A Yelverton resident down in Plymouth has been caught speeding but following the fixed penalty notice and three points, he is putting his foot down in a different way and fighting against the ticket. The controversial speed camera on Gdynia Way seems to be creating havoc for city motorists because it is deemed to have insufficient.

Resident Simon Turner says that there’s not enough signage in the area alerting drivers to the speed limit change as up until last year’s multimillion pound road works, Gdynia Way was a 40mph zone – now reduced to a 30mph.

He said: “Due to the lack of optional combined safety camera and 30mph signs at the exit from Cattedown roundabout, the motorist is under-informed.”

Last month, local paper The Herald reposted on cab driver Dean Gillard who was also caught speeding three times in one morning on Gdynia Way forcing him to move cab firms so he wasn’t passing through the camera as often.

It is drivers like this that Simon plans to stand up for, and any other motorists who have been caught along the stretch.

This Is Plymouth posted these comments from Simon;
“It’s not about money or the points, it’s about road safety.

“I have come under considerable pressure from the Safety Camera Unit to accept the £60 fine and three points on my licence but I have refused to accept this conditional offer despite the extension to the time limit.”

He also said: “I am therefore facing a summons and in doing so will act as spokesperson for others who have been or will in the future be caught out by the lack of signage in Shapters Road and Gdynia Way.”

This is a risky strategy and could result in further punishment for him but to the letter of the law, the UK Government Traffic Signs Manuel, 14.1 states: “To avoid the risk of failed prosecutions, it is of the greatest importance that speed limits be signed lawfully.

“It is equally important that speed limits be signed clearly and in accordance with this guidance, so that at no time will drivers be in any doubt about the prevailing limit.”

The other side of the argument suggests that there is adequate indication that the speed limit of the area is 30mph and not 40pmh. To be fair, Plymouth City Council has the Highway Code on their side which states that “in areas of street lighting the speed limit is 30mph, unless a different speed limit is specifically signed.”.

Of course the easiest way of preventing failing foul of the speed limit would be to have one of our speed camera detectors on board so there was no way you would miss the speed limit. Click here for more details.

And second place goes to…. Wrexham, for catching the second highest number of speeding motorists in north Wales during 2011! The speed camera found on the A525 Heol Maelor in Coedpoeth registered a massive 1,391 speeding motorists last year.

If we say that each motorist received a standard £60 fine and three points on their license, that’s total of £83,460 in revenue and over 4,000 speeding points dished out onto people’s licenses.

First place as taken by the Greenfield A548 in Flintshire which registered 1453 speeders and generated a cool £87,000 in fine revenue.

The Coedpoeth camera, although second in the revenue stakes, wins the “Most Attacked Speed Camera” award for North wales with arson attempts, lens damage and even paint throwing.

We think that the easiest way to avoid speeding is to install one of our speed camera detectors into your car. Starting at under £100, it can save your license and help you become a safer driver!

Lead by example is what we’re told but it seems that Staffordshire Police officers are flaunting speed restrictions by breaking speed limits up to 15 times per day!

Between April 2011 and March 2012 there were over 5,300 occasions where officers were snapped by speed cameras breaking the speed limit. This is around 1,000 times more incidents than the previous year.

Quite rightly this has led to force introducing speed awareness style education initiatives to officers to ensure officers are aware of the policy of using blue lights.

Details of how many officers were prosecuted is exempt from public documents however, Supt Philip Bladen, head of the professional standards department suggested that the incidents of speeding by officers on duty were justified and that drivers were exempt from prosecution.

He went on to say; “When the activation is not justified Staffordshire Police takes the matter very seriously and the driver is dealt with as any other motorist would be,”.

“If the speed falls within the threshold they are offered a speed awareness diversion course but if in excess of this threshold the driver is prosecuted.

“Police officers regularly respond to emergency incidents and therefore it is inevitable that sometimes safety cameras are activated. Staffordshire Police maintains accurate records of such occasions and scrutinises each one carefully.”

Road safety charities welcomed the actions of the force in an attempt to tackle unnecessary speeding.

Somerset have reported that accidents caused by speeding motorists have FALLEN by 31% in the last year despite fixed speed cameras being switched off in the area. Figures obtained from Avon and Somerset police show that the dates between the cameras being switched off in April 2011 and December 2011, there were 109 accidents where speed was a factor compared to 159 in 2010.

Superintendent Ian Smith had this to say: “Nationally accidents are down whether cameras are on or off, and a lot of that is to do with fewer drivers and fewer vehicles being on the roads because of the cost of fuel and the cost of running vehicles.”

These figures also show that 50% fewer drivers were caught using mobile speed cameras in 2011 and the total number of accidents fell by 11% compared to 2010

Philip Gomm, from the RAC Foundation, said: “There is a national trend of falling and reducing casualty rates. Since many of the cameras remain in place, drivers may believe that they are still in use.”

It would therefore stand to reason that you are likely to be a safer driver if you are aware of where speed cameras are located. There is no better way to find this information than using a speed camera detector here.

A rather angry man has been arrested by police in Lincolnshire it has been reported today, following a vicious hammer attack…. on a speed camera. That’s right, a 32 year old from Horncastle was arrested on suspicion of causing criminal damage and failing a breath test.

A passing patrol car spotted the rather animated man stood on the roof of his car attacking the camera in Butt Lane, Tattershall with his hammer and he was taken to Skegness Police Station for further questioning. Crazy.

Maybe his life wouldn’t have taken that bizarre twist had he bought himself a Speed Camera Detector in the first place. Save yourself the trouble of a hammer attack by staying aware of speed cameras in your area here.

A businessman caught travelling at 83mph on the north Devon Link Road has been spared a driving ban after informing magistrates that it would be devastating for his business. 38 year old Andrew Smith pleased guilty to speeding at 83mph on the 60mph speed limit road last year.

Magistrates heard how Smith’s other business had collapsed due to the recession and his property business would go the same way should he not be able to drive. Furthermore, the three employees working for him would lose their jobs should the business fail.

Having replaced his Porsche with a car that doesn’t quite reach the same speeds, magistrates took everything into account and handed him 5 penalty points and a £350 fine.

We always advocate that driving with a speed camera detector heightens a drivers awareness to the speed limits around him and will ensure that a safe speed is always maintained. In this case, it would have saved Mr Smith £350 and five points on his license.

Camaraderie between motorists is never more apparent than when oncoming vehicles flash their headlights in an attempt to warn others of upcoming mobile speed traps. It has however, been deemed illegal with some police forces categorising it as perverting the course of justice.

In Florida, a motorist has had his ticket successfully overturned for such an offence after taking the issuer to court. The driver claimed, successfully, that the prosecution was in breech of the US Constitution’s First Amendment, which prohibits the making of any law that abridges the freedom of speech.

This has not stopped Florida Highway Patrol issuing tickets for more than 10,000 offences in the same vein. The other side of the argument is that this is deemed as “undue use of headlights” and a ticket is valid.

We think it’s probably better to invest in a speed camera detector so there’s no need to look out for flashing headlights.

What do you think?

Source: eveningexpress.co.uk
By Sally McDonald
Published: 23/05/2012

A TRAFFIC control officer who parked his van on a corner on double yellow lines in Aberdeen has been rapped by his bosses.

The Nescamp mobile speed camera driver was snapped by a furious member of the public in the West Tullos area of Aberdeen.

Today bosses at Nescamp admitted the driver had been out of order and “had been spoken to”.

Justice or nitpicking? Tell us….

After 20 years in service, the Gatso has earned millions in revenue, but has it actually reduced accidents?

Source: Telegraph.co.uk
By: Nick Gibbs

The man responsible for introducing speed cameras to Britain’s roads is angry. “I think it’s a fiasco now,” says former policeman Roger Reynolds. It was Reynolds who, 20 years ago, flicked the switch on Britain’s first-ever camera, a Gatso on the westbound A316 over Twickenham bridge in Surrey.

Drivers were initially given a sporting chance. The dual-carriageway through this part of leafy south-west London is a 40mph zone but Reynolds remembers the camera being set at 60mph. “We were trying to catch the worst,” he says.

And the worst were pretty bad in what Reynolds described as a notorious accident spot. In an eye-opening reminder of the casual attitude to speed limits back then, the trial camera on the Thames bridge recorded an astonishing 22,939 drivers exceeding 65mph in 22 days, Reynolds told the Richmond and Twickenham Times back in 1992.

A traffic division sergeant with advanced photography skills, Reynolds was a natural choice to lead the development team comprised of Dutch camera maker Gatso, the government and Reynolds’s employer, the Metropolitan Police. He went on to oversee a network of 750 cameras around London.

When he left the police in 1999, he reckons public opinion was still on his side. “At no time did I prosecute below 40mph in a 30mph,” he says. “To do so at 32mph is ridiculous – and they wonder why there’s a backlash against speed cameras.”

Prosecution numbers track the Gatso’s journey from safety device to “scamera” in the eyes of many drivers. In 2000, according to Home Office figures, just under 600,000 motorists were caught speeding by cameras in England and Wales. In 2007 that figure had shot up to 1.8 million, which, at £60 a pop, represented an annual income of more than £100 million.

According to Reynolds, the camera’s downfall started in 2000 when the so-called “netting off” system allowed local authorities to receive a percentage of revenue from their cameras.

Local police and councils joined forces to form safety camera partnerships, picking out sites which the government would then fund.

It meant camera numbers multiplied from 1,600 in 2000 to 4,737 in 2007, according to AA figures. But the partnerships hadn’t factored in the effectiveness of the cameras.

“When you put a camera in, the number of speeders always reduces. Suddenly there’s no money coming in, so they drop the trigger speed from 38mph to 35mph to pay the bills,” says Reynolds. “What good did that do but alienate the public?”

Stories of individual cameras racking up lottery incomes did further damage. Most notorious is site 050, the M11 southbound camera near Chigwell in Essex, installed in 2000 at the point the motorway limit drops from 70mph to 50mph. In 2003, 9,639 drivers were prosecuted, netting more than half a million pounds. Even worse, figures showed accidents had actually risen since its introduction.

Anti-camera groups reacted by becoming more militant. “We targeted that M11 camera about 20 times over the last 10 years,” says the self-styled Captain Gatso from Motorists Against Detection (MAD). “We used all sorts of methods, [including] when you put a tyre round it and light a rag soaked in unleaded, to burning it out with Thermite and low-level stuff like spraying it with paint.”

Hate figures emerged, most notably the chief constable of North Wales, Richard Brunstrom. Dubbed the Mad Mullah of the Traffic Taliban by tabloids, Brunstrom waged what he called a “personal crusade” on speeders between 2001-2009.

No tactic was too devious, including one memorable trick back in 2008, when a mobile camera was hidden in a horse box.

Despite all this, the British public is still generally in favour. “We’ve done opinion polls on cameras since 1998 and we’ve never seen acceptability below 69 per cent,” says the AA’s Andrew Howard. “I’ve replied to as many letters from people who wanted cameras as those that didn’t.”

The evidence they reduce accidents seems overwhelming. Since the introduction of speed cameras, deaths on Britain’s roads have halved from 4,229 in 1992 to 1,850 in 2009, the most recent figures. Of course road safety has improved in many other ways, but plenty of individual trials have proved the effectiveness of cameras.

One of the most persuasive took place in west London at 21 sites in 1997. Monitored over 36 months before and after installation, fatalities dropped 69.4 per cent.

“We couldn’t claim all the reduction, but I’d argue the cameras had a big effect,” says Reynolds.

“It was never about the fines but about reducing fatalities and injuries. That was our pure motivation. When you’ve been picking dead people off the road for 22 years of your life, you want to do something about it. I’m very proud of what we achieved.”

As he describes it, prosecution wasn’t the original aim. “The whole point was to remind people about speed, not to catch them,” he says. “Right from the beginning we worked a dummy system, with only one in eight cameras live.”

Even today, the AA reckons there’s only about 500-600 cameras equipped actually to record speed. The dummy ones had a rudimentary version of the Doppler radar, whose sole job was to set off the flash. According to Reynolds, it meant £1,000 for a camera vs £10,000.

In 2007 the funding for speed cameras changed, with local authorities given a fixed road-safety grant with more freedom to allocate it. “They found they’d rather spend money on more useful things than prosecution,” says the AA’s Andrew Howard. “Suddenly speed awareness courses became popular and prosecutions dropped.” In 2009, the number of fixed penalty notices issued for speed-limit offences had fallen from 1.8 million to 1.1 million in just two years.

When that grant was reduced in 2010, many authorities slashed back funding to speed cameras or choked it off altogether, most famously in Oxfordshire. The county’s cameras are now back on (assuming they work) but it was clear the square-headed highwayman was not the force he once was.

Looking back over the 20 years since their introduction, it’s easy to see how speed cameras alienated drivers. It’s not the camera’s fault, says Reynolds: “I will argue the device is a major road safety feature. It’s not the camera that should be demonised, it’s the way people deal with it.”

HOW THE GATSO WAS ADAPTED FOR BRITAIN
Developed by Dutchman and former rally driver Maurice Gatsonides, the Gatso camera needed work before it satisfied UK authorities. It uses Doppler radar to measure the vehicle speed, only activating the flash when it’s sure the car is over the set limit. But the Home Office wanted a secondary check. “They recognised it was controversial, so they went for belt and braces,” says ex-policeman Roger Reynolds, who led the development. That became the secondary flash, allowing the police to measure the car’s distance on road markings half a second after the first one. During trials green cat’s eyes were used for measurement, until Reynolds persuaded the Home Office to use white dashes. These were initially painted along the side of the road to avoid distracting drivers. Reynolds says motorists often challenged the technology in court in the early days and he was frequently called as an expert witness. “I never lost a single one.”

WHAT’S NEXT?

Average speed cameras for cities
The success of average speed cameras within motorway roadworks and other, more permanent schemes has sparked an urban version, dubbed Safe Zone by its creator, German tech giant Siemens. The results released last year of an independent trial outside a school in Poole, Dorest, showed the number of vehicles driving at 40mph past the school dropped from 64 per hour before the cameras were fitted to as few as 16 afterwards. The cameras communicate with each other via 3G to track vehicle speeds.

Tyre cameras
Dubbed TreadCam, this device is embedded into the road to scan tread depths with cameras and lasers and flag up illegal tyres. The Association of Chief Police Officers has confirmed it is investigating whether to bring the £43,000 machines from Germany into the UK, but has said that initial applications could be to check truck tyres coming off ferries at major ports.

Sat Nav Warehouse Comment: Speed cameras are here to stay and whilst some cameras do represent a safety based motive, some could be accused of being revenue generators for the various boroughs across the country. Whatever your opinion, we think it is always better to be alerted to the presence of a camera and make sure you are not speeding, than to speed through one or jump on your breaks at the last minute, potentially causing an accident. Browse our range of speed camera detectors ranging from the basic radar detector, right up to comprehensive GPS camera locators.

Source: Scottish Sun

In Perthshire in Scotland, a bus driver faces losing his job after he was caught by the SAME speed camera FOUR times in one week! Kenneth Nicoll was flashed when travelling at 61mph in a 50mph zone on each occasion.

A road ban is expected when he is sentenced next month at Perth Justice of the Peace court. A source said;
“It seems incredible anyone could be caught out four times like that. He may have believed it was a 60mph zone but an experienced bus driver should have known.”

Kenneth Nicholl was snapped by the speed camera located at Waterloo Junction near Bankfoot in Perthshire just after 9am on October 7th, 9th, 13th and 14th in 2011 as he went about his job. Given that Nicholl already has 3 points on his license, he will receive a ban based on the totting up limit.

JP Simon Laidlaw said: “There are four separate offences with three points each, so that is 12 points along with the three already on his licence. I would be very much moving towards disqualification.”

Nicholl and his legal team have until Jun 12th to try and a build a case for a ban resulting in financial hardship should it be implemented and could even result in him losing his job.

Sat Nav Warehouse comment: No matter how used you are to the UK roads, you can still suffer from a lapse in concentration. Thankfully, no accident was caused as a result of the speeding incidents but one thing is for sure – Kenneth Nicholl would not be in this position if he had been using a speed camera locator such as the Snooper 3Zero which would have alerted him to the presence of the speed camera on each occasion! Can you afford not to have one?