ultranomics

Ever had a feeling of being watched? Well I did today as Specs3 stood still watching with his peering eyes waiting for one wrong move, my hands were stiff, my knuckles went white due to my tight steering grip, my eyes were aching due to the constant monitoring of speedometer and traffic, my right foot was trembling for fear of pushing too hard on the accelerator and getting caught by the dreaded average speed camera and I had only done about 500 meters out of a 5 mile stretch at 40mph limit! I would be over the edge any second now.

Can anyone hear the climatic horror movie music when the dude is about to get it? Ching ching ching AAAAH. Well ching ching ching was the cash clocking music to the ears of the British Government and guess who gets stabbed countless times everyday? The poor British motorist that’s who!

The Association of British Drivers, which campaigns against speed cameras also made an interesting point about the Specs3 as they would make, “People put the car in cruise control and the mind in neutral. It’s so boring driving through these sections at a constant slow speed that people are going to drop off.”

Maybe I’m missing something here, but why does the UK government allow cars to be sold that are capable of achieving almost twice the 70mph speed limit which was set back in 1977 when the Ford Anglia had a stopping distance of 2 miles or so. If according to their laws no cars should ever go over 70mph why don’t they simply force the car manufacturers to install speed limiters in every new model and fit one in every existing car during the yearly MOT? The simple answer is that they don’t want to because the UK government would make less cash from the car industry & less cash from the speed fines.

Every UK driver has to go through the stringent British road test which tests the drivers to their limit. Oppressive tactics by the police like constant detection and dictation are an insult to their intelligence and road manners. The new average speed cameras known as Specs3 will appear in clusters of 50 working in a network and will monitor “every” driver’s average speed as they travel. Not only that but an ‘eye in the sky’ helicopter targeting speeding motorists in Essex at a cost of £1,000 an hour is adding misery to the once enjoyable driving.

This recent Canadian report (Review and Analysis of Posted Speed Limits and Speed Limit Setting Practices in British Columbia) has a clear view of the role of speed limits and speed enforcement.

It includes such straightforward common sense items as:
• The majority of motorists drive at a speed they consider reasonable, and safe for road, traffic, and environmental conditions. Posted limits which are set higher or lower than dictated by roadway and traffic conditions are ignored by the majority of motorists.
• The normally careful and competent actions of a reasonable person should be considered legal.
• A speed limit should be set so that the majority of motorists observe it voluntarily and enforcement can be directed to the minority of offenders.

Ready for another eye opener, this time from the Australian police! Apparently a recent survey by the Herald Sun has found that more than 70 per cent of Victorian police believe speed and red light cameras are more about revenue-raising than preserving road safety. A point every motorist [or majority of] has tried so very hard to get across.

The politicians will keep on preaching that speed cameras are there to promote safety and the high fines associated with them are just to slow people down, well this is a baseless argument because the truth about this hypocrisy is coming out. The UK Department for Transport first funded and then suppressed a study that shows a 55 percent increase in injury accidents when speed cameras are used on highway work zones and a 31 percent increase when used on freeways [or non freeways as I would like to think] without construction projects. According to the Transport Research Laboratory, the “non-works [personal injury accident] rate is significantly higher for the sites with speed cameras than the rate for sites without.” You can see the full report here.

I thought of Pakistan to be the speed camera safe haven until my recent trip and found multiple speed cameras at Islamabad’s newly built seventh avenue and Pakistan Motorway Police equipped with the dreaded handheld device at every 5 miles!! This is pants [I could not describe this tragedy in any other word]. First the tobacco industry moved, after the European watershed ban, to Pakistan, India Bangladesh and other neighbouring countries to mint money and pass cancer to the poorer third world countries and now speed cameras which are as painful as any cancer could get are making their way to a local road near every Pakistani town.

So what should the regular Joe think about BBC Topgear now when he sees the likes of Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May blast their gravity busting 500bhp+ monster machines? Is this entertainment or fact based “drama”? Where are those roads where they drive at a million miles an hour without the fear of any Specs3, gatso or speed camera ever passing them by? Why is it that the average Joe is now under the £1000 an hour surveillance eye in the sky?

With modern technology there are better ways of keeping drivers to the speed limit. Unfortunately none puts money in the government’s, council’s or police authorities’ pockets. It would be perfectly possible to install a GPS based device, not dissimilar to a SatNav, in every car, telling the driver what the speed limit is for that stretch of road. The signal would automatically change when the car entered the next speed zone. Should the car be speeding (easily assessed from either a gps signal or directly from the speedometer) an alarm in the vehicle would sound, alerting the driver to the fact he is going too fast similar to the ones installed in BMW cars. The only way of silencing the alarm being to get the speed back under the speed limit. This ensures the driver’s attention is fixed on the road and it’s hazards, not constantly watching the speedometer. Attention to the actual driving is increased and therefore the roads made safer. No need for [you should have gone to] Specsavers Speksy3 and other gizmos – but I don’t see that happening because how then would the UK government milk its cash cows?

But there is still hope for the joy of driving as long as good Samaritans like Swindon councillor Peter Greenhalgh are taking the common sense approach. It is after he objected to the central Government receiving all the cash from fines while Swindon council paid £320,000 a year for the cameras’ upkeep that the Swindon Borough Council became the first to ditch the yellow boxes. Now towns all over the country are joining the rush to get rid of fixed speed cameras. Portsmouth, Walsall and Birmingham may copy Swindon in ripping out the hated cameras, and others are expected to follow suit.