mph and motorists must slow down.

The stark reality is that 90 per cent of pedestrians hit by a car travelling at 30mph will be at least seriously injured. Nearly half of them will be killed.

That is the hard-hitting message from the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Safety Camera Partnership.

As the Forest Journal stepped up its Safer Forest campaign, the Journal paid a visit to Camera Partnership's Winchester headquarters and met its spokesman Julian Hewitt.

He said that road accidents were the eighth-largest cause of death in the world.

By 2020, they will be the third-largest. Speed is the biggest single contributory factor. By reducing speed by as little as one mile an hour, there is a five per cent reduction in accidents.

Mr Hewitt said: "This relationship means that even marginal reductions in average speeds can result in major road safety gains."

The Safety Camera Partnership was formed in April 2002 and is a joint project between Hampshire constabulary, Hampshire county council, the Magistrates' Court committee and the Highways Agency.

The partnership works with communities to reduce casualties on the roads, through speed enforcement, education and road safety engineering.

The county currently has 21 fixed cameras and 32 mobile cameras on its routes.

Mr Hewitt welcomed the recent figures, which reveal that motorists are putting the brakes on speed.

"The numbers of people killed or seriously injured in road collisions has been reduced by an average of 40 per cent on roads protected by safety cameras," he said.

He emphasised that there was still much work to be done in reducing speeds even further and in changing attitudes towards excessive and inappropriate speed.

"It is one of our aims for speeding to be regarded by the public as antisocial, like drink-driving," he said.

Although results are conclusive that speed cameras in the Forest do work, they have also been sharply criticised, with several New Forest residents claiming they are not sited on the most dangerous roads.

Val Ditchburn, of Gorley, Ringwood, said the A338 Salisbury Road needed a fixed camera, to stop the "high number of serious and tragic road crashes".

She said: "Motorists are travelling too fast on a busy, rural road.

"The road is marked as a mobile route but the camera is rarely there. A fixed camera needs to be erected to slow drivers down and to save lives."

However, according to Mr Hewitt, the A338, as a mobile camera route, is effective.

He said: "Mobile routes tend to be longer stretches of road, with more scattered patterns of accidents. Enforcement takes place from a series of locations along a route, so that speed reduction can be sustained over as long a distance as possible."

Mr Hewitt said fixed cameras were located in the middle of a road cluster where accidents were concentrated.

The range of mobile camera equipment is up to about 900m but most enforcement takes place between 100m and 500m from the camera.

A visit by the Journal to the A338 with the roads policing unit saw a couple of speeding motorists being caught on camera.

PC Paul Duncan said a successful day would be when no one was caught exceeding the speed limit.

"We are not trying to catch motorists out," he said.

"We put out camera signs and the van is highly visible.

"The presence of the van in most cases slows the traffic considerably, which is our aim."