To drive in Britain is to measure out your trip in speed cameras. As inevitable as road signs and as implacable as the meanest state trooper, they lurk everywhere, the government’s main weapon against impatient drivers.
It is a shame that so many people hate them.
Among the ways that motorists have made this clear: spraying the cameras with paint; knocking them over; covering them in festive wrapping paper and garbage bags; digging them up; shooting, hammering and firebombing them; festooning them with burning tires; and filling their casings with self-expanding insulation foam that, when activated, blows them apart.
Visual examples can be seen on the Web site of a vigilante group called Motorists Against Detection, which displays color photographs of smashed, defaced and burned-out cameras — pornography for the anti-camera movement.
In a nation that is estimated to have four million surveillance cameras — the most per capita in the world, civil liberties groups say — there are currently as many as 6,000 spots for speed cameras, in the country and in the city, on highways, urban arteries, suburban streets and rural lanes.
“Speed cameras can’t detect tailgating, bad driving, drink driving or drug driving,” said a spokesman for the group, explaining his objections. An occasional contributor to British radio debates about traffic regulations, he uses the name Captain Gatso — after the most common form of speed camera — because, he says, he wants to avoid arrest.
The government does not keep figures on camera vandalism, so it is impossible to confirm Captain Gatso’s claim that the group, known as M.A.D., has attacked more than 1,000 cameras, or that its members are “grown-up people, with normal jobs, who are cheesed off,” rather than hooligans engaging in “willy-nilly childish vandalism.”
But if there is a battle between motorists and speed cameras, the cameras are surely winning.
In this little hamlet in Brentwood, about an hour northeast of London, one particularly reviled camera — installed to catch people exceeding the 40 m.p.h. speed limit on a busy suburban road — has been set on fire three times in the past year, and three times it has been repaired.
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