Is this Britain's sneakiest speed camera?

GENERALLY at Life On Cars we like to keep it local - covering all things motoring in and around Lancashire - but on this occasion we just had to make an exception.

Speed cameras have long proved a contentious issue among car lovers, particularly if they're difficult for drivers to spot, as all the fuss about one particularly prolific Gatso on Parbold Hill proved when I covered motorists' concerns in The Champion two years ago. Yesterday, however, one of our readers in Poole, Dorset got in touch to highlight what he reckons could be one of the most craftily-positioned speed cameras in the country.

Can you spot it?

For anyone who can't see it in the picture above, it's behind the school sign...

There is of course, the argument that if you aren't speeding in the first place then you won't get caught out by it, but seemingly hiding a Gatso behind a school sign does slightly defeat the point of painting it bright yellow in the first place.

What do you think? Can you think of camera that's even better hidden than the one in Poole? Life On Cars would love to know. Get in touch by leaving a comment below...

Mr Honda Concerto ought to agree with my take on rural speed

THE Honda's rear haunches have never looked so frustrating. Even though it was the crack of dawn on a dry weekend morning, Mr Concerto was dawdling.

Bikers among this column's readers will already know why the Cat and Fiddle road, between Macclesfield and Buxton, is worth seeking out - and why it's such a regular visitor to all those accident statistic surveys as a result. It is, carefully driven, a stunning route across the Pennines well worth seeking out. If you've brought a car - and not a superbike - the 50mph speed limit is plenty, but Mr Concerto was having none of it. He was determined I'd be doing 28mph, and not one measly mile an hour more. A great drive ruined by someone dangerously determined not to be overtaken.

Anyway, it was all part of my quest to answer a question I left hanging a couple of weeks back - is it better to head somewhere the fun way or the quick one? The answer, unless you're absolutely insistent that every journey must go via the Buttertubs Pass in the Yorkshire Dales, is emphatically the quick one. On a really long drive motorways are infinitely preferable to getting lost in Mansfield's one way system.

Besides, little country lanes are going to get slower still if the Coalition gets its way; successive governments have struggled to deal with rural accident rates, and now Cameron and Clegg (which, by the way, sounds like a dodgy estate agent) have hit on a solution. Rather than a blanket reduction, they're considering making it easier for local authorities to lower limits as they choose. It is The Big Society versus speed.

For what it's worth, I reckon it's a good idea - there are far too many winding lanes which you could technically shoot down at sixty, but to try would be lethally dangerous, and chances are your local council knows more about accident hotspots than Whitehall does. Great power, however, comes with great responsibility.

If I head to somewhere like Lincolnshire or Yorkshire behind the wheel of something sporty, it'd comfort me greatly to know that the speed limit's been considered locally by folk who know the roads. What I emphatically wouldn't want - and what a lot of the nationals reported last weekend - is a blanket lowering of rural limits to 40mph from the current sixty.

I'm not a speed freak - a proper petrolhead values good handling over doing a million miles an hour anyway - but what I reckon motorists want is education rather than punishment. We want to know people are actually thinking about road safety rather than just blindly and blanketly laying down the law.

Hopefully, Mr Concerto agrees with me.

Should speeding drivers be given harsher fines?

MOTORISTS who end up on the wrong side of the law could be made to pay more for their misdeeds under new proposals being considered by the Goverment.

Ministry of Justice plans currently under consultation are suggesting upping the current penalties paid by drivers for offences such as speeding from £60 to £90.

The report which suggests raising the charges, entitled Getting It Right For Victims and Witnesses, reads: “As part of its new Strategic Framework for Road Safety,21 which aims to reduce death and injuries on our roads, the Department for Transport proposes to increase the level of some Fixed Penalty Notices for traffic offences to bring them in line with other penalties which deal with low-level offending.

"Penalty levels for many offences have not increased during the last ten years. The current levels have fallen behind other fixed penalties and therefore risk trivialising the offences. The proposed increases for motoring offences include those in relation to excessive speed, control of a vehicle, mobile phone use, ignoring signals and pedestrian crossings, and failure to wear a seatbelt."

However motoring groups have hit out at the plans, with the Institute of Advanced Motorists saying its own research highlighted that more than half of all drivers disagreed with the idea.

IAM chief executive Simon Best said: "While funding victims of crime is laudable, the real aim of fines for motoring offences should be deterrence. We want to stop people breaking the law.

“Having an income that relies on dangerous driving won’t help reduce crashes. There is a strong case for this money to be spent on road safety.”

The consultation on the proposals, which can be seen in full on the Ministry of Justice website, closes on April 22.

I couldn't agree more with traffic calming, but are speed bumps really the answer?

I KNOW it's a victory for safety but it's a crashing defeat for my suspension and - by proxy - my spine. The council has ruined one of my favourite roads.

If, like me, you ever travel between Churchtown and Crossens you'll know what I'm on about. Where once there was smooth tarmac there are now rows of humps, right the way between these two charming parts of Southport, and they haven't succeeded in slowing me down. They've made me stop using it altogether.

“A-ha!” I can hear the council's road safety boffins retort in response, Alan Partridge style. Where once souped-up Saxos and Corsas screamed along this stretch of road they're now having to brake before each and every bump; that or face the prospect of either breaking their backs or damaging their shock absorbers. I'm sure, in a year's time, the stats will show the council's mission of reducing the speeds along Bankfield Lane and Rufford Road will have been easily accomplished.

Don't think for a moment that I'm demanding the right to drive down it like a man who's late for the birth of his first child - I couldn't agree more with the need to slow people down along some roads (and everybody's got at least one in mind). There are, for instance, far too many single track roads I know which you can legally do 60mph on, but to even attempt it would be insane. 30mph too fast for Bankfield Lane? Yep, at quite a few times of day I'd go along with that.


Bankfield Lane is one of my favourite roads for a very simple reason - more often that not, it connects where I live with where I want to go. I know that plenty of motorists took the mickey a bit with it, and on some tragic occasions with fatal results. As a motorist I loved it, but as a Crossens chap I couldn't agree more something needed to be done to slow people down.

But did it really need an endless series of enormous speed humps to cure the problem? Couldn't chicanes have done the trick? Or lowering the speed limit? Or even - and I know this is dangerously avantgarde thinking - road safety cameras? I have a particular hatred reserved for speed bumps because while they slow down the dangerous minority (who'll only find a different road to strut their stuff on anyway), it's the majority of motorists who have to pay the price of the additional wear and tear.

The irony is that it's those who live locally - the ones who called for traffic calming in the first place - who'll suffer the most.

We should raise the motorway speed limit - but with a few strings attached

HOW many motorway drivers does it take to change a lightbulb?

Given the not-at-all defensive tone of most of the articles about proposals to revamp the motorway speed limit, I thought I'd wait a week for the dust to settle to write mine, and open it with a joke. The answer, of course, is that none of them should even be attempting it. Not when they're at the helm of a tonne of metal doing 70mph. Or 80mph, for that matter. There is nothing funny about getting motorway drivers to change a lightbulb. This is serious business.

My dad actually wrote a letter to his MP urging him to vote against any attempts to raise the motorway speed limit to 80mph, saying it was “ludicrous”. Lots of you - mainly the Tory party - argue it's high time to add another 10mph to the speed limit. Others, including every road safety group you care to think of, say it'll lead to more accidents and all end in tears.

For what it's worth I don't agree with sticking with 70mph - but I don't necessarily agree with raising it either.

The thing to remember is that the 70mph was instigated in 1965, when most motorists ventured onto these newfangled superhighways in Ford Anglias and Austin 1100s equipped with skinny tyres and brakes the size of milk bottle tops. It doesn't take Jeremy Clarkson to tell you that today's motors of the masses - Focus, Golf, Astra - will easily outrun, outbrake and outhandle their fortysomething ancestors, and they're crammed full of airbags, anti whiplash zones and crumple zones even if they don't. Getting less than five stars in the Euro NCAP crash tests is very bad form in 2011, and it's for this reason I reckon modern cars at least are more than equipped to handle an 80mph limit.

Unfortunately, their drivers aren't. To this day the basic driving test doesn't include any motorway driving, which is insane and almost certainly explains all the middle lane hoggers, the headlight flashers, the outside laners who insist on doing exactly 69.99mph and the ones who think it's fine to shoot out from a slip road into lane three in a single ignorant swoop. Weirdly, there seems to be a correlation between all these drivers and sales of BMW's X5.

So I'd happily back an 80mph limit as long as those expected to do it are forced to learn how to drive on motorways properly. I've said it before and I'll say it again; I honestly believe speed, if you're trained how to use it properly and responsibly, is harmless in the right conditions.

On the other hand, we could ban all BMW X5s from the entire motorway network. Problem solved!