Speed cameras or on-the-spot fines? John Humphrys explores the ideas behind changing road safety policy as Coalition Government announces radical new plan
Governments tend to change their policies only when they realise the old ones aren’t working. It’s rare for them to do so when they are. But that, at least according to its critics, is what the Coalition has done this week. The transport secretary has announced a radical change in road safety policy. But is the switch justified?
One of the great successes of public policy over the last fifteen years or so has been the fall in the number of people killed and injured on our roads. In 2009, the last year for which figures are available, 2,222 people were killed as a result of collisions on the roads. At over six a day, that is still a very high figure, but it is 38% fewer than the numbers killed back in the mid-1990s. The numbers killed or seriously injured has fallen by 44% over the same period.
Many measures have contributed to this progress in road safety, but one of them has been particularly controversial: the widespread use of speed cameras.
The idea behind them is simple enough. One of the main causes of death on the roads is speed. If you can get drivers to slow down, then the number of casualties will fall. Speed cameras provide the means of doing this by acting as a deterrent: drivers know that if they get caught speeding on camera, they will be tracked down, given fines and penalty points and risk, in time, losing their licences altogether.
Not surprisingly, speed cameras became very unpopular among some drivers. Some regarded them as an unwarranted intrusion on the ‘freedom of the road’, part of a wider surveillance society they abhorred. Even those who could see the point resented the fact that drivers who only occasionally and unwittingly exceeded the speed limits were treated just as harshly as persistent and dangerous offenders.
But there were practical objections too. It was argued that once drivers knew where the cameras were, they would behave themselves when under the eye of the cameras and then speed off when they could no longer be seen. Technologies were developed which could be fitted to cars enabling drivers to detect cameras before they could be detected themselves, so defeating the whole purpose.
The new Government decided a new approach was needed. According to the Transport Secretary, Philip Hammond, ‘the big problem under the last government was using technology. Speed cameras were installed and speed became the only focus of the road safety agenda. It ceased to be a road safety agenda and became a speed agenda’.
In line with this view of things, the Government has removed the targets imposed on local authorities for introducing cameras, ended the ring-fencing of funds for installing cameras and said that no new cameras will be put in place.
Instead, the Government is giving the police new powers to impose on-the-spot fines on dangerous drivers. In particular it wants the police to target uninsured drivers, those driving under the influence of drink or drugs and ‘boy racers’ who like tailgating, undertaking and cutting up other drivers. ‘We want to make a clear distinction between those drivers who are a real danger to road safety – reckless, dangerous drivers – and those who are merely occasionally careless or who make an honest mistake,’ said Mr Hammond.
But will the new policy work? Professor Stephen Glaister, director of the RAC Foundation, said: ‘The three things needed to make these plans work are enforcement, enforcement, enforcement. With police services being cut it is far from certain the desired results can be achieved.’
An even greater worry is that drivers will cease to take remaining speed cameras seriously and put their foot down on the pedal. Oxfordshire turned off many of its cameras recently only to have to turn them on again when it discovered that average speeds were rising. An RAC Foundation report last November estimated that, without cameras, 800 more people would be killed on the road every year.
In other words, critics say that the new policy should not be a substitute for the old speed camera policy but a supplement to it and claim that the Government’s falling enthusiasm for speed cameras has less to do with trying to increase road safety and more to do with saving money.
Whether the reduced reliance on speed cameras will lead to more road deaths or not remains to be seen. In the meantime, however, the switching off of speed cameras is unlikely to prove unpopular.
What’s your view?
- Do you think speed cameras are a good idea or not?
- What do you make of the argument that they are unfair in failing to discriminate between dangerous drivers and merely careless ones?
- Do you think the government’s plan to depend less on them is motivated by a genuine belief that there are better ways to improve road safety or by the need to save money?
- Do you support the new policy of on-the-spot fines?
- Do you think they will be sufficiently enforced?
- And what single measure would you advocate to improve road safety?
