You're nicked

**** Rant warning. Four star rant ahead. ****

Blame it on Sandra, she set me off with her wise words about people's expectations.

Many years ago, when I was still living in Aberdeen, I used to travel regularly down to my parents farm in Fife to help out at weekends. On the Forfar bypass, at the junction for Glamis, as the road drops down a nice long hill in a gentle arc that encourages a little overzealous use of the right foot, some enterprising fellow from the local council or the Highways Agency decided to run an experiment. They put a traffic monitoring camera on the top of a large pole and pointed it at the junction. Then they slapped two huge red signs on the roadside with 'Experimental Camera Detection System' on them.

I soon learned to treat that otherwise perfectly safe, straight, wide piece of road with extreme caution. I lost count of the number of times I'd be overtaken by someone pushing ninety as they came down the hill, only for them to pull back into the nearside lane in front of me and slam on their brakes as they saw the sign.

The stupid thing about it was that the camera didn't detect speed. It was there to monitor the junction because the council couldn't afford to upgrade it when they turned the main road into a dual carriageway. Instead of slip-roads and a nice wide waiting zone in the central reservation, cars would back up in the fast lane as they waited to turn right (if you're reading this outside of Japan, Australia, New Zealand and the UK, imagine I said 'turn left' there.) The road didn't have enough traffic to warrant an expensive upgrade, at least in the minds of the bean-counters, so the camera was there to monitor things and apportion blame when something did go wrong.

But people have this strange attitude towards speed in their cars. It's all right, as long as you don't get caught or cause an accident. Ummm... OK.

I have been caught speeding. Just once so far*, in twenty years of licensed motoring. That's not to say that I don't break the limit from time to time. I may be good, but I'm not that good. The incident occurred in Aberdeen in 1992. I was driving through Westhill, heading back to the city, coming down a hill with the radio on and my mind in neutral. When the policeman flagged me down, I assumed that there was an accident up ahead or something. I stopped, wound down the window. He leant down and asked: 'Do you know what speed you were driving at sir?' My heart dropped. I hadn't a clue. 'Umm, about forty, I think.' 'And do you know what the speed limit is here?' Again, I really didn't know. 'Err... Forty?'

It turned out I was doing 47, and the speed limit was 30.

I got three points on my licence and a thirty-two pound fine. The nice policeman also gave me a useful little leaflet which explained in simple terms what the various speed limits were in the UK. I should have known - it's a requirement of the driving test after all - but it appeared that I didn't.

What shook me about the whole incident, far more than the embarrassment of being done for speeding, was the fact that I neither knew how fast I should have been driving, nor how fast I actually was. I was just mindlessly going with the flow. Ever since then I've been very conscious both of how fast I'm going and how fast I should be going. Ignorance is not an excuse. When I get done again, it will be because I have chosen to break the limit.

Sadly, from my extensive driving experience, it would seem that most motorists don't share the same view. It irritates the hell out of me when the motorway slows to a crawl because there's a police car doing fifty and no-one will overtake it. What? Do you honestly think the police are going to book you for doing seventy when the limit is seventy? Are you so frightened of the law that you won't overtake just in case the policeman decides he doesn't like you? Do you really not know what the speed limit is and have just been driving at the same speed as everyone else - following the herd? The whole reason he's doing fifty and not seventy is so that he doesn't cause a massive tailback of cars that want to, but can't legally, overtake him.

Mind you, it's unusual to see a traffic policeman these days. Which brings me back to cameras.

I think I'm right in saying that there are some fifty thousand traffic cameras in the UK. That's speed and red light cameras. That may be wrong, because I can't seem to find the exact data, but there are a lot. Our politicians, and some (but not all) police forces trot out the idea that they are there for safety reason, and I guess I can accept that with red light cameras - but only if every traffic light in the country has a camera on it. Speed cameras however, far from promoting safer driving, merely turn idiots into dangerous idiots, slamming their foot on the brake as soon as they see the little yellow box, with scant regard for the car they've just overtaken.

The motoring press in the UK has been up in arms about cameras for years now, and one success it had early on was in convincing the government that speed cameras should be easily seen. That way, they argued, they would have the desired effect of slowing down traffic. Almost overnight, the anonymous grey boxes turned yellow and stripy, and the random braking idiots multiplied tenfold.

In Holland, they hide their cameras in wheelie bins, hedges, street furniture, anything to disguise the fact that they are there. To my mind this is a much better system. If you don't know that the camera is there, you're not going to suddenly brake and cause an accident. But neither are you going to slow down - so the road safety issue, putting the cameras at accident black spots and so on, rather falls down as well.

That's the problem with speed cameras. Sure, you can fine the speeder, take points off his licence, take his licence away altogether. But not there and then. He's still out there driving like a maniac until the court summons comes through the post.

There is now a whole industry in the UK geared around locating speed cameras and letting motorists know where they are. All this year's road atlases have permanent camera locations marked in them and you can subscribe to GPS based navigation systems that are regularly updated with the locations of mobile cameras as well. And still the press moan about the unfairness of the system. It is a favourite topic of conversation down the pub, a sign of how hard-done we are. Tell your friends about how you got gatsoed and you'll hear only expressions of sympathy.

But hang on. If you set off a speed camera, that means you're going faster than the speed limit. That means you're breaking the law. Try telling your friends that you were taken to task for punching an old lady, or breaking a child's arm, and they won't be so understanding. But that's exactly what you could end up doing with your car.

And that's the nub of it. We hate speed cameras because they are emotionless and unfailing. They catch us when we break the law. But instead of moaning about it, instead of ignoring a law 'because everyone does', we should be trying to get the law changed - that's how it's meant to work in a democracy. Want to drive at 80, 90, 100 on the motorway? Then get a petition going and lobby parliament (good luck, by the way.) Want to be able to do fifty past a school during break time? Great - if you can get the majority of society to agree with you, then that's just fine. And if you can't be bothered, then don't moan to me when you get fined for breaking the law.

Of course, speed cameras are just a cynical attempt to cut the costs of proper policing whilst raising a bit of extra revenue for a government that already wastes far too much of our money. They don't really add much to road safety, but they're cheaper to run than police officers, and politicians can always claim that they are doing their bit for the public good by supporting them. And we do need something to slow down the idiots. I wish people would have more respect when they drive, and understand the responsibility that they have piloting anything up to two tons of metal at high speeds. Sadly, the simple truth is that most people drive badly and get away with it time after time. And the more you get away with it, the more it becomes OK to get away with it. We come to regard driving badly as our right, we expect to be able to do it, although we get very annoyed with other people when they do it too.

In Spain, if I've got my facts right, they have a different approach to speed cameras. On the approach to towns and villages they connect them to traffic lights, so that if you speed, the lights a few hundred yards up the road turn red. Most people still won't run a red light (though it remains to be seen how long that lasts), and so are forced to slow down. It's a simple system that slows down the traffic in towns, where inappropriate speed can do the most damage, and doesn't penalise otherwise generally law-abiding citizens.

In Aberystwyth, just outside the police station as it happens, there is a speed camera where the 40 zone ends and the limit drops to 30. All it does if you are going too fast is flash up a sign telling you to slow down. It's very effective at a point where the road coming into town hits a more densely populated area and where people habitually carried on at 40 in the past, as the road itself hadn't changed.

Other methods work to slow traffic down - and I don't mean crass things like speed humps. There is a whole science of road design and traffic management. Unfortunately most of these measures cost money. Like live, thinking traffic police cost money.

Our wise government can always think of better things than intelligent road design to spend our money on. And we'd really rather accept the occasional fatal accident than dig deeper into our pockets.

3,508 fatal accidents in the UK in 2003. But hey, it won't happen to me.



* OK, twice. I got nicked in Australia once, doing 100 kph on the road from Dubbo to Armidale. When the policeman asked me why I hadn't slowed down going through a township I looked at him in bewilderment and said: 'What township?' One house, two dogs and a fifty kilometre limit for half a mile, apparently. It cost me almost ninety quid, but I got away without points.