Cape Town plans to use more mobile speed-trap cameras in addition to the stationary ones, but the council’s policy to trap for safety reasons, not to make money, remains unchanged.
“Mobile trapping is where it’s at. Stationary cameras are incredibly expensive, easily vandalised and easily circumvented,” said JP Smith, chairperson of the city’s safety and security portfolio committee.
He admitted that some of the city’s 39 fixed speed-trap cameras were undeniable money-makers, but said their sites were being reviewed to ensure that trapping was done in a way that minimised loss of life on city roads.
“The new sites for trapping will be commissioned soon and then the fixed cameras will be rotated between the sites so that the public will never know which camera housings are active at any time.
“We have inherited a hodge-podge situation of fixed speed cameras placed in their locations under various administrations at different times.
“If you look at the location of some of them, you can only believe that they are there for the sake of making money,” said Smith.
The portfolio committee asked for these sites to be reviewed.
“In other words, that we move the cameras to where they have the best impact in terms of dealing with dangerous high-speed areas.”
Cameras would be shuffled around to where they were most needed, said Smith.
“The really effective speed enforcement is done by mobile cameras in sites that change all the time. As and where the camera’s term finishes, we will shuffle them around to more needy locations.
“We also need to do serious night-time speed enforcement and this must be prioritised.”
Fixed cameras were a visible reminder that law enforcement was taking place, but they quickly became ineffective.
His committee was compiling a list of places where fixed cameras were positioned to compare with areas where most accidents happened.
The purpose was to ensure the two coincided with the use of mobile cameras, but there were still problems.
A problem was to get statistics to match, because those supplied by the roads department were difficult to measure against those from the traffic department because they were compiled at different times and collected in different ways.
“We are not comparing apples with apples and they are therefore misleading.”
He said a review process was in place to handle complaints from motorists regarding the perceived inappropriateness of traps.
“I don’t understand why people always have a reason why they should not get a ticket. The bottom line is if you are speeding you are fined.
“Everybody has an attitude that the offence they have committed is not a serious one only those committed by other people are serious.
“Speed remains a major cause of accidents and fatalities, along with pedestrians and alcohol on the roads. There are many roads in Sea Point where people ask for a traffic camera and if we trapped in half of those roads we would get exactly the same complaints about cash-cowing or targeting ‘soft targets’.
“One person’s death trap is another’s freeway.”
Complaints that the traffic department was making money by trapping were nothing new, but the city was on the lookout for apparent transgressions of its policy to ensure that officials were sticking to it.
“There definitely has been money making in the past and it probably will continue.
“What we must do is try to limit it and make sure that speed enforcement leads to fewer lives being lost by trapping at locations where most accidents are happening.”
