Why speed cameras suck

[sobrique]

I dislike speed cameras.
Leaving aside the obvious 'that I got tagged by one', the reasons are these:

* They perpetuate the myth that there's some mystical threshold, at which going faster you suddenly become 'dangerous'. Speed appropriate to conditions. Repeat after me. Speed appropriate to conditions.

* Watching your speedometer because there's a camera coming up means you're not paying attention to the road.

* A few miles an hour over the limit is less dangerous than stamping on the brakes to avoid getting a ticket.

* Automatic tickets transfer the burden of proof onto the hapless motorist. It's an automatic process that on numerous occasions seems to lack basic sanity checking. Guilting until proven innocent is not one of the tenets of our legal system.

* In March, I was assaulted, had a leg broken, and a ligament torn. I'm still not walking especially well. Made a statement, but they 'exhausted their avenues of enquiry'. Is it hard to see how I'm bitter that now some one is making my life complicated by issuing a ticket for doing 48 miles an hour, along a road that until a couple of months ago had a 60 mile an hour limit?

I appreciate that the skills required to investigate an assault case are not the same as the skills require to stick a notice of intended prosecution in an envelope, but somehow it offends me that more effort seems to have gone in to extorting £60 from me than in doing anything at all about the fact that I've had to put up with 6 weeks in a cast, and am still not entirely mobile.

Comments

[mister-jack.livejournal.com]

People who drive dangerously should live with the consequences of their actions. It's the concentration on speed to the exclusion of other factors I object to.

[wolflady26.livejournal.com]

Yes, they should. And so should people who break the law because they can't be bothered to follow it. Most of the people who get into crashes at high speeds thought they were driving safely, until they lost control. Then, oops.

But you're right, speed isn't the only factor. But the scope of this discussion is blaming a camera for causing accidents, when if people were following the law, the camera would be immaterial.

[mister-jack.livejournal.com]

Let me be quite clear about this; if I am caught speeding I will shrug my shoulders say "it's a fair cop, guv" and pay the fine. It won't make a blind bit of difference to the fact the law is unjust, unreasonable and stupid. As Ed has already pointed out speed is the primary cause in only 1 in 13 accidents, and the specific wording is 'excessive speed' not breaking the speed limit. I know of plenty of places driving at the speed limit would be dangerous. There's also the fact that the areas of the country with the most speed cameras have seen road deaths go up not down.

Saying 'if people were following the law, the camera would be immaterial' is irrelevant because the majority of people aren't following the law. Fact is, Speed Cameras are causing people to drive dangerously - I see them do it every day.

[wolflady26.livejournal.com]

I think we're going around in circles here. If I'm driving the speed limit - which, as an experienced driver, I always have a good idea of the speed I'm driving - I don't freak out when I see a speed camera. If I'm speeding, I do. Your conclusion is to remove the camera, and mine is to not speed.

My whole point from step one is that the logic of "People act dangerously when they don't want to get caught breaking the law" is a weak reason for not enforcing laws. Before I see this apply to speeding laws, I would apply that logic to, say, drug use. People would behave _much_ less dangerously with drug use if the laws against it weren't enforced. It also applies to a lot of other laws. For example, lots of people behave more dangerously when they want to murder people, for fear of getting caught. If the laws against murder weren't enforced, the likelihood of, say, drive by shootings would probably plummet. Nevertheless, I'm still more in favor of not breaking the law against murder than dropping the enforcement of it.