ANOTHER tragic accident on West Dorset’s roads, another article in the Bridport News calling for a speed limit reduction.

I can understand the motivation but I wish I was always sure it was with noble intentions.

Exceeding the speed limit – so the official stats say – only causes six per cent of accidents.

I wish people who think a lower speed limit is the answer to every road safety question would tell me how they intend to prevent the other 94 per cent.

Perhaps the problem is that, like so many other things in life, the reasons behind road accidents are complex, the solutions equally so, and therefore don’t make very good headlines?

As someone cleverer than me once said, ‘for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong’.

In my 400,000 plus miles on the road, most multi-vehicle collisions I’ve seen needed at least two people to drive badly.

In the case of mergers at the ends of dual carriageways (I work very close to a very busy one of these myself) for every aggressive driver trying to pass one last car, there is a passive-aggressive driver doing his or her best to stop them.

The basic problem with the A35 is that it carries far too much traffic at busy times for its design capacity. It should have been dualled all the way to Honiton years ago, as faster multi-lane roads are far safer than slower single-carriageways.

As that’s not practical in the short term I would like to see more real traffic police patrolling the road, instead of the speed camera vans that sit in the most lucrative places rather than the most dangerous. Jonathan Robso N Girt House Burton Bradstock Bridport