Australian Newspaper Says 'Cameras Focus on Money Not Deaths '

The Daily Telegraph:

IT RIPS $6 million a year in speeding fines out of motorists, making it the NSW Government's No.1 weapon in enforcing its mantra: speed cameras save lives.
But The Sunday Telegraph can reveal the state's most lucrative speed camera in Cleveland St, Moore Park, is located -- not at an accident black-spot -- but on a stretch of road where there were just five accidents, none of them fatal, in the three years before it was installed in 2007.

And in evidence directly contradicting Government claims speed cameras are road safety measures, not revenue-raisers, 10 of the state's highest-grossing fixed speed cameras are at locations that did not record a single fatality in the three years before they were installed.

Yet the Government has failed to install permanent cameras on dangerous stretches where lives are lost and hundreds of crashes are recorded...

'This confirms what the motorists across NSW have suspected -- the Keneally Labor Government considers fixed speed cameras a revenue-raising machine,' Shadow Roads Minister Andrew Stoner said.

Meanwhile a man in St. Petersburg, Florida is starting to convince City Council members about the false safety claims of camera advocates:

When the City Council discussed installing the cameras earlier this year, Florell said he started reading the studies that were both for and against.

He noticed the ones that were supportive of the cameras were often financed by vendors selling the surveillance systems. He also concluded that ones critical of the cameras used methods that were more scientific and objective...

Echoing research done by the University of South Florida's Department of Health, Florell found that studies generally show intersections are more crash-prone with cameras.

In Chicago, crashes went up by 5 percent at camera-equipped intersections. They climbed by 13 percent in Costa Mesa, Calif., by 40 percent in Greensboro, N.C., and by 133 percent in Temple Terrace.

Here in Globe, newspaper quotes by the City Manager and City Council members suggest that nobody is even bothering to pretend that the cameras are about safety anymore. One Globe City Council member calls it an alternative to raising taxes.

For more information watch this video.

Also read Ten Reasons (+1) Speed Cameras are Lame