by Melanie Denyer

Created on: December 13, 2008

Those little yellow boxes at the side of the road are a familiar sight to most UK drivers, and a far cry from the old days of coppers pointing radar guns from the roadside. Indeed, while there are still mobile camera units in the UK, most of them are placed in clearly-marked vehicles on bridges over motorways and dual carriageways, and the old camaraderie of flashing a warning to oncoming traffic is long past.

And so we have speed cameras or, as the government would have it, safety cameras. The theory is that, by placing a safety camera in an accident blackspot, drivers are encouraged/forced to observe the speed limit and accidents are thus reduced, lives saved, the populace as a whole better off. The practice is that, while many blackspots do now sport their own Gatso camera, there are also plenty of them in places where there is no apparent blackspot to police. In some cases, notably the A2 out of London towards Kent - a perfectly good dual carriageway which was previously at the national speed limit of 70 miles per hour - the speed limit was lowered to 50mph and a series of speed cameras were put in.

The A2 is a shining example of how static speed cameras are no deterrent whatsoever. A gentle drive down there will reveal that many drivers tootle along well above the clearly-signposted speed limit and simply slam on the anchors when they approach the little yellow box. They'll do this for every camera on their way out of London. The same behaviour repeats all across the country. All this acceleration and deceleration does is to make tempers worse for all road users. Those who speed and brake, speed and brake often take ridiculous risks to cut in and out and round law-abiding traffic in a bid to reduce their journey time. In the process, they annoy the law-abiding drivers who object to being tailgated, carved-up, tooted or subjected to all the usual hand signals. Tempers fray, concentration lapses and, before you know it, there's been a shunt - usually so minor (no injuries) it doesn't enter the road safety statistics that are supposedly being improved by the presence of the cameras.

Even if a driver does get flashed by the camera, there is no guarantee that they will either be fined or have their license endorsed. there are many web sites, some specialist, others merely forums on sites more generally designed for keen drivers, which give instructions on how to contest a speeding ticket. Ironically, it is the person who gets caught in a momentary lapse who is

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