Two men have lost their appeal to European courts over the use of speed cameras. They claimed it violated their human rights to be forced to reveal who was driving the car. Or something. Maybe they had a case. I don’t care: it’s transparent bollocks, and everyone knows it.
I wish they’d just come out and say what they really mean: “I want to drive faster”. This is it. This is the sole motiviation behind complaints about speed cameras. They couldn’t care less about road safety, and they couldn’t care less about their civil liberties. Nobody spends time talking about speed limits and safety measures on the railways. It’s obvious what this is really about, and I’m sick of it.
The never-ending complaints about devices that punish people for breaking the law are moronic, laughable and pathetic. ’Money-making devices’, ‘nanny state’, etc. etc.. For crying out loud! It is not obvious to me that it’s safe to do 90 on the motorway. It is not obvious to me that it is safe to do 40 in a 30 zone when ‘it’s quiet’, ’the houses are set back’, ‘I have a 2 litre car’ or whatever tedious excuse people come up with when they just want to drive faster1. Neither is it apparently obvious to the road safety experts who create the laws.
If you really, really think that it’s safe to drive faster, bloody well start a campaign to have the limits raised. Or a variable speed system. Or a free-for-all where the onus is on fragile humans to keep away from massive kinetic machines. Whatever. Something tangible, backed up with proper, statistical evidence that isn’t something you heard Jeremy Clarkson say. Complaining about enforcement and not the law itself just makes me think you have no case.
I’ll bother listening once speed-camera campaigners have something to say that doesn’t smack of a complete disregard for the expertise of road safety experts, other road users and the legal system. Until then it’s just the ramblings of a bunch of speed-junkies.
- incidentally, I suspect the feeling of speed is entirely subjective: 50 feels terribly slow once you get off the motorway. People don’t want to drive faster, they want to drive faster than everyone else [↩]
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8 Responses to “Whining about speed cameras is pathetic” 
- 1 Pingback on Jul 1st, 2007 at 11:39 am
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Well said. I saw that kill-your-speed advert on TV tonight, the one where the girl says that being hit at 40 there is an 80% chance she would die but at 30 there is an 80% she would survive. I had seen it before but only tonight did I notice the final slogan - “its 30 for a reason”
I think it would be quite persuasive if the people it is aimed at were at all likely to pay attention.
Its good to see someone thwarted who is not making much pretence at innocence but just trying to use a loophole. This is the sort of abuse which is used to undermine the human rights act.
Yes! YES! You are so on the nail about this it almost hurts to read it.
Mind, having said that there’s one of those ‘Mind Your Speed’ signs that supposedly flashes up the speed you’re driving at. I’ve gone past this in the middle of a crawling queue of traffic going about 12 miles an hour tops and seen it flash “48 - SLOW DOWN”. I’m wondering if it picks up the speed of passing birds???
Of course you’re right. Behaving irresponsibly in your car is still far more socially acceptable than it ought to be. As I keep telling the parents who park on the yellow lines outside my daughters’ school.
The day I kick off one of their wing mirrors is not too far away.
The problem is that most people are stupid.
Sensible drivers observe the road conditions around them and drive at a speed appropriate for the conditions. At 3:30pm through a village with a school, 20 mph is too fast, even though the limit says 30. At 3:30 am through the same village, you could safely drive at 40 mph, but, no you can’t, because there’s a speed camera and the limit says 30. Computer says ‘no’.
Same on a motorway. M6, early on a weekday morning, lots of traffic about, 60 mph might be too fast. M5, middle of a sunday afternoon, the only traffic is (or should be) in lane 1 and is separated by about half a mile from each other, why on earth shouldn’t you drive at 80 ?
But no, people are stupid. If the sign says 60/40/30 they will drive at 60/40/30, without regard for what’s going on around them.
Teach people to drive properly, then replace speed limits with speed guidelines. But that won’t work unless you ban stupid people from driving…
I disagree - I don’t think the individual motorist, whether ’stupid’ or not, is capable of judging appropriate speeds. Firstly, there are always going to be variables we don’t know about regarding road condition and the surroundings. Secondly, psychological factors make a big difference: 40 feels incredibly slow when you’ve just got off the motorway, and it would be easy to decide 50 was ‘appropriate’. Especially at 3 in the morning. Also, how are you going to charge anyone if they cause an accident?
I think it’s ok for the individual motorist to decide to go more slowly, but never more quickly. There may well be occasions on which it would be ok, but I just don’t think the individual motorist is capable of objectively judging them, no matter how ‘obvious’ it seems, and the only way is to stick to the speeds decided by road safety experts.
The real problem with the result of the case of the ‘speed trap pair’ is nothing to do with speed limits, speed traps, or little girls in adverts. It would still be a problem if they had been shoplifting, or living off immoral earnings.
What should concern everyone is that the Judges at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg voted by 15-2 to reject their case on the grounds that:
“The court did not accept the applicants’ argument that the right to remain silent and the right not to incriminate oneself were absolute rights,”
Now if, as the court says, they are not absolute rights in this case – they may well not be rights in any offence - and that is an erosion of the rights of all of us.
So maybe the pair might do better to sue the government under the Trade Descriptions Act. The police and Criminal Evidence Act lays down the following modern interpretation of the ‘Judge’s Rules’ or ‘right to silence’ also known as the “caution”:
“You do not have to say anything but it may harm your defence if you do not mention now something you later rely on in court, Anything you do say may be given in evidence.”
Maybe this should now read more like:
”You do not have the right to silence and failing to disclose anything we want to know could result in your receiving a harsher sentence - if we can actually manage to find a jail cell for you that is.”
Drivers who get caught speeding should be forced to watch footage taken of people getting knocked over and how it affects lives, because that’s the reality of what happens when speeding occurs. They are just thoughtless idiots.