Done for speeding by mobile camera

[dagd]

And I agree, but it's not always possible to see the signs, some are hidden by hedges or trees or so dirty that they are eligable!

Today, I drove from my home in Woking to our office in Brum (somewhere north of Watford!), I made a huge effort to stick to (or should I say, just below) the speed limit on on the entire journey. First the good news, I saved quite a bit of petrol - a least a quarter of what I would normally use, horray, I've now done my bit to save the planet!

Now the bad news, my nerves are shot to bits! I found it quite stressful, constantly checking my speed every few secs, taking my eyes off the road while doing so. I didn't use cruse or the speed limiter as there was too much traffic. Overtaking; well I managed to crawel pass the odd truck or two and on three occasions, I had to use the BMW lane on the M40 doing 69 mph (coss 70 is the max limit and my speedo might be out), the cars behind were right up my @rse with their lights on. I pulled in at the earliest opportunity and was rewarded by a nice one finger wave!

The second bit of bad news in that my journey time increased by 45 minutes. I'm now thinking about the journey back, I know... I'll hog the middle lane doing 69mph, that way, I can keep out of the BMW lane and overtake the odd truck! It should also keep both Andy and Flasheart happy!

 

[GregE240]

But its not your risk. What if you have a blow out at 100 mph plus. That is an awful lot of energy. Should you crash into another car, take someone elses life? That is a risk you are prepared to accept? Should you get caught driving like that then you will lose your license.

Good for you not speeding past a school when the children are coming out, what about when they are arriving, or leaving late.

Well, according to those hand wringing THINK! adverts I could kill someone if I hit them at 40mph, so I might as well have a blow out at 100 and not have hoardes of traffic sat behind me getting annoyed at my lack of relative progress on the motorway. Thats my thinking anyway.

I'm well aware of the risks, thanks. Oddly, in spite of my relatively slack attitude towards speed limits on motorways, I still have a driving licence, albeit with 3 points on it.

 

[219]

If I drove everywhere at 70mph , then frankly I'd never get anywhere.

Well , actually , you can go just as far at any speed , it just takes a little longer at a slower speed .

Furthermore , it can be quite surprising how little time it may save on your overall journey by attaining high maximum speeds : in this country it is unlikely you can maintain 3 figure speeds for long before other traffic slows you down or you come to a built up area where such speeds are impractical or unsafe ; your AVERAGE speed over the entire journey does not change all that much but you do dramatically increase your fuel consumption , wear and tear on your vehicle , likelihood of prosecution/loss of license/livelihood , risk of serious injury if an accident were to occur and your personal stress level which can have a detrimental effect on your health and life expectancy .

It is for just these reasons that (although I work for one of the emergency services , am an advanced driver , am supplied with a set of blue lights for my car and can legally exceed the speed limit if on my way to an emergency) I choose not to do it : I see the results of serious road accidents all too often (attended one just last night where one driver was seriously injured and had to be attended by a doctor at the scene before being taken away in the ambulance , and that was in the city centre , 30mph limit , probably not a great speed involved) and I know it is just not worth it - no emergency is so urgent as to warrant taking risks getting there .

Besides , don't you realise that most of the people you whizz past at highly illegal speeds are not thinking something like " nice car - look at that baby go !" but more likely " what an idiot , accident looking for someplace to happen " .

In fact , if you whizz past me at a reckless speed , I'm quite likely to call my control room and get them to alert the traffic department .

 

[DieselE]

Almost all mobile speed traps are set up in 30's and 40's.

If that were true in respect of both mobile and fixed speed cameras, I would have no argument with them.

Just be careful when driving in areas controlled by Gwent police. They are notorious for concentrating their mobile camera efforts on the M4 and nice free flowing lightly trafficed dual carriageways such as the A449 (which links the M50 to the M4). These sites are pure revenue raisers.

 

[Parrot of Doom]

Speaking of which. Anybody know exact details of how the "Community Speedwatch" schemes springing up all over the place work? Some friends of mine are involved in one, and insist their reports can directly result in a ticket. However local residents noting down registrations with a pen & paper seems a bit dubious, and I doubt their RADAR (or laser?) guns are routinely checked/calibrated as I think police ones need to be.

The wording I've seen is (of course) pretty vague e.g.
http://www.surrey.police.uk/news_item.asp?artid=6753

I read this that the police would come out themselves and attempt to catch a persistent offender using noted location/time/registration, rather than issuing a ticket based solely on evidence from the community people.

They're wrong. Plod might send you a letter telling you what a naughty boy you've been, but you can't be prosecuted by these OAP hairdryer wielding idiots.

 

[Parrot of Doom]

we have one camera in the town, before it was installed (following a long campaign to get one) there were five serious crashes - four were fatal in a couple of years all on a 400 metre stretch of dual carriageway with a 40mph limit.

Since the camera was fitted (march 2005) ........not a single accident

but of course they don't work do they? they don't make the roads safer and they don't save lives.

andy

How many accidents on that road were there before the 4 crashes in those 2 years?

 

[andy_k]

they were pretty much a regular occurence, there's a house which sits just off that road and slightly below it's level, they have had cars through the walls three times (once in the bedroom when an MG metro managed to use the crash barrier as a take off ramp!!). A motorcyclist escaped serious injury when he came off doing (in his words) over 140 and another one was less lucky when he hit a lamp post doing about (in the accident reporters words) speeds in excess of 120 mph.

Fortunately, most of the locals are aware of it and they tend to drive sensibly but there's always someone who's been stuck behind a lorry since folkestone that ssses it as a great overtaking opportunity

It's a weird bit of road, a nice dual carriageway which is about a mile long but half way along there is a slight bend in the road right at the crest of a gradual slope and the camber isn't quite right as the road drops away. Add to this at the bottom of the hill there's a set of traffic lights with a camera on them to catch the light jumpers

At 40 (the speed limit) you don't notice anything, at 60 you feel the suspension go light over the crest of the hill and in the wet a car may just step out off line slightly. At 70 it's more awkward, especially in the wet and above 80 if you weren't expecting it and hit the brakes to slow down for the lights you could easily end up in the offside crash barrier or if you over compensate then you are looking at the nearside crash barrier and the house wall.

The camera has stopped even the idiots - sometimes they do actually work

Andy

 

[Swiss Toni]

Most hazards can be seen, except maybe ice, but you can anticipate this with experience.

Maybe you can borrow Pontoneers copy of RoadCraft?

 

[dagd]

At 40 (the speed limit) you don't notice anything, at 60 you feel the suspension go light over the crest of the hill and in the wet a car may just step out off line slightly. At 70 it's more awkward, especially in the wet and above 80 if you weren't expecting it and hit the brakes to slow down for the lights you could easily end up in the offside crash barrier or if you over compensate then you are looking at the nearside crash barrier and the house wall.

The camera has stopped even the idiots - sometimes they do actually work

Andy

How do you know this if you never exceed the speed limit?

Incidently, I'd love a camera on a road near my house, sounds like a simular setup, except there are no lights, just a stagered road junction at the bottom of the hill and a bend. I have to pull out a side road and turn right, at busy times, I drive a mile out of my way to avoid it. No one has been killed there yet, but bent cars and bikes a plenty!

 

[BTB 500]

I would fully support automatic cameras on every set of traffic lights. Every day (on my short walk to/from the station) I see people deliberately accelerate through lights that have gone red. I was nearly taken out by a Chrysler Voyager last night as I went across a pedestrian crossing - the driver was using a hand-held mobile too!

 

[GregE240]

Well , actually , you can go just as far at any speed , it just takes a little longer at a slower speed .

Furthermore , it can be quite surprising how little time it may save on your overall journey by attaining high maximum speeds : in this country it is unlikely you can maintain 3 figure speeds for long before other traffic slows you down or you come to a built up area where such speeds are impractical or unsafe ; your AVERAGE speed over the entire journey does not change all that much but you do dramatically increase your fuel consumption , wear and tear on your vehicle , likelihood of prosecution/loss of license/livelihood , risk of serious injury if an accident were to occur and your personal stress level which can have a detrimental effect on your health and life expectancy .

It is for just these reasons that (although I work for one of the emergency services , am an advanced driver , am supplied with a set of blue lights for my car and can legally exceed the speed limit if on my way to an emergency) I choose not to do it : I see the results of serious road accidents all too often (attended one just last night where one driver was seriously injured and had to be attended by a doctor at the scene before being taken away in the ambulance , and that was in the city centre , 30mph limit , probably not a great speed involved) and I know it is just not worth it - no emergency is so urgent as to warrant taking risks getting there .

Besides , don't you realise that most of the people you whizz past at highly illegal speeds are not thinking something like " nice car - look at that baby go !" but more likely " what an idiot , accident looking for someplace to happen " .

In fact , if you whizz past me at a reckless speed , I'm quite likely to call my control room and get them to alert the traffic department .

How patronising.

You've made a mighty assumption that I am in some way an unsafe driver, and I resent that. In my 18 years of driving I have been involved in one accident (where someone drove into the back of me, for your information) and until last December when some faceless Nazi in a van pointed a greed camera at me, I had had a clean licence. My vehicles are maintained regardless of cost.

I have 15 years NCB. For three years I was a named driver on my fathers insurance.

I'm not a risk taker. I don't speed through villages. I don't speed past schools. I don't speed in towns. I'm not dangerous to other road users. FFS get off your high horse and stop being so judgemental.

This is my final comment on this thread.

 

[prprandall51]

They're wrong. Plod might send you a letter telling you what a naughty boy you've been, but you can't be prosecuted by these OAP hairdryer wielding idiots.

PoD, what exactly is it about a load of residents trying to reduce the speed of vehicles passing through the village in which they live to a reasonable and safe limit that you object to?

In what way are they idiots? Because they make you slow down? Because they momentarily make you think for one second that you might have been done for speeding?

Philip

 

[Rose Chap]

Nimbyism.

Enforcement of speed limits whether you agree with those limits or not is a job for the Police.

 

[prprandall51]

Nimpyism?

Rose Chap,

Show me one person who lives in a 30 limit who isn't more concerned about the speeding outside their own front door than the speeding cars that whizz through another village at the other end of the country.

Show me one person who wouldn't be more passionate about preventing a block of flats going up next door to them than a similar block being erected in the next county.

Given the police resources we have, I would rather have them patrolling my village in Surrey than have them pike off to yours in West Sussex. I want to be honest here. I need to be brutally honest here, I am more concerned about the possiblity of my children being run over than yours.

Me a NIMBY - of course. I am just like everyone else. That doesn't mean that I don't care about other people, I just care about me and my immediate circle more.

NIMBY is a term used by people who have never suffered the misery and blight of a block of flats being built next to them or had their child mown down outside their home by an idiot (a real one, not an OAP with a hair dryer).

Philip

 

[richard]

I've been watching this thread with interest, having posted early on about what I thought was upsetting me about speed cameras (law enforcement without human discrimination) - but now have realised its something else !!

I think that the trouble with speed cameras is not the speed camera or the enforcement of the speed limit, its the unbalanced use of speed cameras (unbalanced with respect to enforcement of other traffic laws) - which I believe happens partially because its easy to raise lots of money from speed cameras and partially because its easy to implement.

These two underlying points (unbalanced, raising lots of cash) cause an instant negative reaction in many/most people masking the fact that obeying speed limits is actually good practice, and disobeying them is breaking the law.

Of course the raising lots of cash makes it rather tempting to un-necessarily reduce speed limits in order to try raising extra cash. Which is why in my previous post I said that all speed limits should be set by a central body, appropriately resourced and qualified, not by some quango or local councillors.
And, the moment there are too many infringements on allowing a person to do what they damn well please, then people will complain about civil liberties - its only natural rather than respecting the laws that protect people.

The imbalance itself causes more laws to be broken. For instance, I've seen middle lane hoggers being under-taken, cut-up etc - which are all breaking the law and caused directly because all those people that hog the middle lane have done so for years, never been stopped by anyone, so are never going to stop. If they got stopped and fined and points, then they would stop. Same with stopping on zigzags, mobile phone usage, red-lights and a growing number of sensible laws that are being ignored.

As BTB500 points out, jumping red lights is extremely dangerous - more so than most speeding offences. Why do I say that? because most insurance companies don't load your premium for 1 SP30 speeding offence bt they will for other offences - and they'll have reached that policy purely from analysing what it costs them in compensation payments to people/vehicles/street-furniture - i.e how much carnage is created by people with offence type X on their driving record.

Another example of this inbalance is mobile-phone-while-driving users. Of course you are not concentraing 100% on the road if you are on the blower and clearly the government things you concentrate less if you are holding the phone whilst talking on it (?!?) - there was a program last night on TV where a lorry drive had taken out a row of stationary traffic, who was playing with his phone - never even saw the warning signs or the traffic. I see people texting whilst driving. What do you get for being on the phone, £30 quid fine and 0 points - clearly this fine isn't (a) big enough and (b) (more critically) handed out enough to make a real difference, and, in my view, inbalanced compared to doing 51mph in a 50mph zone.

I see so few police on the roads now, that i keep on thinking about removing my rear number plate and waiting to see how long before anyone stops me !

In reality, what I want is that the focus on law enforcement is balanced, and not focused so strongly on *just* speed cameras because the councils need the revenue or the people who work for speed camera partnerships need to justify their own jobs.


I'm also convinced that there are speed cameras, and quite often mobile cameras, that are placed in locations that are optimised for revenue raising rather than road safety - which just creates a distrust for whole speed enforcement policy, and thus for speed limits.

Yes, certain speed cameras definely save lives. But having variable speed limits on the M25 that drop up and down 10MPH between the boards, or are there when there is no traffic on the road at all (or workmen) make it hard to beleive that there is a lot of 'revenue raising' driven enforcement rather than safety driven enforcement.

If it was true that the money from speed cameras went directly back into road-safety - then maybee the system would work. But as you see from the strength of the responses on this thread many do regard it as broken/just-a-tax/a-waste-of-time

So, lets move some of those cameras into zones around schools, and convert lots of them to be red-light cameras - if we enforce all aspects of road-traffic law, then alongside education, driving will improve, and we'll all be happier sharing the road with all road users.


Richard

ps
And while we are there, start instantly confiscating and crushing cars that are un-insured, un-taxed, un-registered - because if you're willing to break all of those laws you definetly don't care about most of the other driving laws.

 

[andy_k]

How do you know this if you never exceed the speed limit?

it used to be a 60 limit, as for the rest - pure speculation but they dropped it due to the number of accidents. Sadly the organ donors (motorcyclists and young kids mainly) decided that they knew much better and that even though the local authority had deliberately reduced the speed limit to cut down on accidents they would be fine because they were all "really good" drivers.

The speed camera was installed two years after the limit was reduced after a long campaign by the locals and MPs - starnage they are so unwelcome everywhere else yet it was a real struggle to get one here

Just for the record I have never said that I have never broken the speed limit as that would be untrue.

What I have said is that speeding is not acceptable especially in 30 mph zones and that it is not hard to stick to limits.

Quite honestly I don't give a stuff what speed people drive at if the conditions are right but what really annoys me is that whenever they get caught braking a law they are well aware of they cry "foul!!!" and start looking for ways to get out of it, expect even more leeway etc etc etc.

Andy

 

[richard]

PoD, what exactly is it about a load of residents trying to reduce the speed of vehicles passing through the village in which they live to a reasonable and safe limit that you object to?

If they've got hair-dryers (or even fake ones) or use any other threat or menance then I can't see how they are any different to vigilantes.

I.E "we think you are breaking the law, so we're going to scare you"

Its a job for the police and not for residents or other civilians. The police need to be properly resourced - perhaps with all that cash from the speed cameras being spent on traffic police rather than self-justifying quangos.

Go look at this http://www.safecam.org.uk/general_information/about_the_partnership.aspx

which explains the structure of that safety camera partnership. Theres a mere 35 of these entities all with their own slightly different websites structures, and loads of people. What a complete waste of resource and money to split a task that should be consistant across the country into 35 quangos. How many extra traffic police would that pay for. AAGGGHHH.

If you really want the answer to that question. look at their 2004/2005 accounts at http://www.dft.gov.uk/stellent/grou...tentservertemplate/dft_index.hcst?n=14972&l=2


Richard

 

[prprandall51]

If they've got hair-dryers (or even fake ones) or use any other threat or menance then I can't see how they are any different to vigilantes.

I.E "we think you are breaking the law, so we're going to scare you"

Its a job for the police and not for residents or other civilians.
Richard

I may have the wrong end of the stick, but I thought Parrot of Doom was referring to the Police-organised, officially approved schemes where residents of small towns and villages are supplied with speed measuring equipment (the "hair dryers") and trained in their use.
The scheme has been shown to be successful in reducing speeds in the areas in which it has been implemented.

If PoD was not referring to this scheme but in actual fact to a bunch of unlicensed OAPs waving genuine hair dryers at passing motorists then I unreservedly apologise to him and this thread in general. I still wouldn't consider them (the OAPs) to be the idiots, though, if they were waving their hair dryers at people exceeding the speed limit in a 30 zone. I would consider it to be the drivers who were idiots, though I would concede that such action on the part of the OAPs could be considered vigilante-ism and I would suggest it was a short route to a bop on the nose.

Philip

 

[richard]

I may have the wrong end of the stick, but I thought Parrot of Doom was referring to the Police-organised, officially approved schemes where residents of small towns and villages are supplied with speed measuring equipment (the "hair dryers") and trained in their use.
The scheme has been shown to be successful in reducing speeds in the areas in which it has been implemented.

Aha, I thought he/you were referring to a non-police approved action.

Apologies to you both if i'm wrong !

However, thinking about it, i'd still be much happier if the police had enough resource to turn up there, place the equipment in the position where the experienced office beleives there is most risk to the public, and issue tickets (whilst looking for no-car-tax, drivers on phones, or just plain old terrible driving)..

Those signs that light up warning you off speeding are also very effective, and I would prefer to see those rather than people who can pretend to issue tickets.

R

 

[Flasheart]

I am sure http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/6131826.stm this will be of interest to some