The late Dr Geoff Luxford CEng, MIMechE, BSc, PhD, was a chartered engineer with an appreciable understanding of speed measurement instrumentation

The Case Against Mobile Speed Cameras In Northamptonshire

In 2009 Dr Luxford wrote a paper called ‘The Case Against Mobile Speed Cameras In Northamptonshire’. It was subtitled: ‘It Is Time For Them And The Safety Camera Partnership To Go’

Geoff Luxford’s professional investigations brought him to the understanding that it is not speed that kills and injures people, but inexperience, lack of attention, reckless driving and poor judgement, in which speed cameras provide no effective help or solution.

The “speed kills” dogma, with its dependence on reducing and enforcing speed limits
with speed cameras, is a major impediment, he says, to further significant progress in road safety. As a result the rate of progress in reducing fatalities greatly slowed from about 1995, with the ever increasing dependence on speed cameras.

Dr Luxford was of thie view that it is not speed itself that kills and injures people, but collisions and impact. It well known that, in appropriate circumstances, it can be quite safe to travel at thousands of mph. Every day many thousands safely travel at hundreds of mph. The myth that “speed kills” seems to have been carried over from the Victorian days, when it was considered that travelling more than 20mph would kill you.

Obviously travelling too fast for the conditions, or with inappropriate consideration, can result in inadequate control and an accident, which may result in a collision and potential injury, or fatality. Hence it is important to discourage inappropriate speeding, but all too often that is not what the mobile speed cameras are used for and in practice it is not something speed cameras can enforce.

The Alternatives To Speed Cameras

Dr Luxford published another paper in 2010 in which he expressed in a few short paragraphs what reasonable people today recognise as eminently sensible.

Given that speeding (exceeding the speed limit) is only a minor contributory factor to accidents, he says, what we need is to focus attention on what, other than speeding, causes accidents and develop policies to help drivers avoid accidents, rather than just reducing speed

That our road safety philosophy has drifted so far away from his speaks volumes about how well it has been infiltrated by speed kills zealots.

A copy of his 2010 paper can be found here….