The ACT Government predicts it will raise more than $2 million a year from speed cameras. This is a damning admission. It is not damning because it is evidence that speed cameras are mere revenue raisers. Rather it is damning because human stupidity is so predictable that the actuaries in Government can budget for $2 million worth of human foolishness every year.
The cameras need not revenue-raising. The test of that lies in the hands of the very people who are squealing loudest that they are revenue raising. All they have to do to prevent themselves being “”victim” of a “”revenue raising” exercise is not to speed. It is quite simple. Unlike rates, which are revenue raising, paying speeding fines is not a universal, compulsory level. Only people who break the law by speed have to pay them.
Indeed, speed cameras are the very opposite of revenue raisers in their intent. Rather they are expenditure savers. Speed is one of the prime causes of car accidents. To the extent speed cameras cause people to slow down, the number of accidents will fall and the public expenditure caused by the resultant injury and death will fall, as will the private expenditure in caused by the resultant injury to property.
It has also been proposed that the speed cameras be operated by officers from the Department of Urban Services. That should not raise any difficulty. It will free police for more important work.
There will always be a question of where and when the cameras are placed. There may well be a case for some speed limit reviews in Canberra, with the speed limit on some dual carriageway roads being raised and the speed in suburban streets reduced. But that is a separate issue.
The sad fact about Australia’s reduced road toll in the past 20 years is that most of it can be put down to coercion in the form of seat-belts, random breath-testing, radar, speed cameras, red-light cameras and the on-the-spot fine system. Good roads and better cars have helped, but by-and-large the increased safety caused by improvements in cars and roads would have be used up by people travelling more quickly but for the coercive measures. The coercive measures have increased the risk to drivers – the risk of a fine or loss of licence. This has been just as effective, indeed more effective, than hoping that drivers will see the risk to life and limb and therefore moderate their behaviour.
The slight loss of civil liberties in the case of driving is the unfortunate price we have to pay to curb the horrible consequences of bad driving. Every expansion of coercive measures on the road has been followed by a welcome drop in road injury and death.
Education and improvements in car and road design should continue. They are helpful, too. But on their own they are not enough to reduce the death and injury. Truce, Australia has gone from one of the worst countries in the developed world from road trauma, to one of the best. But still more than 1700 people are killed on Australian roads each year and 10 times that are injured. It is still far too many, given that nearly all can be put down to human error.
Far from decrying speed cameras, we should be welcoming them. We should welcome red-light cameras, too. And we should pray for the development of even better technologies to bring bad drivers into line. The double-yellow-line camera and the breath-test responsive ignition cannot be far off.
If they are seen as revenue raisers, too bad. Of more importance, they are trauma preventers and revenue reducers.