And in The Times...
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0, ... 62,00.html
Police win battle for more speed cameras
By Ben Webster, Transport Correspondent
RULES governing the use of speed cameras are to be relaxed to let police enforce the limit on stretches of road where there have been no crashes.
Police chiefs have complained that the existing rules are too restrictive and force them to wait until people have been killed or injured before they can take action.
Motoring groups have accused police of being obsessed with cameras and ignoring other, more effective ways of reducing casualties on the roads.
The number of camera fines has increased from 400,000 in 1998 to two million last year. But the number of road deaths has remained about 3,400 a year. Last year it rose slightly to 3,508.
Under the revised rules, the maximum distance covered by a ?mobile camera site? will be extended from 5km (three miles) to 20km.
Police must still prove that the route has a history of road casualties, but they will no longer be restricted to enforcing the limit in the immediate areas where the crashes took place.
Richard Brunstrom, the Chief Constable of North Wales, said: ?We have a particular problem with motorcyclists slowing down for the cameras but then speeding up and dying on the next corner.We need to keep people?s speed down along the whole stretch of road.?
Mr Brunstrom, who is head of road policing for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Apco), said that the rules had encouraged people to believe they needed to obey the speed limit only near accident blackspots.
Speaking to The Times, he said: ?We are in danger of giving the view that it doesn?t matter where you speed as long as you don?t speed in areas where people have been killed. The whole concept of obeying the law has been diluted. In Victoria, Australia, they enforce wherever and that has been more successful in changing attitudes.?
Mr Brunstrom admitted that Britain?s existing 6,000 cameras had failed to cut the overall death rate. ?We have got cameras at almost all the identifiable casualty hotspots and yet deaths haven?t gone down because they are happening elsewhere,? he said.
Mr Brunstrom added that he had already taken advantage of the new rules, which are still in draft form, to catch speeding motorcyclists on the A5 in North Wales.
?We are hiding behind road signs and walls. We are not trying to trick people, but we are saying: ?You don?t know where we will be.? ?
The RAC Foundation said it accepted that camera rules should be more flexible, but Edmund King, the foundation?s executive director, added: ?We are concerned that the police are putting all their eggs in one basket. Rather than being so obsessed with cameras, they should look at other measures to improve road safety. The answer is often to make a hidden junction safer rather than use cameras to catch drivers.?
Mr Brunstrom is also lobbying for the abolition of the rule which requires police to demonstrate that the vast majority of cars break the speed limit on a road before they can deploy a camera.
He believes that this prevents forces from targeting roads where the danger comes from the occasional reckless driver breaking the limit by a large margin.
There have been 400 crashes on the A127 in Essex in the past three years, many involving young people in sports cars driving well above the speed limit. But the road does not qualify for camera enforcement because the average speed is not high enough.
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Compare the paragraph that I've italicized with:
http://www.safespeed.org.uk/rules.html
Perhaps they are listening? And panicking? And fumbling around in the dark?
Notice also that they are admitting to deaths due to "race away".
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) and enough space to construct nice straight, wide roads. Mind you, I've never been there, so perhaps they are very dangerous - wallabies running all over the place, or something?