What bad roo's been doing
Cameras Catch Speeding Britons and Lots of Grief
Mark Chilvers for The New York Times
This speed camera in Kelvedon Hatch, England, has been vandalized three times in the last year. Fireproof casing was added in the latest repairs.
KELVEDON HATCH, England, Oct. 24 — To drive in Britain is to measure out your trip in speed cameras. As inevitable as road signs and as implacable as the meanest state trooper, they lurk everywhere, the government’s main weapon against impatient drivers.
Drivers in Brentwood, which encompasses Kelvedon Hatch, say speed cameras are money traps.
It is a shame that so many people hate them.
Among the ways that motorists have made this clear: spraying the cameras with paint; knocking them over; covering them in festive wrapping paper and garbage bags; digging them up; shooting, hammering and firebombing them; festooning them with burning tires; and filling their casings with self-expanding insulation foam that, when activated, blows them apart.
Visual examples can be seen on the Web site of a vigilante group called Motorists Against Detection, which displays color photographs of smashed, defaced and burned-out cameras — pornography for the anti-camera movement.
In a nation that is estimated to have four million surveillance cameras — the most per capita in the world, civil liberties groups say — there are currently as many as 6,000 spots for speed cameras, in the country and in the city, on highways, urban arteries, suburban streets and rural lanes.
“Speed cameras can’t detect tailgating, bad driving, drink driving or drug driving,” said a spokesman for the group, explaining his objections. An occasional contributor to British radio debates about traffic regulations, he uses the name Captain Gatso — after the most common form of speed camera — because, he says, he wants to avoid arrest.
The government does not keep figures on camera vandalism, so it is impossible to confirm Captain Gatso’s claim that the group, known as M.A.D., has attacked more than 1,000 cameras, or that its members are “grown-up people, with normal jobs, who are cheesed off,” rather than hooligans engaging in “willy-nilly childish vandalism.”
But if there is a battle between motorists and speed cameras, the cameras are surely winning.
In this little hamlet in Brentwood, about an hour northeast of London, one particularly reviled camera — installed to catch people exceeding the 40 m.p.h. speed limit on a busy suburban road — has been set on fire three times in the past year, and three times it has been repaired.
Now, about $66,000 later, it is back on the job again, new and improved, swathed in protective fireproof housing. “Touch wood, we haven’t had any incidents since,” said Rachel Whitelock, liaison for the Essex Safety Camera Partnership, which installs and maintains the county’s camera sites: 96 stationary spots; 160 stretches of road policed by cameras whose locations change; and 26 traffic light cameras for red lights.
The government says the cameras have been a resounding success, reducing speed by an average of 2.2 miles per hour at speed-camera sites, reducing the numbers of people speeding at the sites by 31 percent and reducing by 42 percent the number of people killed or seriously injured at the sites. In public opinion surveys, they point out, a majority of Britons say they support having cameras on the roads. But theory is one thing; practice is another. People like to drive fast, and they bridle at being told what to do. About two million are caught by the speed cameras a year, generating more than $200 million in fines.
“It’s incredibly difficult to get to people to come to terms with slowing down here,” said Francis Ashton, the road safety manager for the city of Nottingham. “In the States, you have much slower speed limits, and there’s more of a culture of sticking to the speed limit.”
The cameras detect cars that exceed the speed limit, often with radar technology, and take flash photographs of the license plates so a ticket can be issued. A speeding offense adds three points to a driver’s license. Because drivers who amass 12 points in three years face six-month driving bans, people go to enormous lengths to avoid detection.
In a recent case, 28-year-old Craig Moore, an engineer from South Yorkshire, ran into trouble when, in the words of a spokesman for the Greater Manchester Police, “instead of just accepting that he had been caught traveling above the speed limit, Moore decided to blow the camera apart.”
Using thermite, a pyrotechnic substance often used in underwater welding, Mr. Moore succeeded in wrecking the camera, but its hard drive survived — along with videotape of his van driving toward it and then driving away, as the picture dissolved in a cloud of fiery sparks. He was sentenced to four months in jail.
In another case, John Hopwood, a motorist from Stockport who was caught speeding twice in one trip by two different cameras, tried to avert the second ticket by taking a 40 m.p.h. sign from a road in Manchester and reinstalling it on a 30 m.p.h. road in Rochdale, 10 miles away. He was caught and sentenced to 56 days in jail.
Even if they agree that speed limits are necessary, many motorists resent having to obey them all the time. They say they hate being constantly on the lookout for cameras and accuse the government of treating them like cash machines.
“It’s just a road tax,” said Ian Murray, a sales clerk at an army-navy surplus store in Kelvedon Hatch. He understands the need for cameras in residential areas, he said, but feels aggrieved when he sees them on the highway, where the national speed limit is 70 m.p.h. but where the fast lane generally clips along at 80 m.p.h. or higher.
“What happens is you see the speed camera, and you put on your anchor and drop your speed, and then when you get past it you speed up again,” Mr. Murray said. Also, he said, the cameras cause people to brake suddenly, endangering themselves and the people behind them.
Paul Smith, head of an anti-camera group called the Safe Speed Road Safety Campaign, said that drivers spent so much time scouring the roadside for cameras that they forget to pay attention to the road.
“We’ve got a nation of people who have one eye looking out for the next speed camera, another looking for a speed limit sign and another looking at the speedometer — which is a bit of a shame, when you only have two eyes,” he said.
Technology has moved on considerably since the 1990s, when the first speed cameras were installed in Britain. Now, in addition to the standard cameras that photograph the speeding cars’ license plates, there are cameras that can accurately photograph drivers’ faces — so that they cannot claim someone else was driving at the time — and cameras that work in teams, calculating average speeds along a stretch of road.
Of course, for every ingenious new camera, there is an ingenious new camera-thwarting device. These include constantly-updating G.P.S. equipment that alerts drivers to camera locations and a special material that, when sprayed on a license plate, is said to make it impervious to flash photographs.
There are also the low-tech methods of covering a license plate with mud or altering its letters with black electrical tape.
But in the end, the effort is not worth it, said Vincent Yearley, a spokesman for the Institute of Advanced Motorists, a road-safety organization.
“A lot of drivers feel alienated by speed cameras,” Mr. Yearley said. “But the best way to deal with a speed camera is simply to comply with the law, and not to set fire to it.”
