Putting the Brakes on the Speeding Lobby
Evening Standard
As political lobbies go, the anti-speed camera lobby is tiny - polls suggest that 82 per cent of the public approve of the devices. For the facts about speed cameras, as set out in yesterday's Transport Select Committee report, are incontrovertible. Speed cameras have brought down the overall level of speeding (from 69 per cent of drivers exceeding the 30mph speed limit in 1994 to 50 per cent in 2005). At fixed-camera sites, both speeding and numbers of collisions resulting in injuries are well down. And the number of people killed or seriously injured has dropped by almost a half in the same period. And yet with every new effort to put more speed cameras on the roads, or make them work better, the hue and cry goes up. For the anti-speed camera lobby is brazen, disproportionately influential - and lacking in any shred of moral or intellectual legitimacy.
Speeding is a crime. And at the heart of the anti-speed camera case is the proposition that the Government is wrong in attempting to detect and prosecute this particular crime. Put like that, their case is absurd. Habitual shoplifters who attempted to mount a campaign on the basis that shops were employing too many store detectives could expect to be ridiculed and pilloried. Yet much of the press gives acres of supportive coverage to the anti-speed cameras brigade, from the ranks of web-based anti-camera campaigners to direct action macho-men like the self-styled 'Captain Gatso'.
The campaigners complain that the authorities make millions of pounds out of speed cameras. But they conveniently forget that the authorities only make that money because motorists break the law. Meanwhile politicians who would normally be competing with each other to be tough on crime are anxious to placate those who insist on their right to break the speed limit. Four years ago, the then transport minister proudly introduced bright yellow 'easier-to-spot' 'speed cameras. But 'easy-to spot' speed cameras make as much sense as 'easy-to-spot' store detectives. There is no other area of crime prevention where ministers would boast about hoping to catch fewer people. Of course it helps that the anti-speed camera brigade is largely white, male, middle-class and middle-aged. In their hearts they believe that law enforcement is meant to bear down on the underclass; not people like them.
Speed cameras mean that thousands of people are alive today who might have died because of speeding motorists. I believe in being tough on death and tough on the causes of death. And that means saying no to the anti-speed camera lobby.
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