The poll of 1000 motorists found that there is still a lot of negative opinion about the deployment of speed cameras and their locations. In general people thought that speed cameras were beneficial in terms of cutting road deaths.

The section of motorway between Luton and the M25 is due to close over three Sundays in the early hours to allow Hertfordshire Police to calibrate the cameras. This section of motorway will be controlled by sensors in the road to measure speed and traffic flow to calculate the best speed to keep traffic moving.

TomTom releases the anonymous data to Government agencies for the purposes of road safety planning and identifying congestion hot-spots. The data doesn’t contain any identifying information about individual drivers. The Netherlands Police have also been using the data to locate stretches of road where motorists regularly exceed the speed limit to place speed cameras. A TomTom statement explains that the company will prevent that type of use of their data in the future and reassured customers that their privacy has not been compromised.

This new proposals will come into force in April 2011 and are designed to provide taxpayer’s with the right information about how their money is being utilised at the local authority level and how effective speed cameras are. Information will include the reduction of casualty rates, average vehicle speeds and the split between offenders who are fined and those that are offered driver training.

The scheme is a joint venture between the Police and the residents in the village where villagers will be allowed to use speed detection equipment to track the speed of vehicles through the village. Details of speeding cars will then be passed on to the police who will issue warning letters to the offending motorists. The idea is not based on enforcement, but education.

The charity has a hotline number for residents in Swindon to call if they have concerns about the effect that switching off speed cameras has had on their safety. Criticism has been made toward the council in that no statistical information on the effect of switching off cameras has been researched. The view that it has had no detrimental effect on road safety is “unscientific” and based on “no academic evaluation”. Oxfordshire have recently switched off their speed cameras due to cuts in Government funding.

The camera is located on the southbound side of a dual carriageway in Holes Bay, Poole. Dorset Speed obtained the figures after complaining to the Information Commissioner. In the four months after the camera started operation, it totalled 7,373 NIP enforcements, resulting in around £108,000 in fines per month, if the rate were to be sustained over a year the total amount in fines would total £1.3 million, a figure that Dorset Speed says “dwarfs the counts of most other cameras”. The junction at which the camera is placed has had only one serious injury since 1999.

There are guidelines set down that by each police force that state whether a camera be it fixed or mobile, should be marked, signed or in a specific position. These however are guidelines and policies set by each individual police force and not law. When a Police force wants to plough the money received from speed cameras back into road safety schemes (sometimes referred to as the netting off scheme) then they are required to follow guidelines but again this isn’t law. If you have been caught speeding and feel that the Police didn’t conform to requirements then you are entitled to complain to the Safety Camera Partnership but using this as a defence in court will not stand up.