Honest John

If you are a regular motorist, then a weekly scan through Honest John's article in the Sunday Telegraph should be mandatory reading. This weeks' highlight is a letter from a police officer (reproduced below):

I am a retired police sergeant and have extensive road safety and traffic accident investigation experience. I have followed the debate regarding speed cameras and would like to add my opinion. Speed cameras have nothing whatever to do with road safety. They are a blunt instrument with which to criminalise drivers who stray several mph above the speed limit - something that clearly isn't dangerous per se, unless changing or prevailing conditions render it so. Cameras are not able to determine this. Traffic police officers could, but they have mostly been diverted on to other uniform duties, mainly to persecute members of the public for other trivial matters in order to fulfil their "performance indicators", which are hated universally by police officers.

This is a cynical ploy by the Government to fool the electorate that detection rates are up, but you score as many points for solving a shoplifting case as a murder. If the Government was remotely interested in road safety, it would invest more of the excruciating levels of tax it extracts from the road system. Instead, we are forced to endure increasingly dangerous road surfaces, neglected signs and ridiculous levels of congestion that have deliberately been engineered into our transport system. The clear objective is to make motoring such a miserable experience that people will be forced to take public transport.

With speed cameras, the authorities have simply created another dangerous hazard. Where people are unfamiliar with an area, they now spend far too much time with their eyes off the road looking at their speedos, and this has undoubtedly led to an increase in accidents. Fortunately for the Government there is no way of identifying from accident statistics where this has happened, as drivers, while admitting privately what really took place, will not do so officially. Straying over the limit by a few miles per hour does not make a bad driver. Poor governmental policy does.