I see your point but there are some problems that you may have overlooked.
* Safety The sort of road Policing we are seeing is if anything detrimental to safety. There are many reasons for this, from missing out on stopping real speeders/dangerous drivers while giving out 1km/h over the limit tickets to the hazards of putting speed camera's semi-obscured in the middle of passing lanes. The most worrying I have noticed of late is a reluctance of people to pass me when I pull left with a trailer on, or if they do they try and pass far too slowly to be safe. There is no point in funding road policing by any means if it does nothing for safety.
* Cost The Government gets about 50% of the road Policing budget back every year from fines. We are talking usually just under the 100M target. Sure it may not pay for everything but it dosn't have to, to be revenue focused.
* Faith in our Police The way our roads are Policed is beginning to damage the Police's reputation. I know personally that acts of stupidity from our roading Police has done a lot to tarnish their reputation in my eyes. The respect and co-operation of the public is a massive assett to our Police force and its costly when it is eroded.
* Insurance/Employment Costs When you go about effectively catching people out on technicalities the direct cost is sometimes the thin end of the wedge. The cost of employment and insurance is simply unfair on those who draw the short straw and gain a number of tickets simply due to the amount of km's they do on certain over policed roads.
thejazzpianoma,
Sep 3, 3:15pm
I see your point but there are some problems that you may have overlooked.
* Safety The sort of road Policing we are seeing is if anything detrimental to safety. There are many reasons for this, from missing out on stopping real speeders/dangerous drivers while giving out 1km/h over the limit tickets to the hazards of putting speed camera's semi-obscured in the middle of passing lanes. The most worrying I have noticed of late is a reluctance of people to pass me when I pull left with a trailer on, or if they do they try and pass far too slowly to be safe. There is no point in funding road policing by any means if it does nothing for safety.
* Cost The Government gets about 50% of the road Policing budget back every year from fines. We are talking usually just under the 100M target. Sure it may not pay for everything but it dosn't have to, to be revenue focused. That's an enormous subsidy for a department they have to fund anyway and one that gives them lots of PR exposure, giving the appearance that we actually have a properly functioning Police force.
* Faith in our Police The way our roads are Policed is beginning to damage the Police's reputation. I know personally that acts of stupidity from our roading Police has done a lot to tarnish their reputation in my eyes. The respect and co-operation of the public is a massive assett to our Police force and its costly when it is eroded.
* Insurance/Employment Costs When you go about effectively catching people out on technicalities the direct cost is sometimes the thin end of the wedge. The cost of employment and insurance is simply unfair on those who draw the short straw and gain a number of tickets simply due to the amount of km's they do on certain over policed roads.
* Waste of resources At the end of the day, the whole system is just a waste of resources and a significant cost to the country. What a lot of people don't seem to understand is that whenever we waste money, be it directly from Government spending or indirectly like this, its a loss to the country.
In other words that's money that could have otherwise been spent on goods and services that help keep someone else employed and ideally help us produce goods to help balance up foreign trade.
Another way of looking at it is if you just pay Government employee's to do "busy work" which is effectively whats happening here to at least some degree, you may as well just put those people on a benefit.
We do need to have some form of traffic enforcement and we do need to keep our roads safe to a reasonable degree. However as it stands at present we just have a whole lot of wasted resources and very little net safety improvement to show for it. This is very clear for anyone to see as the accident rate, road toll and injuries have not really made any improvement at all over what you would expect from our increasingly safe vehicles over the last 10 or so years. Despite the focus on road Policing changing in an extreme manner from quite lax to overly pedantic.
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