North Yorkshire Police set to capture more speeders with new covert speed vans

13 April 2017

North Yorkshire Police are set to deploy six new smaller “safety” camera vans across the county, this will double the number of vans in the County.

Static speed cameras are required to brightly marked, to act as a deterrent and only deployed where there have been a number of recorded traffic incidents.

The current armoury of 6 speed vans can record offences long before the van is visible and the same will be true for these additional 6 mobile speed cameras.

North Yorkshire Police say that due to their smaller size the new vans are more suited to “hard-to-reach locations” – it is not clear where these locations are.

The camera equipment can detect speeding drivers, anti-social driving such as seat belt offences and drivers using mobile phones behind the wheel. They are also equipped with Automatic Number Plate Recognition technology (ANPR), which assists with the detection of cross border crime.

 

PCC Julia Mulligan with North Yorkshire Police Chief Constable, Dave Jones
PCC Julia Mulligan with North Yorkshire Police Chief Constable, Dave Jones

Julia said: The most important thing to me is that they can be much more responsive to local communities and can easily be deployed to where there are 30mph and 40mph limits.

I get lots of correspondence from people, particularly in rural areas, complaining that speeding and anti-social behaviour on the roads is a real problem within their local area and I think these vans are a really good response to that.

They don’t just deal with speeding issues, for example, if you’re on your mobile phone they can film that and you can be prosecuted. They also have ANPR cameras that scan number plates which can detect if there are criminals travelling through communities. They have a range of different uses and are much more flexible than the bigger vans.

North Yorkshire hasn’t ever had any fixed cameras. We have one of the largest road networks in the country so we have a lot of roads to get around and a lot of these are rural roads. These vans are a much better, more flexible resource that can be used in lots of different situations.

This is genuinely about keeping people safe. It’s a really good way of improving people’s safety, responding to the needs of local communities and saving people’s lives.

 

Speaking about the deployment of the new vehicles and the vital role of the safety camera vans , North Yorkshire Police Chief Constable, Dave Jones, said: The new vans will enable us to reach locations which are both vulnerable to anti-social driving and cross border crime, bringing a further sense of security to our rural communities.

The mobility of the vans is the key to achieving our aim of changing driver attitudes for the long term. Once a speed camera is fixed, motorists get wise to its whereabouts and only change their behaviour 15 seconds before and 10 seconds after driving past one. Our aim with the vans is to educate drivers about the dangers speeding and distracted driving pose and encourage them to change their behaviour, making the roads safer for all.

With the study conducted by Newcastle University finding a reduction of eight casualties as a direct result of the current vehicles, the extension of the fleet is a positive step towards preventing tragedies on our roads and saving more lives.

 

Tom Watson, Safety Camera Officer, said: It’s a total change from using the big vans, these smaller vehicles will fit into smaller sites making it easier to monitor rural roads.

Because we have to stand outside of the vans to use the equipment, it encourages more people to come and talk to us and ask why we are there. We can explain to them the direct benefit the cameras have to their safety, when they are behind the wheel of their car.

 

 

6 Comments

  1. They will have the best police Christmas party ever with all that funding from the evil unsafe speedsters.

  2. I continue to be worried about the fine balance between making the roads safer and alienating the public whose support is allegedly vital to consensual policing. Speed cameras on roads with a high accident rate? Fine I am in full agreement. Speed enforcement on roads where there is high volume vehicle movement but low accident rates? I am unconvinced. To be frank I continue to be disturbed by the concept of the money tree. I sincerely hope that raising finance is not a factor in this initiative

  3. Must be a huge increase in RTA for them to invest in 6 additional vehicles surely they cant say it’s nothing to do with revenue 🙄 I don’t believe the public have voted have these

  4. Non of it is to make the roads safer… If that’s the case they would be pulling people over and giving them a warning and a good stern bollocking…..this is just a money racket

  5. Having spent at least 10,000 hours over the last 12 years obtaining and analysing speed camera data I can now prove beyond any doubt that the cameras have no identifiable effect on accident rates, nearby let alone across the whole area. I have been in correspondence with Ms. Mulligan’s office for more than a year, copying my compelling evidence that cameras achieve nothing (except cash flow of course) and the strange thing is that she gives the impression that she really, really does not want to know how useless they are. It’s called “Groupthink” on wikipedia but I long ago described it as the “my mind is made up, please do not confuse me with the facts” syndrome.

    Trouble is, wasting public money and refusing even to consider the evidence that it is being wasted are breaches of the duty of care owed by North Yorkshire Police and the PCC to the public they serve.

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