Steady now

I find myself agreeing with something John Rentoul has said today, on the anti-speed camera lobby:

when people complain about speed cameras and points on their licence I only wonder why the police shouldn't use hidden cameras and nick anybody who breaks the law. It seems pretty simple: either there is a good reason for a speed limit, in which case it ought to be enforced, or there isn't, in which case it ought to be changed. But instead of campaigning to change speed limits, the entire car-driving nation engages in the displacement activity of complaining that speed cameras are a means of raising revenue.

Not quite the entire nation, more a vocal minority egged on by the right-wing press.

That explains it!

The Times has a piece about why older people are more affected by speed cameras - and why they are so much against them. Research has found that cameras led to a huge percentage increase in the number of men and women over 60 receiving penalty points for speeding, "though starting from a very low base."

The theory is that such drivers would previously have been let off with a warning, at the "discretion" of police officers.

Rob Gifford, director of the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety, said that older drivers had been accustomed to driving on roads without cameras and would have found it harder to adapt when they spread across the country.

“Police may have given elderly drivers a telling-off rather than a fine whereas cameras are blind to the age of the driver,” he said. “It was wrong to be lenient with older drivers because they were posing a danger on the roads by ignoring the limit. Since the growth in cameras, the proportion of vehicles breaking the 30mph limit has fallen from 75 per cent to 30 per cent and deaths have fallen sharply.”

Mr Gifford said that the rise in older speeding offenders helped to explain the emergence of a vociferous anticamera campaign dominated by drivers in their fifties and sixties.

Alternatively...

The story about Swindon Council wanting to get rid of speed cameras certainly has a lot of tory spin on it. But the most mindless comment came from Katie Derham on ITV news:

If you are regularly snapped by speed cameras, you may want to seriously consider moving to Swindon.

Either that or slow down.