It's always good to have one's own views confirmed, and the big splash on the front of the Mail on Sunday this week did exactly that.
Undercover reporters posing as agents for an East European country had contacted the firm that makes most of the speed cameras in the UK, and elicited some amazing information that reinforces all our fears. You can read the whole article here.
The boss of a leading supplier of the devices admitted "There will be so much money coming in you won't know what to do with it." He urged the reporters to site the cameras not where accidents had occurred but where they could catch "businessmen in the morning and school-run mums in the afternoon." He went on to claim that the courts which process fines and issue the points on a driver's licence have been struggling to cope with all the cheques.
The article also explains how the government is manipulating the camera industry so that it can rake in vast profits. The government takes ALL the revenue from speed cameras, then gives some of it back. Each camera partnership sets a target of the number of motorists it will catch each year. If it fails to meet the target, the government cuts its share of the revenue. If it achieves more than its target, the government keeps all the extra money. Of course that means that next year the partnership will set a higher target so it can attract a larger grant - and although it escapes any of the blame, the Government picks up all the profits!
Doesn't sound as though road safety is much of a prime consideration, does it?
The camera firm, Tele-Traffic UK, supplies 97 per cent of the country's police forces with portable laser cameras which are hand-held or set up in special roving police vans. It is run by three former policemen.
Tele-Traffic sells basic hand-held laser speed cameras for £3,000 and the directors told how this could be recovered from speeding drivers in just an hour, saying "Take the UK model of £60 a pop. If you buy a piece of our kit at £3,000, then operate it in a two-hour session, on an averagely busy road, you will catch about 100 drivers that's £6,000."
Predictably this news has been greeted with the usual response - "If you don't want to pay the fines, don't speed". That's all very well if the speed limits the cameras are enforcing have been set at appropriate levels and with regard to the nature of the road and its accident history. Sadly, speed limits are put in place by local authorities, not the police, and some local authorities do so for very dubious reasons. We have written before about Suffolk's disastrous record, for instance, where the introduction of blanket 30mph limits (450 of them all at once) led to a 69% increase in fatalities the next year. On Suffolk's most dangerous road, the A140 between Diss and Coddenham, a confusing system of varying limits has been put in place against the wishes of local people, simply to avoid spending money on improving the road.
The government's own advice to local authorities acknowledges that drivers cannot (not will not, but can not) obey a speed limit that differs too much from the average speed on that piece of road, and advises using a calculation called the 85th percentile to establish the correct speed for the road. Sadly, many local authorities either don't understand or choose to ignore this advice.
The argument that if one doesn't like being fined one shouldn't speed is not so far removed from those sad little doormats who don't object to ID cards - or any of the other invasions our privacy is threatened by these days - because "I've got nothing to hide so why should I worry?"
The reason they should worry is precisely because they have nothing to hide - so why should they be tagged and spied-on like convicts or cattle? The history of the 20th Century is haunted by the sad wraiths of millions of people who felt they had nothing to hide right up to the moment the doorbell rang and the jackboots clattered on the front step.
The GOS says: You could do worse than look at these other articles on the same subject …
Loophole could invalidate thousands of camera fines
Camera statistics don't add up
Avoid a ticket by changing lanes
either on this site or on the World Wide Web.
This site created and maintained by PlainSite