fidgetbum wrote:
Then why does every single one of your demands mention the words speed camera? Reading your arguments, or the way you have set it out, it boils down to you objecting to these objects full stop. You cannot honestly say that they do not help with the speeding issue, and I agree that speeding is not the biggest cause of fatalities, but sure if they save even one or two lives, they are worth keeping.
But do they, thats the question. The camera partnerships would claim they do, but at the same time the numbers of fatalities are going up, so the camera partneships claim we need more cameras?????
The increase in the use of speed cameras has been mirrored with a reduction in traffic police, as an example at any one time there are two traffic cars covering the whole of Berkshire, its just not good enough. As long as cameras remain there the Government will claim they are focussed on Road Safety.
There are three groups of people most likely to be involved in a fatal crash
1 Motor cycle riders
2 Illegal drivers (stolen vehicles/no licence)
3 Drunk or drugged drivers
Lets look at how current road safety policy has affected their actions
1 Motor cyclists
M?C have a very high involvement in fatal accidents, they have the l;east amount of protection and do indeed travel at some stupid speeds but mean speed of a M?C in an accident is only around 30 mph and only 1 in a thousand m/c accidents was the bike doing more than 80 mph (see the Hunt report or MAIDS)
What the current policy has done is focus heavily on the speed of a M/C and as we all know part of the joy of recreational M/C is speed. The camera partnerships focus their attention on popular biking routes looking for speeding riders. The riders know that the cameras will be on these routes and move and have started to ride on the unpoliced and un camerad B roads. These are amongst our poorest maintained roads and generally have some of the worst visibility and are far less safe at a lower speed than the popular routes were at higher speed
60% of M/C accidents are caused by another driver and in the main the reason is looked but did not see, so dreiving M/C onto roads with worst visibility is not a good policy
However Motorcyclist normally kill themselves not other people
2 Illegal drivers
These drivers have nothing to fear from cameras and in fact everything to love about them. Cameras can not touch the uninsured or the unregistered vehicle driver, the Twocker etc. The lack of dedicated traffic police means that these drivers can get away with iot al;l they want and unless they are unfortunate enough to run into ANPR they will never be caught, a recent Government statistic states that a ridiculous number of vehicles on our roads are illegal.
Illegal drivers normally kill someone else not themselves by the way
3 Drink Drivers
Cameras can't catch drunks, and this is reflected by the increase in positive drink tests recently. When you take this increase and consider a dranmatic drop in the number of administered tests you realise that drink driving is on the increase. Co-incidentally it should be of no surprise that positive tests are up when you consider that you are only likely to be breath tested after a serious accident.
I have witnessed the shift in attitude to drink driving over the years. When I first started driving it was before the clamp down on it and I would estimate that the majority of drivers drank and drove at some time. Good inforcement and publicity meant that we saw a steady drop in DD until it was toptally unacceptable and not one of my colleagues would dream of driving over the limit, not because they were afraid they would crash but because they believed they would be caught. Now they can be pretty sure they won't and in a group of 10 people in a pub at lunchtime half of them will be driving over the limit that afternoon.
Our road safety policy ignores the last two of these groups of people and yet they account for the biggest hazard on our roads. We need to get back to the policies that saw a year on year reduction of fatalities and we will not do that whilst speed cameras exist in their current form and especially whilst they exist under the current partnership approach.
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) and I'm on record here as stating that I believe the standard of driving in the UK is slowly getting worse. The snag is that speed cameras don't catch idiots doing idiotic things, police patrols can do that but we're sacrificing them for happy,snappy, gatso chappies.
Trapped by your own twisted logic! No two contributors can use the same username. 
SCHADENFREUDE.