Saturday 7 August 2010

Gone in a flash

The five years from 1997 to 2002 saw an incredible expansion of the numbers of speed cameras in the UK. Scarcely a day passed without some report about speed cameras in the news. They were, apparently, ushering in a new era of road safety, and all reputable commentators were agreed that, like them or not, they were “here to stay”. The late Paul Smith, founder of the Safe Speed campaign, recognised them from the start as a counter-productive quack remedy, but was widely dismissed as something of a crank.

But what is happening now? They’re dropping like ninepins. Swindon led the way, and other authorities such as Oxfordshire and Wiltshire are following. Obviously this is in response to government budget cuts, but if local councils genuinely believed they were effective, surely they would be fighting to keep them and cutting other areas of expenditure instead. In reality, cuts are being used as a cover to beat a retreat from a discredited and unpopular policy. And, despite the shroud-waving anguish from pressure groups such as BRAKE and RoadPeace, I would confidently forecast that we’ll see a further fall in road fatalities in 2010, following the very encouraging figures in 2009. I’m sure Paul Smith will be looking down from above and feeling thoroughly vindicated.

And this underlines the point that, however permanent and entrenched something seems to be, it is not a law of nature that anything endures forever. You don’t have to “accept it” and “move on”. Nobody can predict whether the wheel may turn full circle. No doubt in the early 1920s US Prohibition was widely seen as “here to stay”. But it wasn’t.

4 comments:

  1. Official figures show that bad driving, such as inattention, not looking, losing control of the car, and so on, causes far more fatalities on the road than speed. Yet we have put all our eggs in the anti-speed basket and got rid of traffic police who are needed to deal with the greater problems caused by bad driving.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Couldn't agree more - and hopefully the decline of speed cameras will concentrate minds on providing proper traffic policing.

    ReplyDelete
  3. "but if local councils genuinely believed they were effective, surely they would be fighting to keep them and cutting other areas of expenditure instead"

    Exactly, and I hope all councils follow suit and stop funding the percecution of bars and their owners and staff, who get caught out by smokers smoking in their establishments without the owners knowledge or consent. They did nothing wrong, the smoker did, sometimes willfully, sometimes by accident but the publican is punished to the enth degree...this is so fucking wrong.

    ReplyDelete
  4. As soon as satnavs started picking
    out the money spinners and the
    cashcows stopped yielding a nice little earner,the camera's days
    were up.Anyone with more than 1 GCE o level could have sussed out
    their futility unless they were
    spaced out every 500 Metres on every road in Britain. Unfortunately(Big YIN) the funds
    saved will now go to clamping down on pubs with smoking shelters with
    more than 2 sides.
    Go easy on the speeding motorists
    which INCLUDES MOST MPs
    Hit the backyard smoker which
    EXCLUDES MOST MPs.

    Freezing Fred

    ReplyDelete

Comments, especially on older posts, may require prior approval by the blog owner. See here for details of my comment policy.

Please register an account to comment. Unregistered comments will generally be rejected unless I recognise the author. If you want to comment using an unregistered ID, you will need to tell me something about yourself.