I found this entertaining.

http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2007/12/ ... itish.html

Lol, I've seen loads like that - it's because they are speed cameras. The thing is, the people burning them are the people that speed.

Eitherway, I think speed cameras are a good idea, I think the fines they generate aren't.

It shouldn't be fines, you should just loose your licence if you get caught at it 3 times.

Bah, we have red light cameras in my town - they suck. Here is the big thing that pisses me off. The police ticket the person the car is titled to instead of the person actually running the red light. My car is not titled to me, so when I allegedly received a ticket for running the red light it did not go to me but to someone else. They were not happy and I could not even take it to court to fight since it was not really mt offense. That to me is bullshit.

Belgium is full of speeding cameras and red light cameras. Since i'm a 'defensive' driver and normally never speed (too much) or drive through red lights i don't think it's such a bad thing. In general of course, since there are always weird situations in traffic where good drivers get caught by surprise. And fines aren't exactly low here.

Ideally they should put a camera under my car though, so i can register all offenders that really go over the limit.

Less cameras and stuff, more police cars in civilian colours.

I'm for a larger police presence over all these stupid cameras. A camera isn't going to keep me from getting shot by some psychotic driver but a police car two lanes over probably will. A camera won't keep some guy from running into me and then driving off. Bleh. Surveillance isn't the answer, imo.

Surveillance is a necessary evil, I feel. However, I agree, more police would be better, but the way the UK works, they'd hike up tax another .5%

heh...yea. I'd rather cut our foreign aid and stick it into police funds. But I'm a bastard like that. :p

Yep, thats stupid, its similar here. It IS addressed tot he person who was driving... but if you're caught on camera rather than by a cop in person, its mailed to the house your car was registered at and all you have to say is "i wasn't driving it". As long as they can't prove it was you (and lets face it, the quality on those cameras is terrible), you get away with it.

But you wont get away from your pissed off friend. Well you can get away once coz he'll never lend you the car again. In someway i agree to this method because either way you get penalized, either directly or remotly by pissing off the car owner.

When it comes down to the fact the car owner is a company, well they dont have to prove you were driving, they will just take away the car. I'm not sure how it works if the car is on a lease (its owned by a finance company you pay monthly) but im sure its in the contract somewhere.

And when it comes to fining a company the penalty will probably be higher so they will make sure this issue is in the work contract and you take full responsibility for traffic fines.

Keep in mind that someone always knows who is currently using the car. Sooner or later someone will come asking for the fine money.

hah...you have a high opinion of law enforcement.

In my experience, if you're a company, you get away with anything. A company has money and pays employees that probably work in the city. You don't want to piss off the company so it takes away its jobs and revenue, so you let it get away with basically everything short of murder or felonies.

A case in point are the drought watering laws. I'm in Texas and we get droughts regularly. To help make sure we don't run out of drinking water there are limitations on watering... you can only water on X day(s) between x hours. Also if there is water runoff longer than x feet, you can get fined. You also get fined if you water outside of the designated time periods. They're bastards when it comes to people doing it, too.

However, while I'm watching my grass die, I can drive to work and there are companies watering the pavement, outside of watering hours, creating huge puddles that just evaporate in the sun. And it happens every day for months, so I kind of doubt they're being fined.

Kind of a long post, my bad. It just irritates me how we're all treated so differently in a land of equality.

Don't even get me started on stuff like that. Seems if you do something small, like a speeding ticket, you're the biggest crook of them all. Want to murder someone? Feel free, we'll only punish you for a couple of years then let you out on "good behaviour" complete with new identity so no one has a go at you.

I'm sure I've posted about this before but when my mum was working at driffield post office, she had a nasty run of 4 crooked employees. First was the subpostmaster/mistress. They stole some stupid amount of money (we know they bought a new sporty ferrari, a new house and went on a 2 week balloon flight over kenya); when finally caught they had 6 months community service. That's it. They didn't even have to pay the money back. Then the temporary postmistress that took over from them also stole a small amount of money; she just lost her job. Then one of the counter staff was defrauding the country out of benefits along with her mother; not sure what happened with them.

Then the post office got fed up with all this stealing and changed the systems so it would be much, much harder to get anything without them realising. Basically consisting of constantly being connected to their database and having to record where every little bit of money went; still possible to get round it but much harder to. Somehow the new postmaster got £21,000. He owned two post offices, it took them a year to find out he was doing it and then he got away with only having to give up one post office (ours) because he claimed it was only stolen to help the other post office stay afloat. He also had to declare himself bankrupt but got to keep the other post office because it was registered in his wifes name, even though he ran it.

But we were discussing about speeding tickets, where did all this murder stuff pop up.

All im saying if you are important enough for the company they might let it slide but if you are just another person in statistics then they will probably conjure up some penalty for you.

I got my license in 2003 and i have 3 violations and 2 parking tickets. Basically dont break the law, there are enough idiots for that, so save your fellow man by obeying traffic regulations.

it popped up from satis' comment that the small guy gets penalised more than the big guy (individual/company) and it to me relates the same way to small thief/big murderer. its' all injustice either way. Justice seems to just be a fantasy

Yea, justice is BS unless it comes out of the barrel of a gun!

WOO!!!

Anyway, not really. Fairness is certainly rare. I try to be fair when I can. But I don't trust on government to do the right thing. In fact, I'm a bit surprised when they do the right thing.

err, anyway... yea, surveillance sucks! :p