http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jh ... xhome.html
Now I have learned at first hand the dogma that lies behind the speed camera
Last April I joined the 11 million motorists who, in the past decade or so, have been caught by a speed camera. On a road with eight changes of speed limit in three miles, I was picked up by a camera sited just past where a 40mph limit changes to 30.
As an alternative to three points on my licence, I opted to attend Avon and Somerset's three-hour "Speed Camera Workshop", necessitating an 80-mile round trip to Taunton. Appropriately this is just a mile or two from where, in 2000, a police car carrying Jack Straw, then home secretary, was clocked at 103mph on the M5.
Those who recently attended this course with me had come from as far away as Nottingham and Lincolnshire. It was all conducted on cosy first name terms, by "Ian" and "Bill". The aim, it became clear, was gradually to shepherd us round from feeling we had been unlucky to be caught, via demonstrations of how anti-social it is to speed and how effective cameras are in reducing accidents, to a profound sense of guilt.
We must learn to see that breaking the speed limit is as socially unacceptable as drink driving (not really any different, as it was put, than "going out to hit someone over the head with a baseball bat"). And we must learn to love the camera as Big Brother, there to save us from ourselves.
All this was supported by a barrage of statistics. The only trouble, as anyone would know who is familiar with the admirable website on speed cameras run by Paul Smith (
www.safespeed.org.uk), was that every single figure given to us was hopelessly wrong. (I do not blame the instructors.)
Trotted out first, of course, was the familiar claim that a third of all accidents are caused by speeding. Yet a study by Avon and Somerset police themselves shows that in reality "excessive speed" is the main factor in only 10 per cent of accidents. Of these, less than a third involve exceeding the limit.
Figures were cited to show the financial cost of accidents: £17,550 for each "slight collision", £174,530 for a "serious collision", £1,492,910 for each "fatal collision". But these statistics, including huge sums for "distress", are entirely bogus, originally cooked up by the Department for Transport for a quite different purpose.
As for the claim that speed cameras have reduced accidents, the truth is that serious accident figures have been continuously dropping since 1966, making Britain's roads the safest in Europe. But that rate of decline has markedly slowed since 1994, coinciding with the period when cameras have moved to the forefront of official efforts to promote safety.
A high point of our "Janet and John"-style lecture was a video showing a small child being killed by a car driving down a busy street at 35mph, as if to show us what breaking the limit leads to. The average speed at which pedestrians are hit in 30 and 40mph limits is in fact 11mph. Of accidents involving vehicles and pedestrians, only 1.5 per cent of victims die.
Most striking was the way that "speed" was defined only in terms of breaking the law by exceeding a limit. What we were sharply steered off was any discussion of how "excessive speed" might more realistically be defined as driving at a speed inappropriate to the conditions.
When we were each asked to describe how we were caught, it was clear from the replies that no one appeared to have been driving in a way which endangered themselves or anyone else. All had been driving at a speed which seemed appropriate. But even to think such thoughts is heresy.
We are all guilty. We must learn to love Big Brother.
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