Despite alarmist claims that turning off speed cameras would be detrimental to road safety initial figures indicate that the opposite is proving to be the case.
The Daily Mail reports:
There were 510 road deaths between July and September 2010, compared with 596 in the same period in 2009 – a fall of 14 per cent. The number killed or seriously injured fell by 5 per cent, from 7,115
to 6,740. But traffic volume fell by only 1.3 per cent.
This was in a period where a large number of cameras had already been axed. More have been axed since so it will be interesting to see if this welcome trend continues. The Daily Mail says more than half of Britain's 6,000 cameras are now switched off at any one time.