Beat the system
From The Sunday Times
By Rupert Steiner
October 31, 2003
Keep it clean: former
police officer Glyn Worsley believes that speed trap detectors, far
from encouraging speeding, promote safer driving and reduce accidents
A speed trap detector
can make you a better driver as well as save in fines.
The Mercedes SLK ambled through
the narrow Lancashire roads, its limiter set to the legal limit of
30mph, a tail of cars behind. At the first opportunity most drivers
roared past, some giving the finger, others hurling four-letter abuse,
their venom aimed squarely at the motorist who had delayed their daily
race to work.
Yet the man cruising in the
sports car was neither old-age pensioner nor lost German tourist.
It was Glyn Worsley, 43, a former Greater Manchester police officer
who has spent much of his life protecting the public from just such
road menaces.
Now retired from the police,
he helps drivers to keep their licences clean. Worsley works for the
Bolton-based firm Comtech, where he sells the Beltronics range of
radar detectors that warn drivers when they are approaching one of
Britain's 4,500 radar-triggered Gatso speed cameras. Such scanning
devices were outlawed under the Wireless Telegraphy Act 1949, but
a judgment by the Queen's Bench divisional court in January 1998 found
that the act did not preclude their use.
The former policeman believes
that speed limits should be raised, that speed cameras do not stop
bad driving, and that seven out of 10 motorists break the law by speeding
every day.
"I conducted a rough experiment
driving from my home in Golborne the eight miles to Bolton at 30mph
on the nose," he says. "I wanted to see how the other drivers
behaved.
"By keeping to the speed
limit you actually provoke and annoy other drivers. People pulled
alongside and stuck two fingers up. By sticking to the speed limit
I found I was causing road rage, so I was doing more harm than good."
Worsley says it encouraged people
to take risks when they would not normally overtake, making decisions
based on anger. The case for radar detectors is that they make you
constantly aware of your speed.
Driving fast, it is argued,
is not a bad thing in the right place. By selling detectors Worsley
feels he is making people more responsible. A speed detector, he says,
makes you aware about speeding in the same way that a burglar alarm
makes you more aware about security.
Comtech is a research and development
company that makes a variety of remote transmitting devices for industry,
including real-time stock counts for vending machines. Worsley, who
at one stage had nine points on his driving licence, has been a sales
manager for the past four years.
His licence is now clean and
he never drives without one of the £349 scanners. "I think
it is terrible the way the government is attacking people for speeding.
They really are cannon fodder. It's easy pickings. It's just about
money and not safety.
"Speed doesn't kill people,
it's bad driving. The Gatso cameras don't see bad driving, they don't
stop someone driving around in a deathtrap. They will get the Porsche
owner who is driving down a motorway at 100mph at 2am in a car capable
of handling that speed, even though he is less likely to hurt anyone.
If you look at roads in this country they could support higher speed
limits."
In fact some studies claim that
the number of accidents rose at sites with Gatso cameras because of
drivers braking sharply when they saw them. Worsley says this is why
detectors are so useful.
A Mori survey discovered Comtech's
typical customers were not boy racers but a large number of women
in their mid-forties. Many bought the device to help them to stay
within the speed limits. Cocooned in their car they find they lose
the ability to judge their speed accurately.
Worsley says: "Every time
you hear a beep [from the scanner] you keep an eye on your speed and
stay more alert. It acts as a constant reminder. My oldest customer
is 80 — if some little old guy in a flat hat is still capable
of picking up speeding tickets, everyone is.
"When you have a law that
so many normally law-abiding people break, there has to be something
wrong. I have been able to wear two hats. The only solution is the
expensive one and that's putting more police officers on the roads
who can make more accurate judgments than the cameras. However, even
that is not perfect. The problem is that police tend not to charge
other officers or pretty women, speed cameras do."
Speed traps: what you
need to know
• There are 4,500 speed
cameras in Britain but only one in eight contains film. This does
not stop them flashing but does mean you will be unlucky to receive
a ticket. Nottinghamshire, for example, has two sets of digital devices
that measure your average speed between two set points. The detectors
will not alert you to these devices
• You can pass a speed
camera at over the speed limit without triggering a flash, but the
margin over the limit at which the cameras are set to flash varies.
The minimum is 10% plus 2mph over the stated limit
• If police are becoming
inundated with paperwork they will increase the speed at which you
can safely pass cameras to decrease their workload
• The detectors work by
flashing if you are approaching a speed camera or are being targeted
by a hand-held speed gun. You can set in advance the distance at which
the detector will flash, from 500 yards to half a mile
