Safe Speed Forums

Exploding the myth of the speed camera
Sam Leith 26.07.10

'Don't it always seem to go, you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?” as Joni Mitchell warbled all those years ago. It seems a bit of a jump to think that this sentiment (most obviously applied to lovers, patches of landscape or underappreciated limbs) might also apply to automatic speed cameras. But it might: it really might.

God knows, we don't appreciate them much now. Every time I whizz past one a bit too fast for comfort, it propels my girlfriend and me into a boring and bad-tempered 10-minute exchange: “Slow down!” “Stop back-seat driving!” “It was a camera!” “I know!” “Then slow down!” “Shut up!” etc etc. None of us is exactly overjoyed, either, when the postman brings us news that our girlfriend was right.

The intangibles, the absences, the unprovable negatives — that is, the number of accidents that don't happen because of speed cameras — are never so vivid to us as that £60 fine on the
doormat. Why would they be? Our brains aren't wired to hear the dog that doesn't bark.

But there's something intriguing about reports that Oxfordshire council is likely to switch off its 79 fixed cameras next weekend, and that other counties are expected to follow. A lot of face-saving guff has been spouted about “delivering on the promise to end the war on the motorist” — as if enforcing the law is some sort of obnoxious military intervention. But actually it's about cash: the stated reason for the cameras being switched off is that they can't afford to operate them, because central government funding has dried up.

Seems strange, doesn't it? After all, the bleat of every Clarksonian dinner-party bore, since speed cameras first appeared, was that they were nothing to do with road safety: they were just a cheap and cynical way of raising revenue. If that were true, you'd think the effect of a funding shortage would not be to remove speed cameras but to add a whole lot more.

So that piece of widely cherished common wisdom turns out to have been baloney after all! Who knew? Next, you'll be telling us that another, far less testable commonplace of the indignant petrolhead — that speed cameras haven't saved a single life, and may even make the roads less safe — might be wishful thinking too…

Some no doubt imagine that “the road safety lobby”, as it gets scornfully called, consists of bean-eating professional busybodies. But do we really imagine grown-ups slave at tedious campaigns just for the pleasure of spoiling motorists' fun? The self-interest of the driving-too-fast-in-my-big-stupid-car lobby is, objectively, rather easier to make out.

So I'm minded to give the former more credence. And when you're run over by a Big Yellow Taxi doing 70 in a 50 zone, don't say they didn't warn you.

I wonder whether now is the time for Safespeed to nail it's colours to the mast with a press release saying that we believe it won't make a jot of difference? Swindon is encouraging, but could be a "blip". I think we need to be ready for the big "I told you so"! in 3 years time!