Speed Limits

On average, 10 people die and 100 people are seriously injured on Great Britain's roads each day.

Two-thirds of all crashes in which people are killed or injured happen on roads with a speed limit of 30mph or less.

• Hit by a car at 40mph, 9 out of 10 pedestrians will be killed.
• Hit by a car at 30mph, around 50 per cent of pedestrians will survive.
• Hit by a car at 20mph, only 1 out of 10 pedestrians will be killed.

Recent research has highlighted excessive speed as a contributing factor in 438 deaths and 4,200 serious injuries each year on the UK's roads - that's almost twice as many as drink driving.

Cameras

The purpose of safety cameras is to improve the safety of roads for all road users. Speed limits are in place for a very good reason - to inform motorists of the safest maximum speed for a stretch of road. Motorists who break the speed limit are putting themselves and other road users at risk.

Since the first cameras where installed in Tameside, there have been some significant changes in the way in which cameras are used:

1990's

• Cameras could be placed in any location to enforce the speed limit
• Cameras could be "hidden" so that motorists didn't know where they were
• The cost of installing and using cameras came out of Tameside City Council's budget

2000's

• Cameras may only be placed at locations with a speed-related collision history
• Camera sites have to be clearly visible from a distance of at least 60 metres
• The cost of installing and using cameras comes only from drivers breaking the speed limit

Safety Camera Partnership, the fines paid by speeding drivers are reinvested into:

• Research into driving behaviour and attitudes
• Education initiatives
• Equipment to help improve road safety across the region

Do Cameras work?

It has been proved nationally that traffic cameras can reduce the number of road crashes and protect road users by encouraging people to drive more slowly. In a report published by the Department for Transport in 2004, the use of safety cameras resulted in:

• Around  a 7% or 2.4mph drop in average speed of vehicles at camera sites
• A 32% reduction in the proportion of vehicles breaking the speed limit at new camera sites.
• A 43% reduction in excessive speeding (15mph more than the speed limit) at new camera sites.