Drivers face more speeding fines

Emphasis on speed limits for road safety condemned

By PH Staff / Monday, 3 October 2005 / Loading comments

It's all about speed, they say

Road safety has taken a step backwards as speed camera partnerships find a way of increasing the number of cases they can handle, increasing the emphasis of road safety enforcement on speed alone rather than overall safety.

Road safety organisation The Association of British Drivers (ABD) has discovered a new system that could enable speed camera partnerships to process 650 per cent more prosecutions automatically. The automated system, called StarTraq, would enable a Speed Camera Partnership to increase prosecutions from 800 per day (£48,000) to 6,000 (£360,000) per day.

In the UK, Derbyshire, Wiltshire and Swindon, North Wales, Kent and Medway and Bedfordshire Camera Partnerships are already using the system, with the likelihood of more partnerships considering it.

Scamera partnerships have, until recently, been limited in the number of fines they could manually process per day. This has led to them setting higher trigger speeds for their cameras to contain the case workload. The StarTraq system enables them to increase the number of drivers fined by 650 per cent, according to information from the company. With increased processing capability, partnerships will be able to reduce camera trigger speeds.

StarTraq is already in use in South Africa, and the company quotes a reference from the City Council of Pretoria: "We are beating our annual budget with over R33 million in collections to date."

ABD road safety spokesman Mark McArthur-Christie said: "It’s a tragedy when road safety has moved so far away from saving lives that it is reduced to maximising the number of tickets and fines a partnership can process in a day."