Scamera puts kids at risk?
The Bristol Evening Post reports that the "War on speed cams is putting kids at risk". It is referring to speed camera vandalism near schools carried out by militant group 'Motorists Against Detection'. Road safety campaign Safe Speed said it doesn't condone camera vandalism, but "demands that speed cameras are urgently scrapped to be replaced with sound road safety policies".
Safe Speed said its research strongly suggested that speed cameras "have failed to make our roads safer but have replaced worthwhile road safety beliefs and policies and indirectly made our roads considerably more dangerous."
This is true at camera sites as well as elsewhere, according to Safe Speed, because cameras take precious driver attention away from the road ahead and squander it on the camera, the speed limit and the speedometer.
Safe Speed reiterated its warning to pedestrians not to cross the road near speed cameras because drivers will be paying less attention. This follows exclusive straw poll research that indicates extraordinary amounts of driver attention diverted from the road near cameras.
Paul Smith, founder of the Safe Speed road safety campaign, said: "The assumption that speed cameras make our roads safer in any general way is quite quite wrong. Real road safety depends on human factors - skills, attitudes and responsibilities. Far from improving road safety, speed camera erode the very qualities on which road safety depends.
"Far from saving lives, speed cameras are a deadly mistake and have caused road death reduction to stall. The last place in the world that I would place a speed camera is outside a school. We need drivers paying attention to kids, not cameras.
"All our speed cameras are in the wrong places. They should be in the scrap yard."
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