Good grief, can this be true? Has the government actually started to see sense about road safety?
Reported in the papers today that Alistair Darling, the transport secretary, is shortly to announce that the existing funding arrangement for speed cameras is to be scrapped. Revenue will no longer be available to be ploughed back into new cameras, so the stealthy and inexorable increase of these instruments of the devil will be halted.
Instead, the money will be kept centrally and doled out for a variety of road safety schemes. Darling wants the scamera partnerships to consider alternative means of improving road safety such as better layout at junctions and more visible warning signs. Cameras should only be erected as a last resort.
And the road safety minister, Stephen Ladyman, has recently urged local authorities to ensure that speed limits are set at "appropriate levels". Under new legislation motorists who marginally exceed 30mph speed limits will get only 2 points on their licences instead of the normal three.
Mind you, this isn't a complete u-turn. The government are still claiming that scameras save lives - ignoring the fact that although the number of speeding fines has risen from 200,000 in 1995 to over 2 million last year, road deaths have fallen hardly at all.
There's still a long way to go before we have a common-sense and realistic approach to road safety - the tree-hugging car-hating trendy green know-alls will continue to have things their way for some time to come.
But credit where credit is due - this is a step in the right direction.
either on this site or on the World Wide Web.
This site created and maintained by PlainSite