“One thing you CAN argue about is what benefit are speed cameras?

There may well have been a 60% reduction of serious casualties, but there is no good evidence that ANY of that was due to the cameras.

I wish they¿d stop the spin and deception about the effect speed cameras are having on road safety.

No report has ever established what caused the reductions at cameras. They always seem to assume that the cameras must have played a part, but there is no evidence of that. The entire benefit could be, and probably is, RTM (regression to the mean) and while the DfT refuses to measure RTM and refuses to do scientific tests (RCTs) then the whole issue is clouded with uncertainty.

Speed cameras are an experiment playing with our lives and, in any other field of engineering, the responsible people would be sacked and prosecuted. Yet, in road safety, they get away with unbelievable and possibly criminal negligence.

If they are going to get rid of some cameras, they should do so using scientific tests (RCT). Then we would find out what effect the cameras are having.

If they are saving lives, we need them but, as is more likely the case, they are contributing to more deaths, then they should go. But the key is that we need the best evidence and we are not getting it, despite having paid for it!”

“If Britain would scrap speed cameras countrywide and return to the proven safety method of setting main road posted speed limits at the 85th percentile speed of free flowing traffic under good conditions as she did some 20 years ago, the world leadership she enjoyed in reducing fatality rate year over year per mile traveled would return.

When speed cameras and their massive amounts of revenue replaced setting speed limits for maximum safety and the smoothest traffic flow, Britain lost this safety leadership.

Return to science, and she can have it back.

Regards, James C. Walker, Board Member, National Motorists Association, www.motorists.org, USA”

“The following is based on 1000s of hours research:

For 50 years before cameras fatalities relative to traffic volume fell with almost clinical precision by 7% pa, but since the mid 1990s with cameras, by less than 3% pa - the difference between what should have happened and what did is in excess of 10,000 more dead than would have been expected.

Only 9% of serious accidents involve speed above the limit so it is UTTERLY IMPOSSIBLE for cameras to cut them by 60%, even if they stopped all speeding which they don't.

These absurd reductions are in any case always quoted "at our sites", which represent less than 3% of our roads - so national reductions could not even be 0.5%, at a cost of £120m a year. plus the aggravation and cost to drivers

www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200607/cmselect/cmtran/memo_roads/memo1.pdf shows an April 2007 letter from then Minister Stephen Ladyman admitting that cameras are not 12% more cost effective than vehicle activated signs but NINE TIMES LESS cost effective. Even that figure, based only on 1st year costs was seriously misleading - amortised over 10 years signs are FIFTY TIMES more cost effective than camares - and do not need arithmetically challenged Partnership staff to run them..The way that cameras have continued in use for years after I forced these figures out of the DfT and Transcom is an ABSOLUTE DISGRACE. More detail and my contact details on www.safespeed.org.uk/vas,html.

My analysis of injury accidents 1991 to 2007 shows that Fatal, Serious and KSI injuries do indeed fall by about 40% after 4 KSI or more in 3 years, the threshold for camera installation. But this is the average of 131,303 examples - the vast majority of which NEVER HAD A CAMERA so reductions claimed as camera benefit happen and have always happened, due to regression to the mean, downward trend etc.

In 2006, 14 years after the first cameras were installed, the DfT asked for tenders to research their adverse effect. In 2007 I asked them how they were getting on and they told me that the project had been abandoned as their Chief Scientific Adviser had told them that there could not be any! I rold them of 3 deaths and 3 suicides clearly attributable to cameras, but they didn't want to know. Now of course LV Insurance tell us that cameras have caused 28,000 accidents in 10 years. The adverse change in trend that has cost 10,000+ lives suggests that the figure is a severe underestimate.

Across the country Partnerships have been making wholly bogus claims for camera benefit and at the same time publishing seriously misleading "advice" to drivers and registered keepers, all biased towards securing admission of guilt with minimum resistance, even from the innocent. Much of it amounts to attempting to pervert the course of justice.

One method used by the Government to maximis admissions and cash flow was to remove from drivers and keepers the right to silence that applies to EVERY other criminal offence in Britain, whether murder, rape, terrorism manslaughter. ONLY motoring defendants are told "admit your guilt or the penalty for not doing so will be far more. And your name in the local paper." Google "Idris Francis" and "ECHR" for more information.

I would welcome the opportunity to put all this evidence in front of Surrey or any other Councils, and I challenge Partnerships to debate their bogus claims, in public. Make my day, I'm mad as Hell and I won't take this any more.

Idris Francis”

“If only but if only these speed kills freaks actually understood that t is the vectoring to two moving items which casuses the problem along with drink drugs and inexperience - time this electronic money boxes were banned from public use and more time was spent on rationalising speed limits -20 outside schools in school opening and closing times and 80 plus on multilane motorways out of the rush hour. common sense better than constant threats of intimidation by electronic cash boxes..”