[privacy] Cameras Catch Speeding Britons and Lots of Grief

[Gordon Darling <gordondarling () dsl pipex com>]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/27/world/europe/27camera.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

<snip>

KELVEDON HATCH, England, Oct. 24 — To drive in Britain is to measure out
your trip in speed cameras. As inevitable as road signs and as
implacable as the meanest state trooper, they lurk everywhere, the
government’s main weapon against impatient drivers.

It is a shame that so many people hate them. 

Among the ways that motorists have made this clear: spraying the cameras
with paint; knocking them over; covering them in festive wrapping paper
and garbage bags; digging them up; shooting, hammering and firebombing
them; festooning them with burning tires; and filling their casings with
self-expanding insulation foam that, when activated, blows them apart.

Visual examples can be seen on the Web site of a vigilante group called
Motorists Against Detection, which displays color photographs of
smashed, defaced and burned-out cameras — pornography for the
anti-camera movement. 

In a nation that is estimated to have four million surveillance cameras
— the most per capita in the world, civil liberties groups say — there
are currently as many as 6,000 spots for speed cameras, in the country
and in the city, on highways, urban arteries, suburban streets and rural
lanes. 

“Speed cameras can’t detect tailgating, bad driving, drink driving or
drug driving,” said a spokesman for the group, explaining his
objections. An occasional contributor to British radio debates about
traffic regulations, he uses the name Captain Gatso — after the most
common form of speed camera — because, he says, he wants to avoid
arrest. 

The government does not keep figures on camera vandalism, so it is
impossible to confirm Captain Gatso’s claim that the group, known as
M.A.D., has attacked more than 1,000 cameras, or that its members are
“grown-up people, with normal jobs, who are cheesed off,” rather than
hooligans engaging in “willy-nilly childish vandalism.” 

But if there is a battle between motorists and speed cameras, the
cameras are surely winning.

In this little hamlet in Brentwood, about an hour northeast of London,
one particularly reviled camera — installed to catch people exceeding
the 40 m.p.h. speed limit on a busy suburban road — has been set on fire
three times in the past year, and three times it has been repaired. 

Now, about $66,000 later, it is back on the job again, new and improved,
swathed in protective fireproof housing. “Touch wood, we haven’t had any
incidents since,” said Rachel Whitelock, liaison for the Essex Safety
Camera Partnership, which installs and maintains the county’s camera
sites: 96 stationary spots; 160 stretches of road policed by cameras
whose locations change; and 26 traffic light cameras for red lights. 

The government says the cameras have been a resounding success, reducing
speed by an average of 2.2 miles per hour at speed-camera sites,
reducing the numbers of people speeding at the sites by 31 percent and
reducing by 42 percent the number of people killed or seriously injured
at the sites. In public opinion surveys, they point out, a majority of
Britons say they support having cameras on the roads. But theory is one
thing; practice is another. People like to drive fast, and they bridle
at being told what to do. About two million are caught by the speed
cameras a year, generating more than $200 million in fines. 

“It’s incredibly difficult to get to people to come to terms with
slowing down here,” said Francis Ashton, the road safety manager for the
city of Nottingham. “In the States, you have much slower speed limits,
and there’s more of a culture of sticking to the speed limit.” 

The cameras detect cars that exceed the speed limit, often with radar
technology, and take flash photographs of the license plates so a ticket
can be issued. A speeding offense adds three points to a driver’s
license. Because drivers who amass 12 points in three years face
six-month driving bans, people go to enormous lengths to avoid
detection.

In a recent case, 28-year-old Craig Moore, an engineer from South
Yorkshire, ran into trouble when, in the words of a spokesman for the
Greater Manchester Police, “instead of just accepting that he had been
caught traveling above the speed limit, Moore decided to blow the camera
apart.”

<snip>

more at
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/27/world/europe/27camera.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1


-- 
gordondarling<at>dsl<dot>pipex<dot>com

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