Andrew Dixon

Drove down the A580 near Haydock a couple of times today. This morning about 8:30 there were a group of reflective-jacketed workers placing what looked like video cameras on tripods on the central reservation and at the side of the road. Two cameras pointing at oncoming traffic in both directions. At the M6 roundabout there were additional cameras being unloaded from flight cases and sited pointing at traffic approaching the roundabout. These ones were a lot smaller, and looked like grey tubes again on tripods. They appeared to be being left 'unmanned' as they had waterproof hoods on them and were chained to nearby lamposts.

As I drove through again at around 7:00 tonight the teams were in the process of taking them back down again. I couldn't be 100% sure but one of the guys appeared to have a Highways Agency logo on his jacket.

Any ideas what was going on ...?

mart360

tax man checking tax disks...


Mart

danwrx1980

sounds like a traffic survey mate, only police can place speed cameras i believe, or the casualty reduction partnership which effectively is the police

but beware, if they are surveying traffic, that means cameras could be coming!

john_s

iTrader: (1)

Or could be VOSA cameras looking for vehicles being used without Operators Licences.

John.

Andrew Dixon

A number of options there ...

Traffic survey sounds the most convincing. It gets incredibly snarled up there in the mornings, and the amount of red-light jumping that goes on is astounding and very dangerous. I'd actually welcome traffic light cameras!

Abdabz

Traffic Survey soounds most likely, although I live within a mile of Windle Island and the number of drivers who are unable to drive below 60 down this stretch are frightening.
They put those warning signs up that flash 60mph at speeders but they are always ignored and now they've reserved spaces in the layby's and marked them "police" but I have yet to see temp speed cameras in any of those bays
Hopefully they'll get Specs cameras on there soon enough to monitor all speedsters (although the number of junctions may make this expensive) so half a dozen gatso's and some temp cameras from time to time might help.
The roadworks at Blindfoot Road should slow things down from Windle Island but the rest needs to be closely monitored to get the speeds down.
Black spot after black spot down this stretch btw...
P

Andrew Dixon

My parents live up in Billinge, and I grew up in Windle, even though I'm in Manchester now.

Agree that the particular stretch of A580 is dotted with accident blackspots. I'll be interested to see if the recent-ish speed reduction has any effect on the number of incidents. I seem to remember that there was a call for a blanket 40mph limit a while back!

Having said that, there are some spectacularly badly designed junctions which can't help the problem, not to mention the amount of pedestrian traffic that seems happy to jump over the barriers and cross wherever it feels like it.

I've noticed those 60 mph warning signs seem to trigger below 60mph though? I try and cruise dead-on the limit when it's safe, and still often see them flash up.

Hope to see some good road re-engineering and red-light cameras going up.