Geoff Hoon claims he is the UK motorist’s friend. He is trying to persuade them to welcome the replacement of Gatsos with average speed cameras on the basis that they are fairer.
A large majority of male motorists believe that their driving skills are way above average and so they can drive safely at speeds way over the limit. Indeed most think that speed cameras are an iniquitous form of stealth tax, and that every man has a right, indeed a duty, to thwart them. Everyone quickly got to know the location of cameras on their regular routes and would slow down for the necessary fifty yards after the camera - Gatso cameras use visible flashes which were thought to be a driving hazard if pointed at oncoming cars, so they catch you as you leave them, not as you approach them, and over 90% of the 5,000 cameras in the UK are of this type.
But it still used to be harder to spot cameras on unfamiliar routes. Cunning officials would conceal them behind traffic signs or trees. So any man who took his duty seriously had to invest in a radar detector, or later GPS mapping, which was constantly updated with camera positions. Less serious avoiders simply slammed on the brakes whenever they noticed a camera.
This worked better than one might have expected because the typical camera was out of action for 90% of the time. Once the film ran out, it had to be resupplied, but the police and local authorities tended not to see this as a priority because they did not share in the revenues.
This was the reasoning behind the apparently bizarre decision to stop concealing the cameras and to highlight them with yellow fluorescent paint. It was felt that the increased deterrent effect of a highly visible camera outweighed the reduction in prosecutions.
Significant numbers of Truvelos cameras have been introduced in some areas. These use an infra-red flash, which does not distract drivers, so they catch you as you are approaching them. But the main reason seems to have been that they take a photograph which can be used to identify the driver, thus dealing more easily with disputed cases. They are still easy to spot, and so for a while the only problem has been failing to pay attention, or the odd occasion when the police use some unfair gadget like a laser gun which the cheap detectors fail to pick up.
All that could be about to change. The authorities have been carrying out trials of number plate recognition technology and it seems to have been finally pronounced fit for large-scale deployment. Slowing down temporarily doesn’t help, because the technology can average your speed between any two cameras. If two cameras 40 miles apart pick you up at a thirty minute interval, then you are ticketed.
It remains to be seen how this works out in practice. Except at night it is hard to maintain average speeds above the limit for long distances, so the threat is probably only from cameras that are a relatively short distance apart. If they come in pairs, then it may just mean that you can easily avoid detection by slowing down between them, without any need to slam on the brakes. The most significant point from a speeding point of view may be that there is no film, so no down-time when it runs out. This could have a big enough effect to increase substantially the use of gps gadgets (which are the only type to give effective warning). On the other hand, it could mean that it becomes impossible to drive above 75 mph for any substantial distance on motorways. We will see.
Given the current absurd preoccupation with terrorism, it seems likely that at least part of the impetus behind the move to number plate readers is to enhance the ability of the police and intelligence agencies to track people real-time. I have written on some aspects of this already, so for now I would just repeat the obvious that the dangers of giving barely accountable agencies access to ever more data about our private lives far exceed the benefits. There are two main dangers. One is that we are building up the apparatus for a fascist state for some future clique to seize control. The other is more immediate. We are guaranteeing the abuse of this data. The mistake which all the politicians seem to make is to think that none of the vast number of people with legitimate access to the data will abuse it. All experience shows that a small percentage will abuse it. In particular, some will simply sell it to those prepared to pay.
At the moment the government seems to be having endless difficulty preventing the accidental abuse of information. There has been a continual flow of people with oceans of highly confidential data leaving it unprotected on trains. But that is fixable. Deliberate abuse is not.
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