In January 1998 the Queen's Bench Divisional Court stated that radar detectors had in fact never been illegal, contrary to popular folklore and the repeated claims of the police.. So you can happily buy one and acquire an extra pair of eyes that in some circumstances can identify speed traps further down the road than you can
.
Cameras should save lives - (From AA and Autocar magazine - 21st August 2002)
According to the AA and Autocar magazine, there are 33 per cent more speed cameras on Britain's safest roads than on the most dangerous stretches of our highways. It would seem that those speed cameras are in place for one primary purpose and that has nothing to do with road safety. It is simply to raise money in the form of fines on drivers.
How much easier it is to achieve this target when the speed cameras are trained on gentle traffic rather than on vehicles that might actually be going along too fast for their own and others' safety.
Full story at
BBC News UK
(Opens in new window). For protection against GATSO based speed cameras - see the
Geodesy
and
Road Angel
GPS GATSO detectors.
Radar Detectors are illegal in France, Belgium and Switzerland and may be seized and also liable for a fine. See here for the virtually invisible
Bel 966
.
Radar detectors -
Legality
.
"Watching the Detectives"
By Andrew English -
Motoring correspondent for the Daily Telegraph - UK.
As the police rake in increasing amounts of cash from speed fines, Andrew English wonders whether they're as keen on saving lives as they claim to be, and looks at the pros and cons of high-tech devices that warn drivers of the traps..
THE last time I wrote about speed, the Motoring desk received a very heavy postbag indeed. So I approach the subject again with considerable caution.
In the UK, Gatso speed cameras have been a blessing and a curse for the authorities. Estimates of last year's total fine revenue from the UK's 3,000 speed cameras are in excess of £180 million, but purchasing and maintaining cameras, plus the administrative costs of issuing the tickets, is taking its toll on police budgets.
As a result, the police have successfully called for a higher fixed-penalty speeding fine, part of which (after tickets issued have exceeded the previous year's total) will go to the constabulary in question. The new system is being tested this year.
Suddenly, it is in the interests of the police to deploy more speed cameras and to make more use of those they have. The Thames Valley force is currently studying exactly what it costs to issue a speed ticket, the hidden agenda being that senior coppers would like to see £40 fixed-penalty notice become a £100 fine. This could happen if they can make a convincing case that speed tickets cost nearly as much as they generate. Warwickshire Police, who are adopting dozens more speed cameras and employing extra officers and civilian staff to process the extra fines they will produce, call their strategy, with a revealing candour, "a business plan".
At the same time, speed limits are generally being lowered, as is the speed at which a ticket is issued. In some forces' areas, cameras are set at less than the Association of Chief Police Officers' guideline figure of the speed limit plus 10 per cent and 2mph.
These actions are justified with two simple arguments. The first, and most convincing, is that all speeding is against the law. It was Scotland Yard commissioner Paul Manning who blustered that Britain's 30 million drivers should be fined if they are caught at just 1mph above the limit, although he subsequently engaged in some fabulously undignified mud-slinging with the Mail on Sunday, which claimed to have caught him travelling in his official car at 43mph in a 40mph area.
The trouble with this point of view is that when speed limits and the speed ticket threshold are continually being revised downwards, it becomes much easier and more lucrative to catch motorists. And if the lower speed limits are seen as ludicrous by a significant majority of drivers, then the law falls into disrepute and is ignored.
The second argument is that "speed kills", and that to question the actions of the police or government advisers is therefore to condone last year's 3,421 road deaths.
Difficult to get past this one; like all good propaganda, the slogan appears to offer a simple explanation and a solution for a complex problem and has therefore been widely accepted. In fact, although studies differ slightly as to the effect of speed on road accidents, most (with the notable exception of the unelected and hectoring government adviser Robert Gifford) agree that excessive speed is a major factor in only between seven and 15 per cent of accidents. In fact, it is poor judgement (which may include inappropriate speed) that is the major factor. The plain truth is that if drivers were educated in the fundamental principle of matching speed to vision - or, as our safe driving expert Paul Ripley puts it, always being able to stop safely well within the distance you can see to be clear ahead - speeding would no longer be a hazard. In fact, there would be very few road accidents of any description.
It is also arguable that the justification for the "speed kills" slogan is a wilfully emotive combination of two related statistics: more than 6,000 children are "killed or seriously injured" on British roads each year, and it is said that lower speeds would reduce this awful death toll. However, without being in any way complacent or diminishing the tragedy of individual cases, the detailed statistics give a rather different impression: of the 43,445 children hurt in road traffic accidents in 1998, 5,873 were seriously injured but just 207 were killed, of whom 1,151 and 64 respectively were in cars at the time.
The idea that a crackdown on speeding is intended to save lives is seriously undermined by the siting of speed cameras and most police speed traps, which, far from being placed around schools, playgrounds and accident blackspots, as might be expected if speeding were so very dangerous, are generally placed on long, wide stretches of road where a high number of motorists can be expected to exceed the limit. In addition, far from being used as an obvious deterrent to reduce traffic speeds, cameras are painted a dull grey and are often hidden behind other road furniture. There is also considerable evidence to show that speed cameras don't do much to reduce accidents or speeding, but that they do increase feelings of persecution among people who previously were inclined to be pro-police, and even lead to an increase in the number of accidents in surrounding streets that don't have cameras.
I consider the police have been less than honest about the introduction of speed cameras. When I interviewed London's top traffic policeman in the early Nineties, the uniformed Kevin Delaney was the calm voice of authority. No, he said, Gatso cameras were not being introduced to get at motorists, but were a safety device that would be used in areas where speed was a crucial safety issue, such as near schools.
Ten years on, Delaney works for the RAC Foundation, and says he feels "bitterly let down by the way Gatsos have been introduced. It wasn't what I or any of my colleagues saw as the aim of the experiment when we signed up to it."
Delaney reckons that once the principle of allowing the police to keep a proportion of the speeding fines has been allowed, there will be a conflict of interest, where money becomes a factor. "It doesn't surprise me in the slightest," he said of the ratcheting down of the threshold speeds, or the recent order for 2,000 extra speed cameras for use in and around the London M25 orbital Motorway.
I asked Delaney what he would say if I told him I'd been using a radar detector recently. "I wouldn't have a problem with that," he said, "provided you'd been using it responsibly."
And that's exactly what I have been doing after receiving a number of letters inquiring whether radar detectors were worth their price (quite high, as it turned out).
Two years ago a judge ruled that the use of a radar detector was legal in the UK, as the use of one could not strictly be described as the interception of police wireless transmissions within the Wireless and Telegraphy Act.
I last tested a radar detector around 10 years ago; it was rubbish. It could detect every mobile phone, garage door opener, bank machine and microwave oven within a 10-mile radius and, as a consequence, it never stopped crying wolf. After a week of pointless ear bashing, I wrapped it up and sent it back.
But time and technology march on. The Beltronics 990 International costs a whopping £400, although as importer Glyn Worsley of Complimentary Technology pointed out, it did achieve outstanding results in separate independent tests run by Auto Express and Evo magazines. What the tests showed was that if you paid attention and were fast on the brakes, you could avoid a speeding ticket from hand-held radar and laser cameras, as well as fixed and portable Gatso cameras.
I was still sceptical, so Worsley sent three Bel units for test. All the units come with a choice of three fixing alternatives (Velcro, rubber suckers or a sun-visor clip), two power leads (coiled or straight) and a cigar lighter power plug. Operation is a simple matter of plugging in the unit and turning the ignition key. An electronic voice and a series of squawks and rings accompanies the start-up sequence, then all is quiet (hopefully) with either "Highway" or "City" on the LED display.
(Site Comment - We are an official resaler for the Bel units supplied by Complimentary Technology, here in the U.K. and they provide the shipping of the units. See above.)
Beltronics claims the unit is undetectable in use and that it can be upgraded with new software should the forces of law and order alter frequencies or invent an all-new method of detection.
And that really is about it. The Bel sits on the dash and (mostly) warns about speed cameras and lasers - in other words, it does exactly what it says on the box. It tells you which M25 gantries have live cameras and it could (if the authorities chose to employ laser beacons) warn you of school crossing patrols or of service vehicles blocking the hard shoulder on motorways.
It does cry wolf occasionally; it is convinced there's a laser-toting cow in a field near the A3 in Surrey and it goes mad at petrol stations. It also engenders a degree of paranoia in the driver, to the extent that far from whizzing around everywhere at illegal speeds, I've actually slowed down over the past weeks. Part of the reason is that you can't always stand on the brakes and cruise gently past a speed camera; if there's following traffic, a vehicle about to move into your lane or whatever, you can only safely reduce speed by lifting off the throttle. If you are going too fast, that won't be enough to stop the camera flashing and the arrival of a ticket in the post.
Nor will a radar/laser detector protect you from any kind of time/distance speed trap, such as VASCAR or the new Speed Police Enforcement Camera Systems (SPECS), which times cars over a known distance using digitised images of their registration plates. So the detector will not save your licence and can never be a substitute for good observation and appropriate control of your speed.
Speeding is neither big nor clever, and inappropriate speed in the wrong place puts lives at risk. If you killed or injured someone while driving irresponsibly, you would regret it every day for the rest of your life; for that reason alone, I am reluctant wholly to recommend a radar detector. On the other hand, it can give you the vital early warning of a hazard that the police in just about every other European country seem to think is part and parcel of the installation of speed cameras, frequently painted in bright colours to enhance their deterrent effect and slow traffic at accident blackspots. That's something the British police seem to have forgotten in their dash for cash.
Legality.
As of January 1998 it became legal to use radar detectors in the U.K. It was ruled that the signal from a radar or laser gun is not a police message and therefore that detectors are not contravening the Wireless Telegraphy Act. So you can happily buy one and acquire an extra pair of eyes that in some circumstances can identify speed traps further down the road than you can.
Regina v Knightsbridge Crown Court, Ex parte Foot Before Lord Justice Simon Brown and Mr Justice Mance.
[Judgment January 29 1997]
Microwave radio emissions from police radar speed guns did not constitute a "message" for the purposes of section 5(b)(i) of the Wireless Telegraphy Act 1949, even within the extended meaning of "message" given by section 19(6).
Accordingly, the use by a motorist of an electrical field meter to detect the presence of such emissions was not an offence under section 5(b)(i) since the device was not used "to obtain information as to the contents, sender or addressee of any message".
The Queen's Bench Divisional Court so held, granting David Adrian Foot's amended application for judicial review to quash the dismissal by Knightsbridge Crown Court on January 8, 1997, of his appeal against conviction by Marylebone Justices on July 23, 1996 of an offence contrary to section 5(b)(i).
Section 5 of the 1949 Act, as amended by section 3 of the Post Office Act 1969, provides: "Any person who - . . . (b) otherwise than under authority of the [Minister of Posts and Telecommunications] or in the course of his duty as a servant of the Crown, . . . (i) uses any wireless telegraphy apparatus with intent to obtain information as the contents, sender or addressee of any message . . . shall be guilty of an offence. . ."
Section 19 provides: "(6) Any reference in this Act to the sending or the conveying of messages includes a reference to the making of any signal or the sending or conveying of any warning or information, and any reference to the reception of messages shall be construed accordingly."
Mr Anthony Calloway for the applicant; Mr John McGuinness for the prosecution.
LORD JUSTICE SIMON BROWN said that the applicant was using an electrical field meter to detect radio transmissions from radar speed guns. The device was not able to decode the transmissions. Mr Calloway submitted that the police radar gun did not send or receive messages, even within the extended meaning of that term given in section 19(6).
In *Invicta Plastics Ltd v Clare* ([1976] RTR 251), the Divisional Court had held that those advertising such devices as the applicant's were guilty of incitement to motorists to contravene section 1(1), which required a licence for the use of such devices. However, those devices were now exempted from the need for such a licence by the Wireless Telegraphy Apparatus (Receivers) (Exemption) Regulations (SI 1989 No 123).
Mr McGuinness submitted that a radar beam emitted towards a vehicle was equivalent to making a signal within the meaning of section 19(6).
His Lordship disagreed. No doubt it was a signal or sign which conveyed something of meaning to another person, but Mr McGuinness did not say that it amounted to sending or conveying a "warning or information" within that subsection. His Lordship also rejected the submission that the operator was the addressee of a message, that is of information, sent back by the passing motor vehicle.
A police officer beaming emissions to and receiving information from an inanimate moving object was not exchanging messages with the motor car. There could be no reception of a message save between two human operators.
Tempting though it was to outlaw the anti-social use of such devices, now that they were no longer banned under section 1(1) of the Act, to do so would be to stretch the language of section 5(b)(i) to breaking point.
If, as was probable, the 1989 Regulations had been brought into force without recognising the present lacuna, the matter had to be put right by a further such instrument.
Mr Justice Mance delivered a concurring judgment. Solicitors: Moss Beachley & Mullem; Crown Prosecution Service, Victoria.
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