Has anyone else seen this ??
Sorry for the 'said' copy, but unable to find actual story on Daily mail site.
XB
T? r'if 32/1: Daily Mail, Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Three in four speed .cameras are .dummies
By Ray Massey
Transport Editor
SPEED camera policing is a 'lottery' with the chances
of being caught varying
massively across the UK, it is revealed today.
On average, three-quarters of the yellow boxes have no camera inside or may only flash a warning.
But the chances of getting a ticket can vary enormously from area to area. For instance, all of the camera housings in Cleveland, Cumbria, Humberside and Northern Ireland are 'live', as are two-thirds in Essex.
Other areas where more than half the cameras are live are West Mercia (60 per cent), Warwickshire (59 per cent) and
Avon Somerset & Gloucestershire (54 per cent). By contrast, in the Thames Valley area fewer than one in ten of the 298 cameras is live at any time.
. Other areas'with a low proportion of live cameras are Staffordshire (14 per cent) and Lancashire (16 per cent). London has 453 fixed camera housings, but only one in six of these (17 per cent) can successfully flash a driver at anyone time.
The research is published in motoring magazine Auto Express. The 6,000 fIXed cameras operated by speed camera partnerships across Britain last year led to 2million prosecutions, raising around £120million in fines. Mobile cameras are also a lottery - researchers calculated that there is a one in 16 (6 per cent) chance of a site being manned with a camera on any given day in the UK.
Warwickshire CasualtyReduction Partnership performs about 300 operations each month across its 36 mobile camera sites. By contrast, Strathclyde carried out only 351 in the whole of last year at its 35 speed-trap locations.
Thames Valley, which has only 27 of its 298 housings live, said rotating a small number of camera units around a large number of housings meant whole areas could be covered.
This was 'fairer on motorists than having a high number of active cameras'.
A spokesman said: 'At certain places, I'm sure we could get a large number of tickets if the housings were loaded more often:'
But in Essex, where 67 per cent of the speed traps are active, a spoke man said: 'We want people to understand that if they are going to speed past a camera, there is a strong likelihood of being prosecuted.'
Many areas use 'dummy' boxes with a working flash in a psychological ploy to increase compliance.
Essex said: 'The flashes alert speeders that they have broken the law and leaves them guessing as to whether they will get a fine.'
North Wales Polic'e, whose controversial chief constable
Richard Brunstrom is dubbed the 'Traffic Taliban' for his war on speeding motorists, was one of nine forces and partnerships which refused to provide figures to researchers.
The others were Greater Manchester, Leicestershire, Cheshire, Dorset, Nottinghamshire, Suffolk, Tayside and Wiltshire.
North Wales Casualty Reduction Partnership said providing details of live cameras was 'likely to encourage the public to exceed the speed limit', adding: 'For cameras to be truly effective, there must be a perception that the chances of being recorded are high.'Andrew Howard, head of road safety at the AA Motoring Trust, said: 'The varying proportions of operational safety cameras is a bit of a lottery.'
r.massey@dailymail.co.uk
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