Rejoice, all ye who loathe the speed camera - for the end of the dreaded Gatso is nigh! Or at least it could be in Bournemouth; the south coast town is considering following the
example of Swindon
by removing all its fixed speed cameras.
A committee has been set up to investigate whether the fixed speed cameras in the town - there are 20 of them - actually reduce vehicle speeds or lower the number of collisions.
The instigator of the project is Charminster councillor Mark Anderson. "I've been keen on this issue for a while" Anderson told the Bournemouth Daily Echo. "When I was 20 the reason I drove carefully around the town was because I knew there were police around. I knew that if I exceeded the speed limit I would probably get caught by a radar gun and I didn't know where they would be."
The committee is also keen to discover exactly what benefits Bournemouth receives from the revenue of the fixed speed cameras.
"We pay a lot of money into the safety camera partnership and I'd like to know what we actually get from it," says Anderson. "If we don't have the safety cameras, we can invest the money in road improvements. This could potentially include filling in potholes.
"That's one of the things we will be looking at - should we be using some of this money to help repair the road infrastructure of the town? We have very little money from the government for road repairs."
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