Speed cameras are a cash scam motivated by greed not safety, as revealed by an undercover reporter who posed as a foreign potential buyer of speed cameras.
According to a story in yesterday's Mail on Sunday, the reporter asked how the system worked in Britain. The response was that Britain's system of speed cameras is raking in "buckets of money" with plenty more to come.
Jon Bond, previously a police officer in charge of Warwickshire's speed cameras but now heading up Tele-Traffic, which supplies almost all of Britain's speed cameras, told the reporter said that the courts can't process incoming cheques fast enough. He also reportedly said that the government fixes systems so that none of the money goes towards the roads but instead pours straight in the Treasury's cash bucket.
Tele-Traffic also urged the potential buyer to place cameras near schools to catch school run mums in the afternoon and businessmen in the morning.
Money is also made because the organisations that run the system don’t have the correct legal training. Bond allegedly said that many prosecutions were invalid because an operator (or operators) because did not have the training that the law requires.
Comment
Road safety campaign Safe Speed argued that continuing to prosecute motorists in such circumstances "is surely perverting the course of justice", and called for a criminal investigation.
Safe Speed reported that the Department for Transport has issued a statement in response to the Mail on Sunday 'Speed Camera Scam' article, claiming that it has "clear proof" that speed cameras are helpful to road safety.
Safe Speed said that the DfT has no such thing. Even the evidence for an improvement "at speed camera site" is equivocal due to a large error source known as regression to the mean. After years of ignoring this error, DfT admitted it was highly significant in the small print of its fourth year report, said Safe Speed.
Department for Transport has neither investigated nor considered the side effects of speed cameras on road safety. To neglect the side effects in 1993 when speed cameras were first introduced was negligent. To maintain the position now - when clearly they must be highly aware of the wide ranging side effects - is virtually fraudulent.
Safe Speed founder Paul Smith said: "The Department for Transport is in denial about the abject failure of its road safety policies.
"If speed cameras had 'worked' as a road safety device we should have expected road deaths and hospitalisations to fall faster than before. But that is the opposite of what has happened. Road deaths and hospitalisations are not falling significantly at all.
"Department for Transport must now face the truth. Speed cameras are 21st century snake oil. They certainly do not save lives. In fact that have damaged the very foundations of road safety by feeding false priorities and distractions into the place were road safety exists; into the minds of road users."
The Association of British Drivers' Tony Vickers said: 'Motorists have suspected for many years that the whole system is against them - now we have the proof that it starts with the Government and goes downwards.
"While there is no evidence that any individual on the partnerships profits from this, the truth of the matter is that it is enabling certain police officers to build mini-empires which are completely unaccountable to anyone but the Treasury."
![](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 4 3"%3E%3C/svg%3E)
![](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="https://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 1 1"%3E%3C/svg%3E)