paddy0612 wrote:
Big Tone wrote:
paddy0612 wrote:
...iv included a fair bit of info from this site onto my project
This site will expect royalties you know?
havard referencing
and it will be printed off to show as part of the research, no cheating
Have you asked someone from an organisation who would know the answers you seek?
You have assumed that the government (and councils and the police) would seek to prevent information from being released to you but you have not said you have approached them.
While it is clear that members of this forum have a view and indeed some would give an expert view of some of the considerations you need to take into account you would have difficulty in working out what is or is not a worthwhile opinion of "fact".
There is little in this thread of worth and you will be hard pushed to find any information based upon facts from Safety Camera Partnerships or government figures...stands by for the sarcastic comments on the Safety Camera Partnerships or government figures...indicative of the efficacy of the forum commentary.
I would say a good place to start on the "does it make money?" question is the high level accounts operated and published by the Treasury and the DfT that can be used as a simple profit and loss account. The principle operated by the 2 government departments is that there is no direct link between money in and money out and the money collected in fines is usually quite close to the money paid out in the cost of running the system, net profits being close to £0.00.
In that simple accounting the answer must be "to save lives" but further consideration should be given to just simple accounting as this answer. It is the considered opinion of road safety experts from many areas of the industry and governments that speed management yields reductions in the amount and seriousness of casualties as a result of road traffic collisions; in that respect a reduction in government spending in the investigation of death and the care of those either affected by he deaths and those seriously injured may be considered in some way as "making money" because it is a saving in a high level government budget thereby making a notional "profit" from that reduced spending.
You will find it difficult to find the price of a camera installation because they differ in cost depending on the amount of cameras bought by each county at any time or even the amount of cameras they say or are assessed as possibly buying. In addition to this there is a separate installation cost; it is cheaper to install a camera in a town than it is to do so in a rural area; for instance I have been asked to pay almost £100,000 for a power cable and £50,000 for a telephone line and that was before you purchase the camera and dig holes to put it in. In the town this may reduce to around £150 for the telephone line and nothing for the power. Maybe an average for the whole country could be £60-75k for installation. The costs of running the cameras is a far more difficult thing to estimate as this depends on the type of camera and how often it is used. Digital cameras can be used 24/7 and catch thousands of motorists a week (potentially) and need no roadside attention whereas wet-film cameras, the biggest installed population in the UK, require roadside attention so do not operate a high duty cycle. This means that digital cameras are less expensive to run in that they need little in the way of attention and stores but produce more work for the police back-office administration staff and of course the courts; wet-film cameras don't work often, require swathes of film and processing yet have little in the way of on-costs for the legal organisations. The costs are dependent therefore on the type of camera, the amount it detects and the way in which it is operated and will change from county-to-county.
The process of cases through the courts when they leave the fixed penalty procedure places a huge financial load on the courts and hence the government; you would need to mention this and make an estimate based upon courts service figures.
IMHO, cameras are operated on a fixed budget enforced by central government and that fixed budget now exceeds the revenue from number of fines collected, so in respect of a simple cash analysis it runs at a loss. If you include savings from a reduction in injury and death then you have an area of fiscal and social profit that could be mentioned. If, as is proposed by the membership of the forum here and the site founder in materials elsewhere on the site, the system creates more death and injury then the government and society are loosing £100M's so running it to make money is failing.
It would be interesting to see your bibliography and of course to understand who was going to make the assessment of your answer as there are very few who would be able to make that assessment. Perhaps they are simply going to assess you breadth of research and analysis technique. My recommendation is to learn to asses the efficacy of Internet content as much of it is unreliable and questionable at best.
If you have not approached the DfT for your figures then you have failed at the first hurdle.
Good luck.
If you do a bit of web based research you can see they wouldnt want you to know about it otherwise it’d be on their website publicly, it is not on their website publicly. but whenther or not i opproach them or not doesnt matter to me, it is all ‘research’ and worthwhile to me.
Which organisation would i ask? There isnt much point as my main question is – how much do you make from speed cameras annually and have you got a record from when you introduced speed cameras to now the annual figures... i very doubt they would give me that.
IMO the only people who can make these kind of assessments are the ones who are behind the speed cameras. Not the general public that is the issue however bearing in mind the final write up will be only 3000 words.
I already have three times that in research alone and could get more if i wanted to but if i was to actually go and find out, i feel i would be running around in circles based on the research so far.
I will post up the essay + questionnaires + bilbography and so on when iv written it all up and checked it all.
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