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

[sobrique.livejournal.com]

Well, if we take e.g. a motorway in the UK, 3 lanes, average speed of vehicles 80-90 miles an hour.
Actually, let's leave the 'legal bit' out of it. Assume everyone's following the national speed limit. 70mph.

A driver trundling along at 40 is causing an obstruction, and forcing other drivers to react to their presence. That, in my book, is dangerous driving.

[wolflady26.livejournal.com]

Err, yeah, sure it is. In fact, many highways in the US have lower speed limits as well.

[sobrique.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to figure out whether that's sarcasm or not :).

If the average road speed is 40, then doing 40 is fine and good. If it's 40 and you're doing 20, then you're presenting a hazard to all the other drivers. It might not be illegal, but many 'bad habits' aren't illegal per-se.

(Although if I recall correctly, there actually is a prosecutable offence on the books of 'failing to make reasonable progress' or some such, to cover people driving really slowly on motorways)

[wolflady26.livejournal.com]

I'm not being sarcastic. Many highways in the US have lower as well as upper speed limits, because driving too slowly on a highway is considered a danger. So you can be ticketed for driving 35 on a highway where the speed limit is 55. Either way, it's breaking the law.