Speed Cameras, The Case Against
This excellent paper by Paul Smith is essential reading for those interested in the arguments surrounding speed and cameras on UK roads.
Introduction
The way that speed cameras have been introduced to British roads has been shoddy in the extreme. There have been no proper trials of their effectiveness as a blackspot treatment, no investigation of their possible side effects and precious little thought about their overall effects on our worthy but fragile road safety systems.
Yet politicians, campaigners, so-called scientists and others have been keen to jump on the speed camera bandwagon and tell us that it is all for our own good – based on little more than blind faith and an oversimplified assessment of reality.
And now the country is infested with cameras. The number of speed camera fines is doubling every 3 years, yet roads fatalities are not falling at all. We have every right to expect roads fatalities to fall without assistance from government policy because both vehicle engineering and medical care are improving at a considerable pace and making similar crashes more survivable every year. These improvements in medical care and vehicle engineering are much larger than the growth in traffic.
In this document we will show how and why we believe that bad road safety policy, based on speed cameras, is actually making drivers less effective at avoiding accidents to the dangerous extent of entirely negating the engineering and medical care improvements that we are receiving.
The full paper can be read in pdf format.
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