InvisibleMan

were out in force this morning in wokingham with their digital cameras. I was wondering just how much power do these people have and the pictures they take can legally be used as evidence?

Neil Smalley

None at all. Unless they are serving police officers with appoved equipment, all they can do is moan at you.

Leslie

They are probably just fed up of people speeding past their houses!

Les

OllyK

Try mounting the kerb and driving at them claiming the flash distracted you.

Abdabz

Hopefully if they record enough instances of speeding they can take the information to the local plod and between them drum up enough support to get a few camera's down there to slow the forkers down back under the speed limit...

OllyK

You may well find that "most" are within the speed limit. People's perception of how fast a car is travelling is **** poor. We had this in the village I used to live in. People always complaining about people speeding. The Police came a set up a speed monitoring trap, i.e. no prosecutions, just a concealed measuring device to check what was going on. Only about 3% of the vehicles were speeding, of those 95% lived in the village

How useful do think a few digital snaps are without acurate timestamping etc in determining if people are actually speeding or not? And that's a rhetorical question!

AndyC_772

iTrader: (2)

What it does mean, is that there are people out there who have far too much time on their hands, and who will probably be presenting their 'evidence' to their local MP, the press, the council and anyone else they feel should listen. No doubt they also genuinely believe you should get the bus instead.

It might be worth taking a little time yourself to contact your MP and related organisations yourself in support of your right to drive, just to try and make sure they don't only hear from the anti-car minority and believe that represents the views of the masses.

I've been to public meetings where people have mindlessly demanded speed cameras, without any apparent though as to how they might actually solve perceived local problems. It's quite scary.

Tiggs

they would say that about the drivers!

OllyK

Of course, because they have no idea what speed the vehicle is actually going and the fact that it is moving at all means it is too fast for the lentil munching wrinklies!

I appreciate that people speed, take it to your parish council. Ask them to talk to the police about monitoring speed for a day or so and see if people are actually speeding, I may have a little more sympathy then.

ajm

Someone did that in our town and got done for it!

I always make a point of booting it past the pensioners and their radar gun but I still haven't won a letter!

InvisibleMan

not sure what was going on yesterday & whether these people had anything to do with it but the queues at 6pm were much heavier. There is quite often a van monitoring speeds on the approach to wokingham but not people with digital cameras dotted about throughout the whole of the wokingham area.
Theres someone here in wokingham that is linked with the council or something maybe they know what was going on.

Leslie

I don't know how constricted Wokingham is, but I do think it is unfair to "terrorise" small villages by driving too fast through them.

We have people doing that all the time here especially during holiday time when all the "visitors" come down here to throw their weight about because they consider us all to be yokels and therefore subhuman. They can be unbelievably rude and they feel they have to drive along narrow village roads at high speeds with no regard for anyone else. You can't blame local people for getting fed up with all that.

It just takes a bit of thought for other people really!

Les

mart360

dosent this constitute "happy slapping"??

they are photographing your misfortune, and showing the data to other people..

M

^OPM^

always remember in papers a village just up road from me-parents taking their kids to school were moaning about people speeding so police went up there with a radar gun-guess what-a lot of them complaining were caught speeding in said radar trap-teach them to complain-words pot, kettle and black spring to mind-be like me i admit at times i stray over limit-so dont ever complain when others do it neither!!!