A new British report says that speed cameras are not as effective as old-fashioned policing in reducing road casualties, writes Tim O'Brien.
As the Garda prepares to award a contract for up to 100 new, privately operated speed cameras this week, new research in Britain has again raised significant questions about the effectiveness of speed cameras in reducing the number of road deaths.
According to a UK study commissioned by the British department for transport, no statistical evidence emerged that enforcement of speed limits by cameras - as opposed to old-fashioned police patrols - had any success in reducing death and injury through car crashes.
In fact it would appear that since the British authorities switched the emphasis from fast-moving mobile patrols, to fixed cameras, a dramatic trend in the reduction of fatal collisions was halted.
An analysis of transport statistics and road safety measures, undertaken by British authors Christopher Booker and Richard North, showed that over three decades there was dramatic drop in the rate of fatal crashes leading to the UK attaining one of the best road safety records in the world.
Their analysis - which was highlighted recently by the Daily Telegraph - shows that following a three-fold growth in car ownership in the first 20 years after the second World War, the annual total fatalities rose from about 5,000 to a peak of 7,985 in 1966.
From then on, despite a continuing rise in the number of vehicles, the fatal accident figure steadily dropped, at an average rate of more than 5 per cent a year. By 1980 it had fallen to slightly more than 6,000. By 1993 it was below 4,000 and Britain's roads were the safest in Europe.
But the rate of decline suddenly slowed. Over the next decade, the total fall was smaller than in any of the years between 1990 and 1993. The analysis would appear to suggest the change was linked to a radical shift in road safety policy in the mid-1990s. The focus had been moved to increasing the number of speed cameras.
While millions of motorists were caught by the new speed cameras, and revenues rose to about €170 million a year by 2003, the numbers of people dying on Britain's roads were no longer declining at anything like the same rate as before.
Undoubtedly one important factor in the steady fall in the fatal crash rate in earlier decades, despite a doubling in the number of vehicles on the roads from 12 million in 1966 to 25 million in 1994, had been the technical advances that made vehicles much safer. But this could not have explained a slowing in the fall of incidents in the 1990s, when new regulations had made vehicles safer still.
It seems a key issue in success of putting dangerous drivers and vehicles off the roads was old-fashioned policing. Regular patrols enabled them not just to pick up drivers breaking the speed limit, but those whose driving or vehicles might need to be checked for other reasons. This methodology detects drivers under the influence of drink or drugs, bald tyres and defective lights, whereas a fine in the post from a fixed camera would not.
According to the British analysis, even traffic police with new laser guns began to shift away from human judgment towards the simple act of measuring whether a driver was breaking a speed limit.
In 1992 the police were given a new weapon when the first speed cameras were installed in west London. Trials on the M40 had shown just how frequently drivers broke the limit, when cameras capable of taking 400 snapshots on each roll of film had used up their quota in 40 minutes. But as police patrols were being reduced, the rate of reduction in road deaths was falling.
WHILE THE RESEARCH SUGGESTS speed cameras are not as successful as patrols in saving lives, it seems in Ireland the cameras are not even as effective in raising money in fines as they might be. Comptroller and Auditor General John Purcell, in a recent audit highlighted the high number of unusable photographs from fixed speed cameras, based on radar detection equipment. According to this report, in 2005 some 49 per cent of the 108,331 images taken of speeding cars were unusable. The problems with the system were first identified in 2002.
Industry sources said the problem is one of the use of radar which can be activated by background movement such as waving trees or other vehicles in the photo.
The tender documentation sent to six previously-selected operators this summer does not specify the number or type of cameras required. But the sources said the requirements of the tender would appear to indicate that a radar-based system was the desired option.
Transport sources, however, expressed impatience with criticism of speed cameras yesterday, commenting that speed was undoubtedly a factor in road deaths and that as tools to put speeding motorists off the road, the cameras would be very effective.