Saskia

The method for checking one of these is short and it works on almost every claim of this shape.

1. Demand a citation to a legal text, not to an article. A real law has a code section number. If nobody in the chain can produce one, you are done.
2. Search the jurisdiction's own published code. Most are online and searchable, and this is faster than people expect.
3. Check whether it was repealed or superseded. Published codes usually annotate this.
4. Check the date of the earliest version of the claim. Very often the trail leads to a single humour piece from decades ago that was later quoted straight.

Step 4 is the satisfying one. A remarkable number of these claims have a single identifiable origin in something that was never meant to be taken as fact, and every subsequent repetition is a copy of a copy.

Add one step before all of those, because it resolves a surprising number of cases without any technical work: check what the picture is being claimed to show.

Very often the image is entirely genuine and the caption is false. A real photograph of a real road somewhere, presented as being from a different country, a different decade, or a different event. Nothing in the pixels is wrong; the claim attached to them is.

That failure mode is far more common than fabrication, and it is invisible to every forensic tool, because there is nothing to detect. Asking "what exactly is this being said to prove" separates the two questions and usually tells you which one you are dealing with.

It also means a picture can pass every authenticity check and still be misinformation, which is worth holding onto.

The other half is a social process that outsiders often mistake for gatekeeping.

A claimed proof of something major gets looked at, informally and quickly, by a lot of people at once. Somebody notices something questionable in one lemma. That gets circulated, checked, and either resolved or confirmed within days. No individual read the whole thing; collectively the community did, in parallel.

And when the result is plausible, this process runs the other way just as fast — experts convene, seminars are organised, and the work gets read in enormous detail over months. The famous recent proofs of major results went through exactly that, and several took years to be fully accepted.

So the speed of dismissal is not the same mechanism as the depth of acceptance. Fast rejection is triage; slow acceptance is verification.

The wording is the interesting part, and it is a useful case study in how this genre of marketing works.

Watch for constructions like "based on a historic custom", "you may be able to style yourself", "landowners have traditionally been known as". Each of those is a statement about history or about what people have done, not a claim that you will acquire anything. They are true sentences arranged so that a reader assembles a false conclusion.

That is why it survives legal review. Nobody has said you will become a Lord; they have said that landowners were historically called something, and left the inference to you.

The general lesson transfers well beyond this product: when a claim is phrased in the passive, the historical, or the conditional, ask what the direct active version would be and whether the seller has actually made it.

On the independence question, which is a fair one to raise: the finding does not rest on the reports of the agencies that built them.

Studies have been done in many countries, with different road cultures, different driver training, and different research institutions, including in places that reintroduced roundabouts after decades without them and therefore had a clean before-and-after with no local advocacy attached. The direction of the result is the same everywhere.

One methodological caution worth knowing about, though, because it applies to all before-and-after road safety work: regression to the mean. Junctions get rebuilt because they had a bad few years, and a bad few years is partly bad luck, so some improvement would have appeared anyway. Good studies control for this with comparison sites. It does not overturn the result, but it does mean the headline figures from any single site should be treated as the optimistic end.