A new menace on the roads of London

This Is London report a new menace on the roads of London.

It seems that a new generation of "intelligent" speed traps are being introduced as another way of raising money and making London's roads even more hazardous. These new average speed camera systems will be used to track cars over a wide area - such as a housing estate - instead of the old fashioned Gatso type that just flash at one place. Plenty of drivers will no doubt be receiving those £60 fines in the near future (I am not sure if they will also get 3 points).

So where in London is the first site? Mansfield Road, NW3; that's the road that links Camden Town/Haverstock Hill with Highgate Hill/Kentish Town Road. The whole of the 20mph zone on this road will be under the watchful gaze of the placed on hight new blue average speed cameras.

The usual suspects will no doubt say that if you obey the speed limit then you will have nothing to fear but the truth is somewhat at variance with this. From my experience of average speed cameras on stretches of motorway roadworks, drivers do indeed obey the speed limit unfortunately they achieve this by keeping one eye on their speedometer all the time. On a motorway with no traffic coming in the opposite direction, or coming from side-roads or cyclists weaving about or pedestrians crossing the road this is just about safe but on a London urban main road?

Of course nobody has explained why there is a 20mph speed limit on part of Mansfield Road, it's not a fast piece of road just a typical London road. What has happened over the last 15 years or so is that speed limits in London have bee reduced by around 10mph on main roads; the A40 dropped from 60mph to 50mph, the A406 from 50mph to 40mph and almost at the same time the speed cameras were introduced. Now we are to have many many more 20mph zones until 20mph is the standard speed for residential areas.

If this technology trial is successful then the plan is to roll these systems out across London and what a great revenue raiser they will be.


The line that is always used is that "Speed Kills" and that speed is a major factor in road accidents. This is of course rubbish as I pointed out 2 years ago

"A DfT strategy paper claimed speed was "a major contributory factor in about a third of all road accidents". The "excessive and inappropriate speed" that helped "to kill about 1,200 people" each year was "far more than any other single contributor to casualties on our roads". The source given for this claim, to be repeated as a mantra by ministers and officials for years to come, was a report from the government's Transport Research Laboratory, TRL Report 323: "A new system for recording contributory factors in road accidents". Not many people would have looked at this report, since it was only available for £45. But some who did were amazed. The evidence the report had cited to support its claim that speed was "a major contributory factor in about a third of all road accidents" simply wasn't there. Many other factors were named as contributing to road accidents, from driving without due care and attention to the influence of drink; from poor overtaking to nodding off at the wheel. But the figure given for accidents in which the main causative factor was "excessive speed" was way down the list, at only 7.3 per cent."

Do read the whole of that piece but this extract might also prove interesting:

"The statistics for Durham showed that, of 1,900 collisions each year, only three per cent involved cars that were exceeding the speed limit, just 60 accidents a year. Look more closely at the causes of these 60 accidents, the "actual cause of the accident invariably is drink-driving or drug-driving". Drug-taking was now involved in 40 per cent of Durham's fatal road accidents. Many accidents, he said, were caused by fatigue, although one of the most common causes was the failure of drivers to watch out for oncoming vehicles when turning right. To none of these could speed cameras offer any remedy. "The cause of accidents," Garvin (chief constable of Durham) concluded, "is clearly something different from exceeding the speed limit"."

Also

"In September 2006, the DfT finally conceded one of the central points that Safe Speed's Paul Smith had been arguing for five years: that only five per cent of road accidents were caused by drivers who were breaking the speed limit. In The Daily Telegraph, Smith was quoted as saying "the government's case for continuing to install cameras has been destroyed"."

So the truth is that speed cameras do not make the roads safer, are not needed and are being used to raise revenue - who would have thought it?