Using something called thermite, a pyrotechnic substance often used in underwater welding, Moore succeeded in wrecking the camera, but unfortunately for him, 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 instance, John Hopwood, a motorist from Stockport who was caught speeding twice in one trip by two different cameras, saw the camera flashes, then tried to avert the second ticket by taking a 64kph sign from a road in Manchester and reinstalling it on a lamppost on a 48kph road in Rochdale, 16km 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 roadside 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 113kph, but where the fast lane generally clips along at 128kph 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,” 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 spend 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.
Camera 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 the speeding took place — 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 global positioning system equipment that alerts drivers to speed 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 and 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,” 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.”
RSS