The battle between petrol heads and speed cameras has been ongoing since 1992, but there has been recent developments.

Thousands of drivers are having speeding fines and penalties cancelled as some faulty cameras have been triggering for cars that are not speeding.

National Highways, which really put the “Highway” in “highwayman”, operate England’s motorways and blame an “anomaly” in how variable speed limits interact with motorway signs.

What was actually happening, in turn, was a delay of about 10 seconds between the speed cameras and their relevant variable speed signs. So if you were driving on a road which has just been signalled as 60 miles per hour, the speed cameras could still be recording a speed limit of 50.

National Highways has admitted to 2,650 incidents of false speeding fines since 2021, but apparently, this issue has impacted 10% of England’s motorways and major A roads.

This raises a broader question: how can we trust these systems if they’re inaccurately identifying speeding offenders?

National Highways says it’s working with the police to ensure accurate activations and promises that nobody wrongly accused of speeding will be prosecuted. Police forces have also promised to stop issuing fines for faulty variable cameras until speeding offences can be guaranteed.

On the back of this, 36,000 individuals have had their speed awareness courses cancelled as a precaution while the issue is further investigated, which is far more than the 2,650 speeding incidents National Highways is admitting to.

Now, this is obviously a concern that needs to be resolved, as you can’t accuse and penalise people for speeding if they’re sticking to the speed limit.

But I will say that if something like this happened in France, they would have destroyed at least 60% of the speed cameras in use, just as they did during the fuel tax protests between 2018 and 2019.

“SPECs – monitoring average traffic speed through roadworks – M4” by Rockman of Zymurgy is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

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dan, boland, dan boland, cars, speed camera, motorway, a road, major road, fines, penalties, miles per hour, mph, national highway, highwayman, france, protest, revolution, scrap speed cameras, destroy