Faking it – the £40 speed camera

Smile! It's not real!

A pensioner in Bedfordshire has attached a very realistic fake speed camera to his house.

Fed up with cars speeding past his home on the A1 in Beeston, 72 year old Mike Lacey decided to do something about it, building the impressive bright yellow rig and camera out of drainpipes and guttering, and mounting them on the side of his property next to the dual-carriageway.

With his pad just metres away from the busy road, and fed up that there are no speed cameras operational in the area, enterprising Mike took it upon himself to do something about it, with £40 worth of pipes, copious ingenuity, and some bright yellow paint.

It seems that, irrespective of whether it makes a difference or not, the local authorities want him to remove his fake camera as they have apparently been informed by the Highways Agency that it is “distracting”. That’s kind of the point, isn’t it? They’re painted bright yellow because people are meant to see them. And as Mr Lacey built his camera only after the existing real one stopped working, isn’t he actually being rather public-spirited?

Mike says he won’t be taking his dummy setup down “until a remedy is found”, which would seem to be a relatively simple matter of the disgruntled Highways folks replacing their non-functioning kit.

They’ve said that they “are designing a replacement system... which will encourage better compliance with the speed limit”. What... like, say, a speed camera that detects speeding cars and means the offending driver gets a fine? Wow. If only something like that existed.

Here’s a radical idea; until they’ve got their new system designed and installed (which, presumably, might take a while), why don’t the Highways gang go and thank Mike for doing their job for them?

I’ve never understood the reasoning behind speed cameras having to be vividly obvious – many drivers just slow down when they spot them, then accelerate away once they’ve passed. If you didn’t know where cameras were and they weren’t easy to spot, wouldn’t you be more likely to watch your speed all of the time?

The massive reduction in expenditure on yellow paint could be used to actually buy and install some kit that works and makes roads safer for everybody.

It would also mean people like Mike could get on and enjoy their retirement without having to resort to adorning their houses with pretend speed cameras.

This post first appeared as my " A wry look at the week" column, in The Mail, on Friday the 5th of October, 2018. They re-titled it as "Nothing fake about speeding", and this time it didn't appear online for some reason.

I had a rant about the pointlessness of making speed cameras obvious one before and such is the power of my newspaper column that absolutely nothing happened. I guess this will be the same. Hello? Is this thing on..?

(CD A-Z: A compilation of mash-ups. I like mash-ups.)