New CCTV Auto Fines Being Trialed Exposes Graham Hill

Tuesday, 11. March 2014

A Gatso speed camera

A Gatso speed camera (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sometimes you get the feeling of déjà vu when you read something in a magazine and think to yourself, here we go again! Years ago, before most of the bloody things were turned off, local authorities were accused of putting up speed cameras to simply raise money, not to save lives.

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They would hide them behind trees or camouflage them so that you didn’t stand an earthly of seeing them. So as you raced past the gates of a school, you weren’t slowed down, as was supposed to be the intention, instead you simply received a fixed penalty notice in the post.

As a result the local authorities were forced to paint the Gatso’s yellow so that motorists could see them and slow down to prove that the point was safety not money making. So I was surprised to see that London council, Redbridge, is trialling automated CCTV cameras to capture motorists straddling yellow boxes and making illegal turns in order to issue automatic fines.

At the moment fines can only be issued when a camera operator views the offence either live or on a recording. The new system uses number plate recognition to identify the driver then issues fines automatically via the computer system. The system has already been introduced by some local authorities to capture drivers illegally driving in bus lanes.

However this latest move has caused the AA and RAC concern who believe that the objective may be money raising rather than deter bad driver habits. Time will tell. By Graham Hill

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