There's WAY too much to reproduce here; I urge you all to clink of the
link and read the full article.

http://www.carbibles.com/speeding_facts.html

Speeding - it's an emotive issue and one which the police and
government always use as leverage whenever they get a chance.
Constable Tim NiceButDim, when interviewed next to a smouldering pile
of twisted metal on the side of the M25 will say "This accident was
caused by people speeding, plain and simple." Similarly, Highway
Patrol Officer Chad SteroidAbuse, when interviewed next to a
smouldering pile of twisted metal on the side of Interstate 15, will
say "This accident was caused by excessive speed and nuthin' more."
It's the same the world over, but separating actual fact from emotive
fiction is always difficult. As part of my research when authoring the
Speedtrap Bible, I spent a day at the Transport Research Laboratory in
Crowthorne, in England. It's the government's vehicular research
centre, with high speed test tracks, crash rooms, drag strips, banked
curves and all manner of other test areas set in the lush forests
around Bracknell in England. They test everything there from the
effectiveness of seatbelts inside a car to the effectiveness of road
surfaces and crash barriers outside the car. I was particularly
interested in their studies on speed in relation to the cause of
accidents. The library at the TRL has copies of all their reports, and
the two I spoke to their technicians about (and ended up buying) were
TRL323 entitled "A new system for recording contributary factors in
road accidents" and TRL325 - "The factors that influence a driver's
choice of speed."
Is speed a contributing factor in most road accidents? TRL323

The short and politically incorrect answer is no, and here's why. TRL
Report 323 entitled "A new system for recording contributary factors
in road accidents" was a joint project between the TRL and the DETR
(Department of Environment, Transport and Regions). It was designed to
give true figures for the real causes of accidents taken across 8
representative police forces over 6 months in the summer of 1996. They
devised a system based on two main categories: what went wrong, and
why? Each of those is divided into subcategories such as failures of
the driver or rider, failures of pedestrians etc. The report is a
fascinating read for someone like me who has a website to maintain,
but could be incredibly dull to most people. So to cut to the chase,
there's two sections of information we need to look at.

1. Overall incidence of contributary factors
This is a categorised list of all the factors in the report which
could contribute to but not necessarily cause an accident.

[...]

What this means is that in 7.3% of the accidents, speed was one of
many factors, and in only 6% of the accidents was it a definite causal
factor. Look at the top 4 factors and you'll see that they can
generally be categorised as the old police adage of "driving without
due care and attention." More to the point, if you take into account
"loss of control" accidents (which covers a multitude of sins
including wheels coming off the vehicle, black ice, etc) then
according to the report, only 4% of all accidents are caused by loss
of control of the vehicle with excessive speed as the primary
contributing factor.

2. Incidence of commonest precipitating factors, by type of accident.
This is perhaps a more telling chunk of information which aims to show
the most common factors involved in different types of accident, such
as vehicle-pedestrian, single-vehicle etc. Excessive speed doesn't
feature directly in this information because it is considered to be a
subcategory of "loss of control" (see above). The government and road
safety campaigners will always tell us that pedestrians are killed
because of speeding motorists. This simply is not the case. Would you
believe a staggering 84% of pedestrians involved in accidents are
killed or seriously injured due to their own incompetance? In the TRL
report, the prime factors involved in pedestrian fatalities are listed
as:

   * Pedestrian entered carriageway without due care (84%)
   * Vehicle unable to avoid pedestrian in carriageway (12%)
   * "Other" (4%)

So in the real world, it's not motorists tearing up and down town
centre roads at speed that is to blame for pedestrian fatalities, but
the pedestrians themselves for stepping in front of moving vehicles
without bothering to look where they're going.

[...]

Conclusion : Speeding isn't the problem.

So speed doesn't kill. Well - it does - but in nowhere near the
numbers we're told. The police and governments should be spending more
time on educating people to drive properly and pay attention - less
loss-of-control or inattention accidents would be the result of that.
They should spend more time making pedestrians responsible for their
own actions instead of blaming drivers. That would reduce the
pedestrian culling. They should spend more time and resources banning
cellphones and arresting drivers for drunk and drugged driving - all
major causes of accidents as supported by dozens of reports. But
speeding remains the lowest fruit in the tree and consequently the
easiest one to pick, even though it's the single least responsible
line item for the cause of accidents.