Cameras are money making, not life saving

£120 million was collected in 2006 from speeding tickets. That money helps pay for an entire industry built around designing, manufacturing, installing and maintaining speed cameras, not to mention the army of administrators or the traffic police officers who spend time sitting in wait with a mobile camera instead of going after the more dangerous 4 million estimated drivers who are on the roads illegally. The money from fines now goes straight to the Treasury. (Local authorities were once allowed to keep it) Originally when cameras were first introduced in Britain they were used with honest intentions and erected at genuine accident black spots. But when the money started rolling in from drivers caught by these new devices the authorities realised how much money can be made if they keep on planting new cameras. If it really wasn’t about the money then why have they focused so hard on an offence that causes just 5% of accidents and have done proportionally very little in preventing the other 95% causes of accidents? http://www.speedcameras.org In favour of road safety, not revenue Further to this opening argument.... The PACTS reply (and the pilot study and all their other quoted analyses) is based on a gross misuse of the figures in Highways Economic Note #1 (HEN1), which gives estimates for costs associated with a road fatality, serious injury, etc and also the value of preventing a fatality (VPF). The Costs are the true costs to the county of an incident (emergency services, hospital, repairs to roads, etc.), typically up to £10,000 (for the worst case, a serious injury). The report makes it clear that VPF includes amounts for pain, grief, loss of earnings, etc. (totalling around £1.5M for a fatality) and explains that VPF cannot be equated to costs. Any use of VPF to show return on investment is bogus and potentially fraudulent. The values assigned to pain, grief, etc are hypothetical amounts that someone might be prepared to pay to bring their loved one back, and are to be used to compare alternative road schemes. Those values do not exist and would never appear on a balance sheet. To get £58M "cost saving" from two years of "280 lives saved", PACTS are using an average figure of about £100,000 as the costs of a fatality/serious-injury/minor-injury. This is a blatant misrepresentation of official government figures by a governemnt body. Further, most of the 280 reduction in KSI per year at camera sites is due to the statistical phenomenon "regression to the mean", in other words those 280 accidents would probably not have happened anyway, regardless of cameras. It is a fanciful number and bears no relation to reality (ask yourself how any camera can save a life!). So, with a massive reduction in costs per death/injury and a massive reduction in the number of "lives saved by cameras", the return on investment argument is exposed as totally bogus. I believe the "return on investment" in terms of safety/casualties is less than 5% per annum. I am currently pursuing this issue with the Head of Scrutiny with my local County Council, who have been using the same tricks. Bripe - an advanced driver and safety professional