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Simon Jenkins 'Comment' leader - reflects what we all think!
[url]www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,482-926051,00.html[/url]
[url]www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,482-926051,00.html[/url]
Here's the full text of the article:
Speed cameras are just electronic Dick Turpins
Simon Jenkins
Yesterday the Transport Secretary, Alistair Darling, opened the M6 relief motorway north of Birmingham. He called it “Britain’s first toll road”. He clearly did not like the thing, blaming it on the last Conservative Government. No more toll roads are planned. Mr Darling is old Labour at heart and believes that roads, like hospitals, should be “free at the point of delivery”.
This is nonsense. Toll roads are as old as stagecoaches. Kilburn and Knightsbridge were toll roads. The government happily levies tolls on roads across the Severn and the Humber rivers. The M25 round east London is a toll motorway. Ministers may travel blindfold in sealed limousines, but their speech writers seem never to peer out from their windows at this alien land which they rule called Britain.
Yet these are not Britain’s real toll roads. They collect pin money. Britain’s most lucrative highways are those policed by sleeping tax gatherers, the mighty Gatso speed cameras that stand as sentinels and droop like vultures over every road. These speedcams are the totems of new Labour’s weird approach to law and order. Government may be soft on street crime, lax on mugging and inert on vandalism, but it is “zero tolerant” of traffic offences.
Half the yobs in London may smash my windscreen, walk off with my radio or cover my walls with graffiti, and the police are not to be seen. But if I leave the wheel of my car two centimetres over a white line, a warden will pounce and a giant grabber will carry my vehicle off to a compound and a £150 fine. In Tony Blair’s Britain a crime is just a crime, but a traffic offence is a satanic deed. When it comes to motoring, Mr Blair is Judge Dredd, Enforcer and Terminator all in one.
Thus with speeding. I do not regard myself as a fast, let alone dangerous driver. Until Mr Blair came to power and told police forces to subcontract speeding fines and keep half the money for in-house expenses, I had an unblemished driving licence and took pride in my roadsmanship. Now I am one of a reported million motorists a year who acquire points and am at risk of losing my licence. This severe punishment would once have been reserved, and rightly, for dangerous or drink-affected drivers.
Speed cameras have almost nothing to do with road safety. Britain had the safest roads in Europe before they were introduced. Mr Darling claimed yesterday that speed cameras had yielded “up to” 35 per cent fewer accidents, a figure based on the theory that speed is a factor in a third of all accidents. This is like the BBC saying yesterday that train fares are rising by up to “9 per cent”. Such statistics are near meaningless.
A moment’s inquiry of his own transport research laboratory would tell Mr Darling that he is being fed tosh. The “safe speed” website www.safespeed.org.uk of the safety expert, Paul Smith, shows Whitehall admitting excessive speed as the chief cause of no more than 7 per cent of accidents. More alarming, road fatalities in Britain were marginally up on 1999, before the new regime came into place, and up on 1995. There is no t a shred of evidence to support the “35 per cent” assertion.
The police and the private operators working the speed cameras are in the business of making money for each other. They have a direct financial incentive to maximise revenue. Only one police chief, Durham’s Paul Garvin, has dared call the speed cameras’ bluff.
Co Durham constabulary refuses to use cameras, preferring road patrols, and has an accident rate 34 per cent below the national average. Mr Garvin points out that drug abuse is a 40 per cent contributor to unsafe driving. But do not ask the Government to take that seriously.
The giveaway is that most cameras are not located on dangerous roads but on safe ones. Autocar magazine recently revealed that there are 73 Gatsos on the 50 safest stretches of road in Britain and just 18 on the 50 most dangerous ones. The reason is obvious. Drivers are most likely to break speed limit traps on safe roads, while on dangerous ones they are naturally more careful. Cameras festoon motorways, the safest class of road in the country. Until recent protests, they were even kept inconspicuous, lest their deterrent effect endangered revenues. No camera has its speed limit marked on it as on the Ccontinent.
This is the mad, sad world of modern British government. Public services are driven by targets, contracts and performance indicators, not the public interest. Officials slave over computer screens crammed with league tables. A service is measured by money saved or revenue raised. Cars are seen as wallets on wheels and Britain’s 5,000 speed cameras are tax points.
Since the Treasury introduced its new regime in 2001, the camera operators have not cut road fatalities, but their threefold increase in cameras has delivered some 4,000 speeding notices, fines and licence endorsements each day. Annual Revenue has soared from £10 million to £82 million or, even £152 million, with some £220 million going in tax to the Treasury. The figures are guesses as they are, unbelievably a state secret.
Labour ministers will not introduce road tolls, so the Treasury has opted instead to boost police and its own revenue with a stealth tax. Speed cameras are an electronic Robin Hood.
Of course the tax can be avoided by sticking to the speed limits. But modern cars and ever better roads have made it near impossible to do so. Roads are still being straightened and made faster, with cameras carefully located on their safest stretches. It has been admitted that Bristol’s cameras are sited to raise revenue, not at black spots. The same is true on London’s Embankment. The limits are often arbitrary and changeable. As any road user will attest , they are broken by virtually every motorist. The only bad luck is getting caught.
In my experience the most expensive of the new “toll” roads has been the A1 through the East Midlands. This is the old Great North Road on which the highwayman Dick Turpin used to emulate Alistair Darling. Over the past three years the A1 has cost me six licence points. The road is an A road but mostly of motorway standard, and drivers are thus easily seduced into thinking that the limit is 70mph when it is 60mph.
Even Nottinghamshire police admit that the road is regularly under repair. Drivers must try to negotiate cones and chicanes while spotting randomly sited notices imposing 50mph or even 40mph stretches. Watching for changes in the limits while driving safely is near impossible. The A1 is a police goldmine. Its cameras must come close to outgunning the legendary M11 Gatso which collected £840,000 in a single week. Gordon Brown should award that camera a Treasury MBE.
The Government’s transport adviser, David Begg, pointed out yesterday that the best speed camera would be one that collected no fines because its presence kept every driver within the limit. To the Treasury such a camera would have failed. Mr Brown would hurl it on the scrap heap in a rage and strip its operator of his bonus.
I do not mind paying a fair price to drive on good roads. Tolls and petrol taxes are the best way to curb hypermobility and encourage people to travel on public transport. But a minimum £60 toll for going a fraction over an ill-judged and ill-signed speed restriction is excessive punishment, as is the removal of a driving licence. Since the frequency of the offence is a function of the amount of driving done, endorsement is grossly unfair on those who drive for a living.
This is rotten government. A laudable desire to promote safer driving has been highjacked by the tax gatherers. Figures indicate that fewer police are now out seeking drunk or dangerous drivers, retreating instead to their offices or cameras. Durham attributes this directly to speedcam fixation. That is why motoring fatalities are not falling.
A Government which fails to charge openly and honestly for public services is introducing payment by the back door. Speeding fines are not being managed to promote safety: they are being managed cynically to raise money. They are the stealthiest of stealth taxes, devious, punitive and random. Small wonder 48 per cent of motorists say they would never report anyone for vandalising a Gatso.
Speed cameras are just electronic Dick Turpins
Simon Jenkins
Yesterday the Transport Secretary, Alistair Darling, opened the M6 relief motorway north of Birmingham. He called it “Britain’s first toll road”. He clearly did not like the thing, blaming it on the last Conservative Government. No more toll roads are planned. Mr Darling is old Labour at heart and believes that roads, like hospitals, should be “free at the point of delivery”.
This is nonsense. Toll roads are as old as stagecoaches. Kilburn and Knightsbridge were toll roads. The government happily levies tolls on roads across the Severn and the Humber rivers. The M25 round east London is a toll motorway. Ministers may travel blindfold in sealed limousines, but their speech writers seem never to peer out from their windows at this alien land which they rule called Britain.
Yet these are not Britain’s real toll roads. They collect pin money. Britain’s most lucrative highways are those policed by sleeping tax gatherers, the mighty Gatso speed cameras that stand as sentinels and droop like vultures over every road. These speedcams are the totems of new Labour’s weird approach to law and order. Government may be soft on street crime, lax on mugging and inert on vandalism, but it is “zero tolerant” of traffic offences.
Half the yobs in London may smash my windscreen, walk off with my radio or cover my walls with graffiti, and the police are not to be seen. But if I leave the wheel of my car two centimetres over a white line, a warden will pounce and a giant grabber will carry my vehicle off to a compound and a £150 fine. In Tony Blair’s Britain a crime is just a crime, but a traffic offence is a satanic deed. When it comes to motoring, Mr Blair is Judge Dredd, Enforcer and Terminator all in one.
Thus with speeding. I do not regard myself as a fast, let alone dangerous driver. Until Mr Blair came to power and told police forces to subcontract speeding fines and keep half the money for in-house expenses, I had an unblemished driving licence and took pride in my roadsmanship. Now I am one of a reported million motorists a year who acquire points and am at risk of losing my licence. This severe punishment would once have been reserved, and rightly, for dangerous or drink-affected drivers.
Speed cameras have almost nothing to do with road safety. Britain had the safest roads in Europe before they were introduced. Mr Darling claimed yesterday that speed cameras had yielded “up to” 35 per cent fewer accidents, a figure based on the theory that speed is a factor in a third of all accidents. This is like the BBC saying yesterday that train fares are rising by up to “9 per cent”. Such statistics are near meaningless.
A moment’s inquiry of his own transport research laboratory would tell Mr Darling that he is being fed tosh. The “safe speed” website www.safespeed.org.uk of the safety expert, Paul Smith, shows Whitehall admitting excessive speed as the chief cause of no more than 7 per cent of accidents. More alarming, road fatalities in Britain were marginally up on 1999, before the new regime came into place, and up on 1995. There is no t a shred of evidence to support the “35 per cent” assertion.
The police and the private operators working the speed cameras are in the business of making money for each other. They have a direct financial incentive to maximise revenue. Only one police chief, Durham’s Paul Garvin, has dared call the speed cameras’ bluff.
Co Durham constabulary refuses to use cameras, preferring road patrols, and has an accident rate 34 per cent below the national average. Mr Garvin points out that drug abuse is a 40 per cent contributor to unsafe driving. But do not ask the Government to take that seriously.
The giveaway is that most cameras are not located on dangerous roads but on safe ones. Autocar magazine recently revealed that there are 73 Gatsos on the 50 safest stretches of road in Britain and just 18 on the 50 most dangerous ones. The reason is obvious. Drivers are most likely to break speed limit traps on safe roads, while on dangerous ones they are naturally more careful. Cameras festoon motorways, the safest class of road in the country. Until recent protests, they were even kept inconspicuous, lest their deterrent effect endangered revenues. No camera has its speed limit marked on it as on the Ccontinent.
This is the mad, sad world of modern British government. Public services are driven by targets, contracts and performance indicators, not the public interest. Officials slave over computer screens crammed with league tables. A service is measured by money saved or revenue raised. Cars are seen as wallets on wheels and Britain’s 5,000 speed cameras are tax points.
Since the Treasury introduced its new regime in 2001, the camera operators have not cut road fatalities, but their threefold increase in cameras has delivered some 4,000 speeding notices, fines and licence endorsements each day. Annual Revenue has soared from £10 million to £82 million or, even £152 million, with some £220 million going in tax to the Treasury. The figures are guesses as they are, unbelievably a state secret.
Labour ministers will not introduce road tolls, so the Treasury has opted instead to boost police and its own revenue with a stealth tax. Speed cameras are an electronic Robin Hood.
Of course the tax can be avoided by sticking to the speed limits. But modern cars and ever better roads have made it near impossible to do so. Roads are still being straightened and made faster, with cameras carefully located on their safest stretches. It has been admitted that Bristol’s cameras are sited to raise revenue, not at black spots. The same is true on London’s Embankment. The limits are often arbitrary and changeable. As any road user will attest , they are broken by virtually every motorist. The only bad luck is getting caught.
In my experience the most expensive of the new “toll” roads has been the A1 through the East Midlands. This is the old Great North Road on which the highwayman Dick Turpin used to emulate Alistair Darling. Over the past three years the A1 has cost me six licence points. The road is an A road but mostly of motorway standard, and drivers are thus easily seduced into thinking that the limit is 70mph when it is 60mph.
Even Nottinghamshire police admit that the road is regularly under repair. Drivers must try to negotiate cones and chicanes while spotting randomly sited notices imposing 50mph or even 40mph stretches. Watching for changes in the limits while driving safely is near impossible. The A1 is a police goldmine. Its cameras must come close to outgunning the legendary M11 Gatso which collected £840,000 in a single week. Gordon Brown should award that camera a Treasury MBE.
The Government’s transport adviser, David Begg, pointed out yesterday that the best speed camera would be one that collected no fines because its presence kept every driver within the limit. To the Treasury such a camera would have failed. Mr Brown would hurl it on the scrap heap in a rage and strip its operator of his bonus.
I do not mind paying a fair price to drive on good roads. Tolls and petrol taxes are the best way to curb hypermobility and encourage people to travel on public transport. But a minimum £60 toll for going a fraction over an ill-judged and ill-signed speed restriction is excessive punishment, as is the removal of a driving licence. Since the frequency of the offence is a function of the amount of driving done, endorsement is grossly unfair on those who drive for a living.
This is rotten government. A laudable desire to promote safer driving has been highjacked by the tax gatherers. Figures indicate that fewer police are now out seeking drunk or dangerous drivers, retreating instead to their offices or cameras. Durham attributes this directly to speedcam fixation. That is why motoring fatalities are not falling.
A Government which fails to charge openly and honestly for public services is introducing payment by the back door. Speeding fines are not being managed to promote safety: they are being managed cynically to raise money. They are the stealthiest of stealth taxes, devious, punitive and random. Small wonder 48 per cent of motorists say they would never report anyone for vandalising a Gatso.
THINK OF THE MOTORISTS!Just sent this to the times:
Dear Sir,
I have to commend you on a well written and informative article.
Policing for profit via the speed cameras (renamed to "safety" cameras to make them more acceptable no doubt) has taken over from common sense policing via intelligent and well trained traffic officers.
The so called "safety" camera partnerships use dubious and downright fraudulent methods to get cameras sited.
Such as "adding in" crashes on roads that occured due to drunk, drugged and illegal drivers, all to boost the "ksi's" for a road to make it legitimate for excessive enforcement, along with the resulting profits generated.
Basically theyre making money from people's injuries and deaths!
They are abhorrent, up to and beyond the point of nauseousness. They are vile, bile inducing theives, masquerading under a banner of "road safety".
Exceeding a speed limit is one of only a few "offences" whereby you cannot be tried by jury, where you are presumed guilty (not innocent), where the prosecution disclose their "evidence" on the day of your court appearance (should you not pay the sharks their cash) usually 5 minutes before proceedings start, so you have no time to prepare a defence, where your sentence for not "confessing" can be anything up to 10 times the original sum of the fines.
What a wonderful system for these "partnerships", its something closely akin to "The Mob" and all their tactics.
I note with interest that you mention Mr Paul Smith and the Safespeed website he runs.
This man almost single handedly has brought the truth to the fore. His tireless devotion to seeking the truth, disecting the "partnerships", Transport 2000, and Brake's hysterical Mary Williams disinformation is staggering. Always they distract when questioned, they divert, they do not answer the points Mr Smith raises.
They cannot do so. Not without referring to the very documents that Mr Smith has shown to be flawed, it is thus that their arguments are also flawed.
Other sites of interest that campaign against these cash cams, greed cameras and scameras, can be found here:
www.saferroads.co.uk
www.onethirdlie.org.uk/
www.arrivedeprived.org.uk/
www.abd.org.uk/
www.pepipoo.com/
www.roadweb.org.uk/
To name just a few. Please visit them all, read the statistics that are shown, then make up your own minds, something the likes of T2000, brake and the partnerships would never encourage.
Yours Faithfully, .......
Dear Sir,
I have to commend you on a well written and informative article.
Policing for profit via the speed cameras (renamed to "safety" cameras to make them more acceptable no doubt) has taken over from common sense policing via intelligent and well trained traffic officers.
The so called "safety" camera partnerships use dubious and downright fraudulent methods to get cameras sited.
Such as "adding in" crashes on roads that occured due to drunk, drugged and illegal drivers, all to boost the "ksi's" for a road to make it legitimate for excessive enforcement, along with the resulting profits generated.
Basically theyre making money from people's injuries and deaths!
They are abhorrent, up to and beyond the point of nauseousness. They are vile, bile inducing theives, masquerading under a banner of "road safety".
Exceeding a speed limit is one of only a few "offences" whereby you cannot be tried by jury, where you are presumed guilty (not innocent), where the prosecution disclose their "evidence" on the day of your court appearance (should you not pay the sharks their cash) usually 5 minutes before proceedings start, so you have no time to prepare a defence, where your sentence for not "confessing" can be anything up to 10 times the original sum of the fines.
What a wonderful system for these "partnerships", its something closely akin to "The Mob" and all their tactics.
I note with interest that you mention Mr Paul Smith and the Safespeed website he runs.
This man almost single handedly has brought the truth to the fore. His tireless devotion to seeking the truth, disecting the "partnerships", Transport 2000, and Brake's hysterical Mary Williams disinformation is staggering. Always they distract when questioned, they divert, they do not answer the points Mr Smith raises.
They cannot do so. Not without referring to the very documents that Mr Smith has shown to be flawed, it is thus that their arguments are also flawed.
Other sites of interest that campaign against these cash cams, greed cameras and scameras, can be found here:
www.saferroads.co.uk
www.onethirdlie.org.uk/
www.arrivedeprived.org.uk/
www.abd.org.uk/
www.pepipoo.com/
www.roadweb.org.uk/
To name just a few. Please visit them all, read the statistics that are shown, then make up your own minds, something the likes of T2000, brake and the partnerships would never encourage.
Yours Faithfully, .......
Apologies if it's been posted before but there's an article on the thisislondon website about London speed camera plans.
You can see it here:
www.thisislondon.co.uk/traffic/articles/8083263?source=Evening%20Standard
It talks of "revenue targets" rather than saving lives. Which is interesting.......
Charles
You can see it here:
www.thisislondon.co.uk/traffic/articles/8083263?source=Evening%20Standard
It talks of "revenue targets" rather than saving lives. Which is interesting.......
Charles
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