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UK Blazes New Trails In Orwellian Speed Enforcement
by
Edward Niedermeyer
(IC: employee)
Published: April 20th, 2010
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the cameras enabled “number plate capture in all weather conditions, 24 hours a day”. It also referred to the system’s “low cost” and ease of installation.
The system could be used for “main road enforcement for congestion reduction and speed enforcement”, and could help to “eliminate rat-runs” and cut speeds outside schools, it added. It could also reduce the need for speed humps.
Britain’s Automobile Association calls the system “a natural evolution of the technology that is out there.” We call it creepy. Oh yeah, and cruelly ironic.
Edward Niedermeyer
More by Edward Niedermeyer
Published April 20th, 2010 8:35 PM
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I HAD always wanted to visit the UK. but a country that trains cameras on it's citizens all of the time and extorts money from already strapped motorists will not be getting any of my money.
So, the British are neurotics, for some strange reason overly concerned with traffic safety. Right? Wrong! It's fxcked up, dear TTAC, when you in reporting about UK traffic policy carelessly (or callously) omit the fact that the UK has been remarkably effective in reducing traffic deaths. Here's a quote from a book that was reviewed not once but twice, on this very blog (Traffic, by Tom Vanderbilt): "In the 1990s, the United Kingdom dropped its road fatalaties by 34 percent. The U.S. managed a 6.5 percent reduction. (...) Had the U.S. pulled off what the U.K. did, it is suggested, 10,000 fewer people would have been killed." If you want to paraphrase Nixon and say you don't give a shxt about dead people (or rather, formerly alive people), then that's your right -- but please be open about it, and don't try to have it both ways.
How does anyone drive fast, or even just above the speed limit, in UK at all? Between this and what I learn from watching Top Gear/5th gear, it seems like every inch of road there (except some backwater A/B roads) is monitored. And yet people there buy more sports cars and BMW's than anyone else in Europe. Are the tickets they receive relatively harmless compared to here?
Speed cameras in the UK do not reduce accidents , but they raise a lot of money for the government.Thankfully there is an election due in a few weeks , and the current government will get fired.Things can only get better.