The Role of Cameras in Road Safety

(a)    People as the Basic Problem

The Queensland Police website makes 3 statements on the page for “Camera Detected Offences” at :–

https://www.police.qld.gov.au/programs/roadSafety/infringement/default.htm

1.    The Camera Detected Offence Program is a road safety initiative aiming to reduce the road trauma on Queensland roads.

2.    Speed and red light offences are recognised as life endangering and are a major cause of road accidents. Aside from the tragedy of road deaths, road crashes place a high cost on the community each year through hospital and health care costs, lost productivity in the workplace and the use of emergency services.

3.    Speeding reduces reaction time and distance which increases the likelihood of road crashes involving other road users.

I’m sure that nobody would dispute the connection between speed and incidence of collisions involving other vehicles (including bicycles) and/or pedestrians. Any loss of life on any road is a tragedy and, accordingly, speed limits need to be set and all drivers must have enough personal discipline to abide by those limits.  But do all drivers always abide by those limits?

Clearly not – hence there is a need for enforcement by means of penalties that will have a severe impact on the offender. This is not to say that bad things won’t happen while abiding by a speed limit, or any other rule of law. There is much more than driver education and discipline – there must be dedication to the concept of “defensive driving”, which seeks to minimise the risk of collision with all other road users; this requires drivers of ALL kinds of vehicles to keep their mind on the primary job of driving their vehicles safely.

Does that happen? No, it does not and the situation seems to get worse as more and more vehicles come onto our roads. Discipline has, it seems, gone out the window and it’s almost as if drivers must constantly try to prove how much better they are – and how much more they deserve to be on the road – than those few who abide by speed limits. As one who earns a living as a driver, I see it all the time – ill-discipline and even ill-temper, in control of vehicles that, unfortunately, don’t seem to be pulled up by the Highway Patrol often enough to improve road safety for everyone else.

How can road safety be improved in a way that is fair and reasonable yet deals as harshly as possible with those who have no regard for other road users? If you accept those statements above, extracted from the Queensland Police website, you might think they’re on the right track.  But are they?

(b)    The Cases Against Me

To date, I have been on the receiving end of a Traffic Infringement Notice on three (3) occasions – once in 2013, once in 2014 and once already in 2015 (as of March 2015, anyway).  In each case, the notice of fine and demerit point turned up in the mail anywhere from 3 weeks to 2 months after the offence.  I do not dispute the evidence of my breach of the law but merely want to know what has happened to me in the time between these offences and receipt of the fine.

Was I involved in a collision with another vehicle? No.
Was I involved in a collision with a pedestrian? No.
So… where is the evidence to support the very first statement on the Queensland Police website? How was road safety improved by these fines?

How were my offences detected?

Well, the first one certainly had me dead to rights because, as soon as I received the notice, I knew what I’d been doing at the time of the offence and, indeed, I had been rash enough to boldly blow through a 60 KMH sign at a speed just a bit under 70 KMH.  The camera that caught me was this one :–

Can you see it? Maybe the next photo will give you a better idea of it.

There it is, atop a pole used to support a street light.

Can anyone say that it is not a hidden camera? I had been under the impression that the Police are legally prevented from hiding themselves but, clearly, the same requirement does not apply to the cameras they use.

The second occasion was pretty much like this :–

I’d seen it as I turned from a side street to the highway and my initial reaction was that I was okay because my speed was just under 50 KMH in a 60 KMH zone. But then it dawned on me that I was in an active School Zone so the speed limit was 40 KMH! I was pretty sure that I was history for that one and, indeed, the fine duly turned up in the mail.

The most recent fine was, to my way of thinking, the most dastardly of them all, because the cop was concealed like this :–

He was shielded by thick vegetation on a median strip, such that traffic heading north along the highway could not see him at all though he was clearly visible to traffic heading south. He was aiming the “gun” at the rear of vehicles heading north, as they passed by his hiding spot.  So, yes, I guess I’ve always been wrong about cops not being allowed to hide from us.

While I will always accept the evidence that I broke the law, I will never accept that the fine had any immediate, positive or negative effect on my driving, or the safety of other road users. The fact remains that, by the time I received the fine, I had still not been involved in any sort of collision and, therefore, nobody had died or been injured by me. So where is road safety in all of this?

(c)    The Case for Road Safety

The case for “road safety” might be enhanced if the Police had a more prominent presence on the road and pulled over motorists who had broken the law.  It might then be argued that the involvement of the Police in stopping the motorist had physically prevented a collision later on. Of course, if the offending motorist was to subsequently be involved in a collision, the argument point would be moot!

I’m sure that every driver has seen systems such as this, used to detect those who exceed a speed limit, or run through a red light :–

People who run a red light are, without doubt, at greater risk of causing a collision that might well involve collateral damage to property as well as damage to other vehicles, as well as death for one or more people. I’ve seen people inadvertently run a red light because they saw the green light at the NEXT intersection before seeing the red light at THIS intersection. I’ve seen the red light camera flash repeatedly for a vehicle that had stopped over the line because the light turned yellow and red before the vehicle to make a turn.

Thus, there can be as many reasons why a red light camera does not contribute to road safety – most especially in cases where 2 or more intersections ahead are controlled by traffic lights that operate on different phases to each other. This is a problem which remains unaddressed so can we also say that the State and local level governments are also contributing hazards to road safety?

The next system is widely known as “flash for cash”. A vehicle by the roadside, unattended, with signs front and back – albeit not especially conspicuous in size, colour or position. The camera flashes and the government gains extra revenue without having to refer to it as a TAX.

So I must ask again, where is the case for road safety when the only offence is a speed that exceeds a nominal limit? Have you seen a sign similar to this one :–

Is this really the way to improve road safety, or are we just paying an undeclared tax for breaking a law? I think the two are very different, without any evidence of the offending driver being involved in a collision due to his/her use of a speed in excess of a nominal limit.

Is it the case that the cameras are really a very high tech way to improve safety, or have the cops finally learned all the lessons that Ned Kelly could teach them?

Alternatively, could these cameras possibly be a tax by another name? A way to keep greedily grabbing money from hard working slobs by those who don't actually have to perform any real work inside a government bureaucracy?