Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Warwickshire is scaling back its speed camera programme - thanks to a £1.2M Coalition cut to the speed camera budget. The council appreciate the road safety benefits of the cameras, but at a time of austerity, they can't easily make up the funding shortfall from elsewhere. Philip Hammond and Mike Penning may protest that they're not forcing cuts to safety cameras, but in practice they're making life very difficult for councils that refuse to do so.

The council are going to make the best of a bad job by keeping all the existing cameras going at least some of the time, retaining at least some of the deterrent effect. Unlike Oxfordshire, which simply announced it was going to switch off all its cameras and watch people die.

The safety effect of the Warwickshire cameras will be diluted, because if people who speed past a camera don't receive a ticket, they're unlikely to change their behaviour. And people who would have received a driving ban due to serial reoffending will retain their licences - exactly the people you don't want on the road.

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