Safe Speed Forums

Safety aid or stealth tax?
12:00pm Tuesday 27th July 2010

Thousands of speed cameras could be axed after the Government slashed funding for them. Road safety partnerships responsible for the camera network claim this will lead to more accidents. Critics say cameras were never about road safety, but revenue generation. The Northern Echo’s motoring editor Nigel Burton puts the case for scrapping the cameras – and Julie Townsend, deputy chief executive of independent road safety charity Brake, explains why we still need them.

Nigel Burton has been Motoring Editor of The Northern Echo for 20 years. A qualified advanced driver, he religiously observes speed limits and has a clean licence (touch wood).

IT’S a sinking feeling tens of thousands of drivers experience every year. One minute you are driving along minding your own business, the next there’s a double flash in the rear view mirror and the creeping realisation that you’ve just been snapped by a speed camera.
More than 1.8 million tickets are issued this way every year.
Camera numbers have grown every year since the 1991 Road Traffic Act allowed their use to prosecute motorists breaking the speed limit.
But not for much longer, it seems.

The Government has cut the amount of cash given to councils for road safety initiatives by 40 per cent – limiting the money that can be handed on to safety camera partnerships – and banned all funding for new cameras.
And not a moment too soon.
The proliferation in speed cameras on our roads had less to do with safety than an insidious stealth tax that allowed the real danger drivers – the ones who get behind the wheel drunk or with no tax, MoT or insurance – to get away with their disgraceful antics.
Motorists were conned into accepting speed cameras. Initially, the Government said it would only be used at accident blackspots and traffic lights, so we acquiesced despite our fears.
But the rules were soon relaxed when officials realised how much a camera on a quiet stretch of road could rake in.

The most profitable camera in Britain – monitoring a bus lane with a badly signposted diversion – fleeced drivers of £2m in just three months. No injuries were avoided, speeds didn’t change and no lives were saved.
I’m not against speed cameras per se. In some cases they can make a positive contribution to road safety.
But I believe that a camera is nothing more than a cheap band aid. The real solution for an accident blackspot is to redesign it – removing the problem so drivers and pedestrians can go about their business safely. But realigning roads, adding roundabouts or traffic lights costs money – lots of it.
How much easier it was to pay £30,000 for a speed camera that, when set up, required hardly anything in maintenance, while the money just rolled in.
Police guidelines defined blackspots as a stretch of road where there have been eight accidents (including four serious) in three years.
But a study carried out in 2008 found that many of these blackspots were nothing of the sort – their accident record wasn’t the result of speeding or dangerous driving but, more likely, weather conditions or simple bad luck.

If a camera went up at one of these sites, and the accident rate fell, officials were quick to claim a success, but experts concluded it was likely the figures would have fallen regardless.

This effect is called “regression to mean” and is familiar to statisticians, but not, it appears, to safety camera supporters.
FOR careful drivers, like me, speed cameras are a menace because they distract my attention from the road.

Since I cannot rely on driving sensibly to avoid a fine, I have to constantly scan the roadside for a yellow box and be aware that the car in front may suddenly slow for no apparent reason.
In recent years, motorists have finally become fed up. Even a name change, from speed cameras to safety cameras, wasn’t enough to save the hated Gatso from being rumbled as just another stealth tax.
Sadly, the real speed camera scandal – the extent to which cameras have been used to replace highly-trained police drivers – will now come home to roost.
As a result of the run down of police traffic units, the number of warnings and vehicle rectification notices issued to motorists driving dangerous cars has more than halved. We need more traffic cars, not less.

Hopefully, now the cameras are on their way out a more common sense approach to road safety will prevail – to the benefit of everyone motorists and pedestrians alike.
Julie Townsend is deputy chief executive of independent national road safety charity Brake.
THERE is a vast amount of evidence showing that cameras are extremely effective in cutting casualties and slowing traffic down at accident black spots.
Road safety partnerships around the UK are delivering highly-successful and economic work, particularly through the use of speed cameras.
We have also made huge progress in reducing tragic, needless and costly road deaths and injuries in recent years.

Turning cameras off and pulling the plug on other important road safety work, would be a disastrous blow for those communities relying on cameras to protect them, and an insult to those crying out for measures to cut speeds in their neighbourhoods and those families so traumatically bereaved by speed.
Traffic is the biggest killer of young people and dangerous behaviour on roads causes thousands of horrific deaths and injuries of all ages every year in the UK Every year, Brake is contacted by scores of communities crying out for measures like speed cameras to protect local people and enable them to use roads without fear of speeding traffic.
Research has shown they are highly effective in preventing deaths and injuries.
It is vital that the Government continues to invest in proven technology like speed cameras, alongside other crucial road safety measures like traffic policing and education.
These measures not only help to prevent the unspeakable trauma of a sudden bereavement or serious injury, they also make good economic sense, helping to stem the huge cost to the economy of road death and injury.
Staying well within speed limits is essential for everyone’s safety and speed cameras are an important tool in catching drivers who insist on breaking the law and putting lives in danger.
They can also be self-funding due to the fines paid by speeders.
NEWER cameras, which measure a driver’s speed over the length of a route, rather than at one particular point on the road are extremely effective: the European Transport Safety Council quotes research showing that deaths and serious injuries have been cut by between 60 per cent and 85 per cent on roads in England where average speed cameras have been trailed.
Brake urges drivers to slow down, especially around schools and in residential areas where children and other vulnerable road users may be out and about using the roads on foot and bikes.
If a child on foot is hit by a vehicle travelling at 35mph, they are more than twice as likely to die than if they are hit at 30mph.
It is on these roads, as well as on many single carriageway rural roads, where many people die in crashes where excessive or inappropriate speed is a contributory factor and yet all too often there is little enforcement of appropriate speeds.
These are the environments where enforcement of the speed limit is essential.