Well done Swindon!

[SimonsMerc]

BBC NEWS | England | Wiltshire | Town switches off speed cameras

Swindon [...] borough council said it was reinvesting the £320,000 a year maintenance costs for the five cameras in road safety measures.

-simon

 

[GrahamC230K]

Not sure why they bagged them and made it so obvious. Surely even as effective dummies they were a deterent?

 

[crockers]

Well they have gone from 5 sites where you know where the cameras are to roving mobile police units with hand held radar guns where you don't know where they will be. Which do you think a). catches most motorists and b) is the greatest deterrent.

 

[Dryce]

BBC NEWS | England | Wiltshire | Town switches off speed cameras

Seems also to rather blow the argument that the cameras are put up to make money.

 

[crockers]

Seems also to rather blow the argument that the cameras are put up to make money.

I don't think that may be true as the money wasn't coming back to the council whereas the council were responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of the cameras. They therefore feel that the money spent could be better used elsewhere. I am sure if they could have kept the revenues then Swindon would have kept them.

 

[Dryce]

I don't think that may be true as the money wasn't coming back to the council whereas the council were responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of the cameras.

Well it looks like the council had the choice as to whether the cameras were installed and operated - or they wouldn't be ceasing to operate them.

It implies that the people responsible for the cameras don't make money therefore this is a clear demonstraion they are not operated for revenue.

The fact that the revenue goes to HM Treasury is a separate matter.

So that means councils presumably operate cameras for other reasons, for example:

• maybe they just don't like motorists
• altruisim trowards HM Treasury
• financial stupidity
• genuine safety concerns

 

[st13phil]

It implies that the people responsible for the cameras don't make money therefore this is a clear demonstraion they are not operated for revenue.

The fact that the revenue goes to HM Treasury is a separate matter.

Actually, it's not a separate matter. Until the change in the funding arrangements for Scamera Partnerships the money-go-round was a "virtuous circle" for the camera operating body. More cameras = more revenues = more cameras ad infinitum. However, even the most inept of our politicians realised that the general public were smelling a very large rat and re-jigged the funding arrangements a year or so ago so that the camera operating bodies could say "our hands are clean, we're not doing it for the filthy lucre". Trouble is, the money's just going via another route into (essentially) the same coffer and the smelly rat is still very much in evidence.

That Swindon have ceased to directly fund Scamera operations is, I suspect, at least in part a political point about funding but all credit to them for standing up to the hectoring bullies in organisations like Brake who have made their usual predictions of death and destruction whenever anyone has the temerity to question that Speed Cameras Are Great and the Ultimate Road Safety Panacea

 

[Roger Jones]

Consistent with other domains of civil transgression (speeding being one) and criminal activity, it seems that the collection of cash is a prime motivator for the authorities, wherever in the public sector that cash is destined to arrive. Hence, criminal low life are not pursued as vigorously as the middle-class motorist, because the latter has the means to pay and the former doesn't. Justice it isn't; deceitful it is; fundamentally wrong it is too.