RiDE INVESTIGATES
Police forces around the UK could be ramping up the number of unmarked camera vans
FOR JUST OVER a year, Northamptonshire Police’s Safer Roads Team have been using a stealthy, unmarked safety camera van alongside their fleet of fully marked vehicles to nab speeders at sites across the county.
After its first full year in use the van is now a permanent addition to the police’s arsenal – and other forces across the country are thinking of using one too.
Speed cameras have been a fact of life in the UK since 1991, but they really hit their stride at the turn of the millennium with the formation of so-called ‘safety camera partnerships’ that were able to retain the revenue from fines and plough it back into the project.
During that decade the emphasis started to shift from fixed sites – the yellow boxes, often referred to as ‘Gatsos’ even though they’re often from other brands, including Truvelo – towards mobile cameras, often in vans. One of the main reasons for this shift is that the ring-fenced funding of the safety camera partnerships was removed in 2007, leading to many fixed speed cameras around the country being turned off.
Northamptonshire is one of those areas. Its fixed speed cameras (apart from those on motorways) were deactivated more than a decade ago – although they remain in place as a deterrent – with the focus turning instead to mobile cameras that could be deployed as necessary to recognised speeding or accident hotspots.
But the idea of a discreet mobile speed camera is relatively unfamiliar. The arrival of speed cameras in 1991 was softened by the decision to paint them bright yellow and the convention has generally remained to keep cameras overt, even with the advent of mobile camera vans.
Similar impact
Evidence suggests that, when it comes to accident reduction, both overt and covert cameras have a similar effect. A 2016 meta-analysis of multiple studies into speed cameras around the world, co-funded by the College of Policing, found that “while both covert and overt cameras led to a reduction in speeding when compared to no cameras, there was no evidence that the effects differed between camera types”.
