Speed cameras are good for you
Driving fast is dangerous, says Ross Clark, and the middle classes should stop whining about attempts to slow them down
Iam beginning to feel a bit lonely among fellow columnists. I do not have a speeding conviction upon which to vent spleen. Maybe one of these days I will notice a flash in my rear-view mirror, followed by a brown envelope in the post, and I will be ranting with the best of them: Simon Jenkins in the Times, Alan Judd in this magazine and almost everyone, every day, in the Daily Telegraph. But somehow I doubt it. I don't seem to have a great deal of trouble adjusting the speed of my Peugeot to limits which, if anything, err rather too much on the liberal side.
The above-mentioned gentlemen represent the civilised end of the anti-camera lobby. There is a more sinister end. Last month Mary Williams, who founded a roadsafety pressure group Brake after her mother and boyfriend were killed by speeding motorists in separate incidents, received death threats via a motorists' website, Pistonheads.com. One user of the site posted a note suggesting that her brake cables be cut; another described her as a witch who should be burned at the stake, Her crime was to appear on television to defend speed cameras. Invited to denounce the comments, Paul Smith, the founder of motorists' pressure group SafeSpeed, remarked, 'Mary Williams is a dangerous character because she supports a fatally flawed policy. The comments made about her are mild reactions, quite frankly.'
Sadly, as with Northern Irish paramilitaries, the government has melted in the face of intimidation from the militant motorists' lobby. Two years ago it ordered police forces to paint their speed cameras bright yellow, thus allowing a reckless motorist the opportunity to slow down for the few yards where the camera is sited before pulling away once more on his murderous passage. Now it is considering another way of appeasing speeding motorists: a Tory suggestion not to put points on the licences of those caught speeding by a camera, which would allow wealthy motorists to treat speeding fines as just another motoring expense. In addition, the government has subjected all new speed cameras to a 'fourcoffin rule'. Under new guidelines, police forces are allowed to use some of the income generated from speeding fines to set up new cameras, but may do so only on stretches of road where there have been at least four deaths or serious injuries within 15 kilome
tres of the site of the proposed camera during the past three years. It is reassuring to know that if little Johnny gets mown down on his way to school, it will take only another three of his classmates to perish before the police are allowed to enforce the motoring laws.
The main arguments of the anti-camera lobby are these: speed cameras can't prevent accidents because, as the Transport Research Laboratory's research paper TRL 323 proves, only 7 per cent of accidents are caused by excessive speed. Speed cameras are really about raising revenue. Worse, the crusade against honest middle-class motorists is diverting policemen from the business of catching 'real' criminals like burglars.
The first argument is fallacious. The purpose of TRL 323 was not to discover how many accidents are caused by speeding but to analyse the way in which policemen had filled in accident report forms. While 'excessive speed' accounted for 7.3 per cent of the factors blamed for accidents, many of the other factors, like 'behaviour — in a hurry', 'aggressive driving' and 'reckless behaviour', were simply speeding by another name. The anticamera lobby chooses to ignore other statistics by the Transport Research Laboratory, which show a 35 per cent reduction in the number of people killed and seriously injured close to the sites of speed cameras. A separate study in west London reported a 70 per cent drop in accidents at camera sites compared with before cameras were installed.
It isn't true that speed cameras are great revenue-raisers. No one has installed cameras with more enthusiasm than Northamptonshire police, yet the force is nursing losses as the cameras have proved to cost more to maintain than they raise. That said, the government should neutralise the revenue argument altogether by using any surplus from speed cameras to award a rebate in road tax to anyone who reaches the end of the year with a clean licence.
Dodgy statistics are one thing, but what really irritates me is the assertion that in some way police are persecuting middleclass motorists at the expense of pursuing 'real' criminals. 'A serious political problem is being created by the emphasis that is being put on petty crimes at the expense of serious ones,' writes Rachel Sylvester in the Daily Telegraph. Yet the prison population has doubled in recent years, and it certainly isn't because jails are overflowing with Ruperts and Samanthas caught in their Volvos at 31 mph on Wandsworth Bridge. Several times I have been moved to write to police forces to report a case of criminal driving — one of which involved the driver of a smart new car deliberately forcing a cyclist off her bike for the offence of being in his way. On each such occasion, in spite of supplying a registration number, I have received a polite letter from the local constabulary regretting that nothing can be done. On the one occasion my car was broken into I received a call the next morning from a police officer who had seen the damage and had searched for witnesses.
But if police forces are prosecuting more speeding motorists than they used to, there is good reason for doing so. Burgled Londoners like to bemoan the fact that the Metropolitan Police can't follow the example of New York under Rudolph Giuliani, where crime was cut dramatically after the introduction of 'zero tolerance' policing. This was not achieved by sparing middle-class petty offenders. Zero tolerance means what it says: among those fined in New York in recent years are a commuter who occupied two seats of a subway train, a restaurant-owner who sat on an upturned milk crate, and numerous middle-class ladies who have fed pigeons in Central Park.
The theory behind zero tolerance is that if you pick up people for petty offences, you tend in the process to capture serious offenders. Catch a graffiti artist and the chances are that you have also caught a drug-dealer. Keep tabs on `lifestyle crimes' — petty offences which detract from the quality of life of local residents — and you give criminals and potential criminals a strong message that no crime will be tolerated.
If it is true for graffiti artists in the Bronx, it is true for speeding middle-class motorists in Fulham; you can bet that those who treat speed limits with contempt are also likely to be fiddling their taxes and embezzling stationery from the office. At the moderate end of the spectrum, speeding is every bit as much a 'lifestyle crime' as spraying graffiti; at the more serious end, it is akin to running up behind somebody with a knife and bawling 'get out of my way'. Middle-class motorists may huff and puff, but the rising tide of crime over the past five decades will not begin to be reversed until they accept that the law applies to them, too.
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