I don’t want to defend Chris Huhne, I really don’t. Apart from anything else, I have always thought the country would be better off if all Oxford PPE graduates were simply imprisoned immediately, instead of the present inefficient system where we wait for them to commit a crime first. This would save us from being ruled by people who wanted to be politicians at the age of 17.
But no newspaper has yet pointed out that the speed camera which caught Chris Huhne was not just any old speed camera. From what I have found online it seems to have been the long-notorious ‘Site 050’ camera at the M11 at Chigwell, just beyond the point where the speed limit on the motorway drops from 70mph to 50.
The camera was installed in 2000. In 2003, the year of Huhne’s offence, it generated more revenue than any other speed camera in the country. Along with the MEP, it caught 9,638 other drivers that year, netting over £500,000 in fines. Despite this, figures showed that accidents at the spot had risen since its introduction. For accidents to rise after the installation of a speed camera is unusual. Nearly always accidents are shown to have fallen after a camera is introduced, and this fact is often used to trumpet their effectiveness. But the claim may rest on statistical sleight of hand. After a spate of accidents, a camera is installed and sure enough the accident rate falls. But you would expect the accident rate to fall independently — because of a phenomenon called ‘regression to the mean’. This makes evaluating the true effectiveness of cameras rather difficult.
There are also countless psychological experiments which suggest naive interventions such as speed cameras and seatbelts may simply lead to greater risk-taking elsewhere.
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