Date published: 2005/03/18
The Cambridge Evening News says:
A new type of speed camera which is being installed on the A14 will cause more accidents, not fewer, a driving organisation has claimed.
As reported by the News, the Highways Agency has announced £2 million worth of measures to cut the accident rate on the road between Cambridge and Huntingdon.
A new speed limit of 60 mph will be policed by the Specs camera system which measures motorists' average speed over a stretch of road instead of at a particular point.
The cameras work by capturing a car's number plate twice and then using the time elapsed between the two points - which can be several miles apart - to calculate the average speed.
But the Association of British Drivers (ABD) has attacked the plan, saying Specs cameras are even worse than the notorious Gatso cameras because motorists will be concentrating on their speedometers rather than the road.
But road safety officers in Nottingham, where the cameras were first used, say fatalities were cut by 100 per cent in the first three years and other injuries were cut by a third.
Nigel Humphries from the ABD said: "In theory the Gatsos are supposed to be placed at accident blackspots but these cameras just cover a whole stretch of road so people will drive along looking at their speedometer and switch off to what is going on around them.
"A whole army of children could walk into the road and you wouldn't see them. I think the number of accidents on the A14 will go up with these cameras.
"Most of the accidents on the A14 are not caused by speeding. They are caused by people running into the back of stationary traffic. It's just amazing ignorance that they think this will work.
"That stretch of the A14 needs to be upgraded into a motorway - that would solve the problem. They have failed to invest in the proper road that Cambridgeshire needs and so they are trying to divert attention onto the motorists and blame individual drivers for what's happening.
"At the end of the day the accidents are happening because that road is too busy, not because people are speeding."
Specs cameras were first introduced on two notorious stretches in Nottingham in 2000 and Scott Talbot, project co-ordinator of the city's safety camera network, says it has had a major effect on the way people drive.
He said: "We had lots of nasty accidents and casualties and we couldn't do much with the roads because they had shops and buildings by the side of them.
"The initial system covered about 1.5 km of road and within that 1.5 km there were about two deaths a year, they were very bad roads. In the three years after the cameras were installed there have been no fatalities on those stretches, a 100 per cent reduction.
"Before they were installed the average speed was well above the speed limit but since then the average speed has been reduced by about four miles per hour.
"People driving along those roads have commented that there is a lot less congestion because the faster cars go the bigger the gap they have to leave. Now pretty much everybody on those roads drives at the same speed so you get a much smoother flow of traffic."
Well, you never know, the cameras might reduce accidents. Average drivers do drive less safely when there are cameras because of constantly having to pay attention to the speedometer, but wreckless drivers might be slightly less wreckless, so the overall situation might improve. The real problem here is indeed the A14 itself, and the police should lock up Blair and his cronies for criminal neglect for doing nothing about this, rather than harassing drivers. The idea that one of the two most important roads for Cambridge has to have a 60 mile an hour speed limit is an indictment of the squalid state of transport in Britain after eight years of Labour misrule.
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