Observations on speed

How appropriate it is that the AA's new road atlases should give away the location of all Britain's speed cameras, as the body was founded exactly a century ago with the aim of organising platoons to warn motorists of police speed traps. Speed cameras have long been disliked for catching drivers unawares. In 2001, the Sun successfully campaigned for them to be painted yellow, and to be clearly visible rather than hidden behind trees or signs.

The same attitude informs those drivers who helpfully flash their lights to alert other motorists to the speed cameras they have just passed.

The main objection to the speed camera is its mechanical stupidity. It simply refuses to exercise discretion and common sense. Fine, upstanding citizens who have been driving a few miles above the speed limit on deserted roads in the middle of the night find themselves collared alongside the worst kind of boy racer.

These supposedly "trivial" breaches of speed limits have not always been seen as victimless crimes. In the early years of motoring, the aristocratic road hog, immortalised as Mr Toad in The Wind in the Willows, was a common hate figure. It was when motoring became a middle-class hobby in the inter-war period that opinion shifted. Local magistrates, previously likely to be members of the horsy set and thus biased against cars, acquired these newfangled contraptions themselves and found their attitudes towards errant motorists mellowing accordingly.

As the historian Sean O'Connell shows in his book The Car in British Society, British traffic law began to rely on the motorist's sense of fair play rather than punitive legislation. Introducing the Highway Code in 1931, the then minister of transport, Herbert Morrison, said it worked on the principle that "it is just as ungentlemanly to be discourteous or to play the fool on the king's highway as it would be for a man to push his wife off her chair at the Sunday tea table and grab two pieces of cake".

The increasingly powerful motoring lobby promoted the idea that there was no single, unsafe speed - it depended on the location, the road conditions and the individual driver's competence, and so it was unfair to insist on a universal limit. Governments appealed to the motorist's good sense and civic duty, accepting the existence of a semi-official speed limit a few miles per hour above the legal one. In the 1930s, motoring groups started to criticise police speed traps as unsportsmanlike, "un-English", and a misallocation of scarce resources. An Autocar correspondent complained in 1937 that "luxurious mobile police limousines" were ensnaring speeding motorists when they "might profitably be employed in their proper duty, which I maintain is to protect property".

A 1939 government committee on road safety concluded that the obsession with restricting speed was downright dangerous. In extended 30mph zones, drivers were "inclined to become sleepy and less alert and to watch the speedometer rather than the road". This same committee also recommended that magistrates should postpone the disqualification of offending drivers for 48 hours to "eliminate the quandary of the motorist who, having driven to court, finds himself disqualified from driving home"; thus it may not have been entirely impartial. The culpability of members of the respectable middle classes in many road accidents prevented more legal coercion of the motorist.

The Tories attack speed cameras as evidence of new Labour's recent "war on the motorist" - an unhappy alliance of the nanny state, stealth taxation and cutting-edge technology. In fact, all the myths that inform the opposition to speed cameras - that they infringe civil liberties, cause accidents, persecute the law-abiding and sneakily catch drivers unawares - were in place before the Second World War.

As their inconvenience to individuals is obvious but their social benefits are diffuse and debatable, speed cameras turn us all into traffic engineering experts. Motorists go slow on the M4 to protest against them. The petrolheads on Top Gear see them as an attack on the inalienable rights of freeborn Englishmen. And those renowned road safety specialists, Richard and Judy, warn in the Daily Express that they can cause accidents by forcing drivers to brake sharply. The alternative argument - that, in the interests of public safety, drivers should observe speed limits regardless of the presence of cameras - is less often entertained.

Joe Moran lectures at Liverpool John Moores University

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