Wednesday 24 March 2010

Someone needs to get their SPECS on [rant]

Yours truly drove to Buxton tonight, over the Cat and Fiddle, and found to his intense joy and delight that the morons have been at work, and it has sprouted a crop of SPECS average speed cameras.

Now, I'm actually generally in favour of average speed cameras - they are both fairer, and more effective than the usual Gatso's. But the current system seems to be badly thought out, badly installed, and on the wrong sort of road. Taking these points in reverse order...

Firstly, almost all the fatalities up there are bikers, certainly all the ones that this system is aimed at. I really don't understand why people care about biker fatalities - unlike stupid car drivers, bikers very rarely take any innocent victims with them when committing suicide. I have no issue with people taking risks that only affect themselves, so if you want to ride like a twit, then be my guest. Drive like one, and you may kill me, so I'm less keen on the idea. If people want to install SPECS on the A6 through central Stockport, go for it - its full of speeding morons in cars, not on bikes.

Secondly, the installs are more than a tad ugly - they seem to have decided its now a motorway, and hence installed motorway sized gantries. Guys - this was a beautiful part of the world once - adding a dozen steel masts with bright yellow camera's is hardly adding to the beauty of scenes...

Thirdly, the install seems to have been done by a half brained moron. There are three camera's in close succession on the long straight, which is the only bit a normal person would want to break the limit on, in order say to safely pass a lorry.
By comparison, the long twisty stretch where all the bikers commit suicide has no camera's at-all, apart from at each end. Given that there is a much shorter straighter parallel route for most of that with a 60mph limit, and no camera's to tell them which way you've been, its not like its going to be possible to prosecute anyone until they are averaging a lot more than 50mph on the twisty bit. Not that they won't try of course.

As a parting shot, I've done a quick Google, and found that apparently the whole thing has cost a tidy two million quid. The country is going bust, and they are spending £2,000,000 in order to save the lives of half a dozen suicidal bikes... its not like they will get that back in fines any time soon either - they need to bag nearly 35,000 people at £60 a pop just to get the face value back in fines... doubt 35,000 people a year drive it. Given that each fine probably costs £30 to administer, that's actually 70,000 people to bag. Frankly, we will have all evolved into aeroplanes some time before they manage to book 70,000 people...

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