Speed cameras are not the solution

9:46am Friday 30th April 2004

A councillor received 11 points on his licence and was fined £250 after being caught by a mobile speed camera four times in two hours breaking a 30mph limit in Weston-super-Mare.

At the next council meeting he called on his own council to make speed limit signs clearer, saying the new 30mph signs were insufficient and "stupid, and there ought to be repeated signs on every other lamppost."

He had an advantage that the rest of us are denied - an arena in which to air his grievances.

The Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens has been quoted as saying: "I don't approve of the use of speed cameras as money-making devices. The proper use for speed cameras is to lower the accident rate."

He insisted all the Met's cameras be placed where there was a history of serious accidents. "I am not after people on the school run exceeding the limit by five or six miles an hour. I want to target the dangerous drivers, the road hogs, and the menaces driving unlicensed and uninsured."

But who protected me from the articulated lorry that tailgated me with headlights on full beam as I drove at exactly the legal limit through the 40mph roadworks on the M25 last night? Had my very real fear led me to accelerate away, I would doubtless have got a ticket and my explanation would have fallen on deaf ears.

Twice recently I have seen a police van parked just inside the 30mph zone entering Wycombe from the west along the A40. The rear of the marked police van was on both occasions obscured by another vehicle parked (on a single yellow line) behind it, but so that the camera placed in the rear of the vehicle was still able to get a good view of the vehicles leaving the traffic signal controlled roadworks.

Normally you would be hard pressed to muster 20mph; but drivers that had been stopped by the temporary traffic lights were released into an a typically empty stretch of road. Catching cars exceeding a 30mph limit whilst accelerating out of roadworks onto an empty road is the road traffic equivalent of catching wasps in a jamjar and, I would argue, guaranteed to catch those very people on the school run exceeding the limit by five or six miles an hour to whom Sir John Stevens referred.

The majority of drivers (no not you, my dear perfect reader, but all the rest of us) speed at some time or other. Every councillor, every police officer, every magistrate (and quite a few of them have been convicted, it appears) is likely to have broken the law in this respect at some time.

But there is a universal reticence to acknowledge this, because it carries the implication that we don't care about the risk to human life. I am coming to the conclusion that the proliferation of speed cameras and varied approaches to speed restrictions have the potential to be more dangerous than the speeding that is being targeted.

I spend much more time than I ever used to looking down at my speedometer to check I am not marginally over the limit and as much time again checking for seemingly arbitrary alterations to the limit just for fear of being caught and deprived of my licence.

I would prefer to be able to concentrate on the road and what was actually happening on it.

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