Report Questions Efficacy Of UK Speed Cameras

There are police cameras all over England. The number of cameras per person is frightening, and they are also used in great numbers on the roads of the UK. And now, a new report by the UK Statistics Authority directs some disbelief on the figures that the Department for Transport has used to rationalize its speed camera campaign.

I'm not a big fan of traffic cameras, let's just get that out of the way right now. I don't like being monitored in general, but the real reason is not that I'm afraid of being caught speeding (although hat's part of it). What I really abhor is that traffic cameras are seen by both the courts and the non-car-aware public as being infallible. If the camera says you ran a red light or were going to fast, well, then it must be true.

That's BS. It puts too much trust in machines, and it does so at the cost of our bank accounts and potentially our freedom.

You add to this that there are already numerous studies out there showing that red light cameras have more of a tendency to cause accidents (people are afraid of getting a ticket, so there's lots of heavy breaking and rear ending) and that the same red light cameras have been used by more than one municipality in the U.S. as nothing more than revenue generators.

So out comes this report for the UK Statistics Authority (which either sounds lovably quaint or like something from a Monty Python skit (or is that redundant)), and it reads as another blow against traffic cameras.

The UK Department for Transport says that it has reduced serious injuries in road accidents to 60 per cent of the average from the mid-1990s, partly thanks to the use of speed cameras. Sounds good, right?

Well, it turns out that those figures are based on police reports, which were taken at the time of the accident. But the information based on hospital admissions have not dropped, calling the reliability of the police reports into question.

The Stats said: "The figures are widely recognized as being an incomplete count of both accidents and casualties," and that the figures "may not be sufficiently reliable to meet all user needs."

Not the nicest of words. Claire Armstrong, a campaigner for the anti safety camera group, Safe Speed, had even more pointed comments. "This is something we have been saying for years. It is disappointing that it only comes to light now after all the damage that has been caused by the wrong road safety messages and the extortionate amounts of money that has extracted from motorists and badly invested," said Ms. Armstrong.

OK, so here's my recommendation: Do away with all traffic cameras, get the cops to put down the doughnuts and get out on the road and start doing their job, which is policing the community. Yeah, I know it's hard, but that's why they call it work.

Source: PistonHeads. Photos from Flickr users Adrian Short, takomabibelot and secretlondon123.