There’s a new speed camera on the block -- and it could be in force in huge numbers quite shortly.
Called Spike, it can measure how fast a car has travelled over a distance, rather than snapping it just at the point when it passes the device.
The only system that was been able to do this until now was SPECS (Speed Check Enforcement System). It costs hundreds of thousands of pounds, which has limited its implementation.
Spike costs just £20,000, in the same price range as a Gatso. The system, which is also portable, has been submitted to the Home Office for approval, according to a report in The Telegraph. What's more it's tiny and hard to spot.
PIPS, the company which makes the product, boasts that Devon County Council plans to install the system around Exeter and Newton Abbott, with further expansion planned for Barnstaple and Totnes.
Bizarrely, the AA Trust said that the system would cut down on people driving into trees and undertaking rash overtaking manoeuvres on single carriageway roads.
Road safety campaign Safe Speed's Paul Smith said: "This will lead to people looking at their speedometers every couple of seconds, rather than looking at the road. It is the massively expensive cost of the Specs system that has stopped it being introduced more widely. Speed cameras are highly destructive and ones which take an average are even more so."
"Research commissioned by the Highways Agency, the largest of its kind, associated average speed cameras with a 4.5 per cent increase in crashes in motorway road works sections, and a 6.7 per cent increase in crashes on open motorways.
"We know for sure that road safety hasn't improved as expected in the speed camera era. I believe that this is because speed camera come with dangerous side effects. All cameras cause side effects, but the side effects of average speed cameras appear to be especially subtle and insidious.
"Speed camera side effects are everywhere, but none of them have been adequately studied."
Picture courtesy PIPS Technology