Reuben Jacob Smeed (1909–1976) was a British statistician and transport researcher.[1][2]
He obtained a degree in mathematics and PhD in aeronautical engineering from Queen Mary's College before entering academia as a teacher of mathematics.
When World War II started he was working for the Royal Aircraft Establishment on radio and radar equipment. In 1941 he assumed the rank of Wing Commander while he ran a small team in operations research for RAF Bomber Command looking at bomber losses. Whilst there he used statistics to verify the safest methods and formations for bombers and to investigate the effectiveness of various radar countermeasures,[3] and by 1945 had become their Chief Research Officer.
In 1947 he joined the Traffic and Safety Division as Deputy Director at the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (later the Transport Research Laboratory), where he investigated issues around traffic, road users, accidents, lighting and vehicle behaviour, pioneering the scientific study of transport studies. In so doing, he discovered a number of surprising or counter-intuitive features of road systems. In 1949 he proposed Smeed's law, an empirical rule that broke the usual link between environmental factors and road accidents. Instead he correlated traffic fatalities to traffic density, as measured by the proxy of motor vehicle registrations and country population. He also proposed that the average speed of traffic in central London would always be nine miles per hour, because that is the minimum speed that people will tolerate. He claimed that his new designs for the linked use of traffic lights might increase the number of cars on the roads but would not increase their speed, because, as soon as the traffic flowed faster, more drivers would come to slow it down.[3] Under his direction the TRL investigated many aspects of road safety and driver behaviour, publishing more than 50 papers.
In 1962 he was commissioned to head the Smeed Report, an influential study into the benefits and feasibility of congestion charging in urban road networks. Although it was initially well received, successive governments' failed to act, and he left the laboratory in frustration soon after its publication in 1964, joining the Ministry of Land and Natural Resources. He was awarded a CBE in 1966.
In 1967 he became the first Professor of Traffic Studies at University College London where he taught until his death in 1976.