Safe Speed Forums

This morning I'm a bit p****d-off because the nasty speed cameras have just cost me around £5000.
As some may know I run a recruitment agency and we had arranged for a candidate to take up a contract position at a major airline as a senior design engineer for about 9 months to handle the design of a special structural design programme. Today I learn that he has just been banned for getting 12 points, all for minor speeding offences over the last 3 years and will now not be able to travel to my client's offices. Thus he has been fined and lost his means of earning a living, whilst I have lost our fee of £3 per hour for 40 hours a week for approximately 40 weeks.
I gather that the UK is now the easiest country in Europe in which to lose your licence for speeding and that over 1 million drivers are sitting with 9 current points and hoping for the best every time they go out.
And all this to try to prevent the now-established 4% of accidents caused by breaking the speed limit.
I feel a letter to my MP coming on!

Ring the local press. Ask for the newsdesk. I have a feeling that they will love the story.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

What's interesting here is that the guy has found another job, short-term but closer to home although at a lower salary. So, his cost is the fine plus the insurance loading, mine is that I've lost c.£5k in direct revenue and my client now has a mojor problem affecting his operating status next year. Of course, I've been asked to find someone else to do the job, but it ain't that simple at that level.
And all that for the sake of ripping £60 out of another driver who is not a young 'boy-racer', but a mature engineering designer with a degree in Aeronautical Engineering.
Has this country gone completely crazy?

It really has.

I've now got a fairly senior role witha national company it involves travele all over uk for which I need my car.

I have 6 points and a further 3 'under negotiation'

at 46k pa i'm afraid the odds are stacked against me. Of course I'll suffer but assuming that i provide a service and therefore add value to society then who suffers the most?

You'll just have to do what a lot of others, including the Blessed Dr Ladyman, have contemplated or done - give your points to someone else!

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"Politicians are the same the world over... We build bridges where there aren't any rivers." - Nikita Kruschev

I would never consider PTCOJ.

We come back to the thing we discussed a while ago. If your job involves a lot of driving, you may well pass over 200 speed cameras each week. Thats over 10000 per annum. If you are slightly over the limit at more than one per annum, your licence, and thus your job/career/pension contributions/mortgage/kids holidays/loan repayments/marriage (maybe), are in jeopardy. This means your driving accuracy has to be 99.99% or you will end up losing your career, etc.
In how many other jobs will this be acceptable - i.e. the sack for being 0.01% in error in any year? My goodness, if the 'do-gooders' achieved this in their lives it would be a bloody miracle! Imagine if a secretary got the sack for hitting one keyboard key incorrectly in every 10,000 key strokes. That's the truth of it for the high mileage driver.
It's totally unacceptable and we must fight it as hard as we can.

It's so true, I think I posted some stats like that a while ago.

Now on the routes I know well, I'm clearly at a lesser risk. But these points that I have accrued are not on roads I know well. All I know is that they were all about 10mph over the posted limit one of which was 10mph below the posted limit the last time I drove on it. It's a numbers game and I'm afraid they are stacked against those who do the highest miles and argueably are the most experienced drivers.

I witness so much appaling driving (and I'm not saying I'm any good either) but these people will NEVER get picked up by a camera because they don't speed.

I had a near miss today when someone simply stopped in front of me, yesterday when someone pulled off the m way without indicating.

ok, I'll bite...


in what way was this not your fault?

Making you a more moral and upstanding citizen than our present Minister for Transport!

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"Politicians are the same the world over... We build bridges where there aren't any rivers." - Nikita Kruschev

I didn't say that there could be not blame apportioned....if you want to play the blame game then I would say that I was not to blame because I wasn't the one who veered sharply to the side ot the road, stopped and started looking at his map.

I was the one whoever, who left sufficient space to take safe evasive action.

while it's defintely an example of the sort of crap driving that cameras do nothing to stop it's not exactly a "near miss" is it?

"And all this to try to prevent the now-established 4% of accidents caused by breaking the speed limit. "

Is this 4% figure where speed in excess of the speed limt was the only factor, the primary factor or a contributory factor?

When the law is geared against ordinary individuals committing victimless offences it has definately become an ass.
Therefore, why is anyone surprised when those people start to treat it with contempt, as is now happening.
You simply do a risk assessment. As the risk of being caught when someone else 'takes the points' is so low, compared to the horrendous potential consequences of losing your licence, it's simply not an issue for many professional drivers. By professional I mean those doing over about 25000 miles per annum on business, plus private mileage.
If I still had to do that mileage I would almost certainly get a S. Ireland registered car to use in the UK and, maybe, an Irish licence as well. After all, it's so easy. I know a guy in business who has done this for years and he's never had any problems, been stopped or questioned. His company pay him mileage and he changes his car every 12 months by going to Dublin, trading in his old one and buying a new one. That way it never needs an annual test, is always taxed (in Eire) and is insured in Dublin with the Norwich Union as a business-use vehicle, which means it can be used for business anywhere in the EU.
When asked why he has an Irish car, he simply says that he has an office in Ireland (technically correct) and works both in Eire and the UK.

I would say that the consequences of loosing one's licence outweigh the chances of being caught for letting someone take points for you to most working people. I couldn't get to my place of work without a car and therefore if I lost my licence I would have to change my job to one that was closer to home.

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Science won over religion when they started installing lightning rods on churches.

for something so precious only the utmost care is acceptable.

I am a high mileage driver, like many others on the forum, yet I am not worried about losing my license.

Where speed limits are set and communicated correctly there isn't an excuse. We need to make sure limits are set correctly and signed correctly.

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COAST Not just somewhere to keep a beach.

A young loner on a crusade to champion the cause of the innocent, the helpless, the powerless, in a world of criminals who operate above the law.

It's strange, really. I was brought up in the 40's and 50's to have respect for the law in all its forms and, to be truthful, I did. I even had respect for motoring laws and when I was first caught speeding I just accepted that I had transgressed, paid up and didn't complain.
Now, however, it's a different matter and i think i've turned into an OAP anarchist. I now tend to ignore the laws I consider stupid and ill-conceived. I re-wired a load of power sockets in my workshop the week before last, took a load of plasterboard to the local tip in plastic bags ('it's illegal for us to take plasterboard'.), and I threw an applecore out of my car window on a country road (I'm sure the maggotts will have finished it off by now). I have 100W bulbs in my headlights (I want to see in the dark and I always dip, anyway) and I piped in my own new gas fire recently (if I can design and build hydraulic systems for aircraft, I can pipe in low pressure gas pipes). So, I'm really a criminal in my old age.
Do I care, do I look like I care? Do me a favour, I don't give a s**t.
The more stupid laws we have, the more will be ignored. The only trouble is that not just the stupid laws will be ignored, the sensible ones will as well - in fact they are being ignored already.
If I keep on thinking like this, the 'Thought Police' will be around.
Why do we tolerate this? Where is our Dunkirk Spirit?

so if YOU think the laws on sexism, racism, homophobia are ill conceived then it's OK for YOU to be sexist, racist, homophobic?

You know what, it's really not OK.

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COAST Not just somewhere to keep a beach.

A young loner on a crusade to champion the cause of the innocent, the helpless, the powerless, in a world of criminals who operate above the law.

How good to know that your driving is better than 99.99% accurate at all times! You must be the only one in this country who can drive to that level of accuracy year-in, year-out, in all conditions, day and night. I think you've just been very lucky so far, as, incidentally, have I, as my licence is still clean so far and has been since 1988 when I received 3 points and 1973 when I received 3 points.
Are you seriously telling us that you never, ever, go even 1 mph over the posted limit. Would you swear to that on your child's life? Would you? Would you really swear to that?
The problem is that the limits are not set correctly, they are arbitrary, often unnecessary and inconsistent. The cash-camera scum lie and cheat to obtain convictions and the accuracy of their equipment is by no means confirmed by scientific assessment.
Pray find me other laws which have such side effects on ordinary people not parties to the offence(s) such as I've described here.
Now, it appears, I have a client complaining that I didn't confirm the guy had a licence, even though there is no mechanism for checking as it's covered by the DPA. I guess when I submitted the candidate he had a full licence and that's what his CV said.
Anti-cash-camera? You bet. In fact, I can't wait until I get a candidate applying for a vacancy who lists one of his previous jobs as working for 'A Speed Camera Partnership'. I shall delight in telling him that he's failed my psychometric test and that he's a w****r and thus unsuitable. Will that happen? Oh, yes, eventually. Will I so respond? You can bet on it.

I'd get yourself a road angel and keep it updated. When limits change where you don't realise you can get it to bleep loudly if you are over. I just bought the cheap navigator version (£250) and it takes so much stress out of driving in strange places. I usually keep within limits the vast majority of the time but I don't know whether if I did 40k a year whether I'd be getting pinged just on the balance of probabilities.

First rule of speeding - never speed in big wide straight roads, especially those with white markings. Those are the ones with regular speed checks Speeding on twisty, turny country roads is of course perfectly safe to do as there are never camera vans hanging around as they're obviously not an accident black spot or dangerous at all Those big evil straight roads are just throwing people into the scenery all the time