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Speed gun man slows the traffic
By Daniel Knowles

Aldbourne resident Michael Edmonds has launched a one-man speeding blitz.

Armed with a £500 speed detecting gun he bought himself, semi-retired bookkeeper Mr Edmonds, 69, has been clocking cars as they tear through the village on the B4192 Swindon-Hungerford road.

So far, the highest speed has been 45mph in the 30mph zone.

Mr Edmonds kicked off the campaign in February having seen cars racing along the road past pedestrians, including young children.

In the first five days he logged 124 vehicles exceeding 33mph during peak hour within 100 yards of the 30mph sign. He caught 20 doing more than 40mph.

Mr Edmonds said the council had approved extra houses in the village but had done nothing to protect the new residents other than install a sign saying pedestrians used the roads.

"It's like moving the deckchairs on the Titanic," Mr Edmonds said.

He wants an interactive speed sign installed to tell motorists when they need to slow down.

He said he had appealed to Wiltshire County Council in February to install the speed sign.

He has also collected a petition with more than 200 signatures.

"The residents of this village want a response to the speeding," Mr Edmonds said. "The people with children don't think it's safe."

He said just taking his speed gun out near the road slowed most drivers down. "It does have a preventative effect," he said.

Mr Edmonds' crusade has prompted a lively debate on the village website.

"We need real fixes not a well-meaning Charles Bronson with a few hundred quid's worth of self-funded gadget and no clout," one resident wrote. Another urged him to keep up the good work.

Wiltshire and Swindon Safety Camera Partnership said they would investigate the speeding issue in Aldbourne in the next two to three months, following a request from the county council.

A county council spokesman said the council was aware speeding could be a concern in some villages and was working on the problem.

"We are currently looking at how we can develop a strategy with the safety camera partnership to see how we may be able to make better use of interactive speed signs," he said. "It is hoped this will be completed later this year."

Strange - man puts up sign warning about speed traps ,aids road safety and gets fined.
Man sets himself up a a one man speed trap vigilante, possibly causing panic braking and other road safety hazards and nothing is done .
Oh, but this is Britain today.

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lets bring sanity back to speed limits.
Drivers are like donkeys -they respond best to a carrot, not a stick .Road safety experts are like Asses - best kept covered up ,or sat on

Sounds good for the busybodies - until some aggressive traveller pulls up, gets out and beats the living daylights out of him.

Oh, and before you say "He could be traced by his numberplate" - he is in a "throwaway".

As a direct comment, 25 vehicles a day exceeding 33mph in an hour doesn't seem very many for peak time.

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Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

At least it's not a speed camera they're proposing.

I don't understand people on this site sometimes - we're apparently "all for" VAS and SIDs, but when some guy decides to press for one he is ridiculed.

At the end of the day, would you want to live in a village where you didn't feel safe because of people exceeding the speed limit. People have a reasonable right to feel safe in their own environment.

But speed cameras don't make roads safe. That’s the common fallacy

Why not campaign for a bypass.

Oh sorry, the same people who wants lower speed limits also want to eliminate new road building projects..

If the MAXIMIM he has ever recorded is 45 it isn’t exactly a speedway is it!

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Speed camera policy Kills

It also doesn't sound like much of a "speeding problem".

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"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

Methinks the ridicule isn't being directed at him asking for VAS/SIDs, but at his speed-gun vigilante method of obtaining the data he then used to ask for them. I doubt you'd have seen the same response here to his actions if he'd arranged for the local authority to set up an official speed monitoring unit (one of those little boxes with the twin tubes stretched across the road) and then used the data from that to stake a claim for VAS/SIDs...

Yes, most/all of us here would prefer to see VAS/SIDs installed instead of scameras, but the data used to justify their installation (or indeed, the installation of any speed-related object - scam, chicane, hump...) HAS to be collected in a proper, verifiable manner without any suggestion of bias creeping into the results. Where is the independent corroboration of his speedgun readings to prove that his findings are genuine and not affected by any attempt to make the data fit his original claim of there being a speeding problem? Wouldn't take much to skew the results, just put down a 30-31 as a 32-33, maybe ignore the occasional sub-30 reading... I'm not saying that's what happened, but can anyone *prove* it didn't?

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Chris

Very good point indeed.

And another significant point - how many of his speeders are repeaters, living locally and either going in or out of the village past him??

That is something that his and an official survey would not pick up, but perhaps needs to be addresses, not just the nimber ( again a number) found speeding.

EG - is it a the same drivers numerous times or numerous drivers once??

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lets bring sanity back to speed limits.
Drivers are like donkeys -they respond best to a carrot, not a stick .Road safety experts are like Asses - best kept covered up ,or sat on

After you pass him turn around, go back and ask if you got 'Fastest Time of the Day'. If you didn't, have a second run

bet he's an OAP ( sorry so politically incorrect of me) with nothing better to do, such as wash his skoda (

it is again a need to properly analise the area , and make changes to the road layout as required (can't spell nessasary without word dicoinary)

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Brian of Plymouth
When will the government realise , that to err is only human, to be perfect is to be GOD.

Flat cap and all:

nice picture

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Brian of Plymouth
When will the government realise , that to err is only human, to be perfect is to be GOD.

dont you recognise this man

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now retired

Barry Manilow?

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Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

...or Nikki Lauda?

Around here .. villagers from next village" tear through" the hamlet we we are are based - north of Keswick at speeds of 35 mph - verified by IG - he has his uses . Yet their "Martins of the "Ever Decreasing Circles mindset" moans if anyone drives through their village above 20 mph though.

We go NSL to 30 mph for the half mile or so's length of the hamlet

But.. not so long ago on the Vine prog - they carried the story of a village in Norfolk being give an Lt12020 by the local prats. They were on the programme proclaiming how this would "change the quality of life in the village"

Halfway through the debate - a councillor from Cambridgeshire telephones. This lady is part of the the Cambs Prats. She said she actively campaigned for such a scheme in a Cambridgeshire village. The villagers got their way .. were issued with a speed gun.

They found that this set neighbour against neighbour as they found the villagers themselves were doing most of the "speeding", conflicts set in .. and they even found themselves at war with the next village who claimed that ALL the villagers from the vigilante village were speeding through their village at much faster speeds.

The scheme was ditched ..

When asked how problem was being resolved - the lady replied that they have placed a VAS and it has made a difference.

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KEEP SMILING
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Smily to penny.. penny to pound
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But the real message? SMILE.. GO ON ! DO IT! and the world will smile with you!
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Which appears to prove the quoted point made recently by a police officer in another thread (that I can't for the life of me find) that peoples' view of speeding and speed cameras is largely dependent upon the role they are adopting when posed the question.
As concerned resident and pedestrian they are more likely to be in favour than if asked when stepping from their car at a motorway service station. This is why I never believe straw polls which suggest that the public in general are either for or against speed cameras.
I omit those here present from that generalisation BTW.

Yep - when I checked the speed through Mad Doc's home hamlet - found the average was 35 mph - and some were 45 mph .

Of course - Rigs - people will answer these polls according to set of circumstances. You usually find they answer very positively if the newspapers are reporting an accidnent and very negatively when the read of cases like this one.

They are also very negative to police when they read of our inadequacies - failure to cop right bloke or the silly prosecutions such as puddle splashes or "pee cee nonsense" ... or the odd bent as well.

I still say you cannot beat a good old fashioned from the dynosaur age

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Take with a chuckle or a grain of salt
Drive without COAST and it's all your own fault!

A SMILE is a curve that sets everything straight (P Diller).

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Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon - but driving with a smile and a COAST calm mind.