HERE we go again with another dose of speed camera overkill.
Another 48 are set to be switched on across the county at the end of this month -- 18 of them dotted around East Lancashire.
And the justification for them is saving lives and reducing injury. They are being installed at so-called 'hot spots.'
But these, it turns out, need not necessarily be stretches of roads with high death and injury rates. Government guidelines allow police to erect cameras simply to cut speeding -- and, as we all know, to reap fines revenue.
To me, this explains why some of the existing cameras in East Lancashire -- never mind the new ones -- are placed on dual carriageways and by-passes designed for faster driving in areas that are hardly residential.
And going off the spate of letters from angry readers, I'd say a majority of motorists suspect that the 'saving lives and injuries' motive is a just cloak for raking in millions of pounds from easy-target offenders when more serious criminals warrant the police's attention.
Yet I accept that speed cameras DO save lives and cut injuries -- but not a lot. That's because, tragic as each case is, there are, relatively speaking, very few deaths and injuries on our roads altogether. And only a third of them are down to accidents involving speeding -- amounting to just over 20 deaths and 350 serious injuries in Lancashire last year out of a population of 1.3million and out of the billions of miles of road journeys in and across the county.
These latest cameras bring the number in Lancashire up to 117 and the eventual total is set to be 320 -- at a cost of £10million. But given the small numbers of fatal and serious-injury accidents that this equipment and outlay is being ranged against, isn't that a serious misapplication of public money and police resources?
Some might say that no matter what it costs to save lives, the money is well spent. But when many times more lives are being lost through heart disease in Lancashire would it not make far more economic and humane sense to scrap this expensive and dubious speed camera explosion and spend the money instead on by-pass surgery which many people die waiting for at present?
And just when will someone put a cost on the resentment that this overkill is stoking up against the police?
I have even been told that it has got so bad that now many officers are worried that real villains are being let off by juries disaffected by the anti-speeding sledgehammer to crack a nut.
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