Highlands & Islands MSP, Jamie McGrigor, has been banned from driving for 4 months after being caught doing 42 mph coming out of a 30mph zone near Lochearnhead. His lawyer had argued on his behalf that he needed his licence to fulfil his duties over this huge constituency.
McGrigor is indeed one of the few list MSPs for the Highlands & Islands who works to fulfil his responsibilities to the region, driving 30,000 miles a year. We know from Press Releases received that he appears at meetings on issues of local concern on matters such as crofting and fishing right across the territory, including the outer islands.
He is philosophical about the ban, vowing to watch speed limits carefully after he has served out his sentence in December.
His statement that he was caught coming out of a 30mph zone and his determination to watch the speed limited zones more carefully do, however, flag up issues with which many are familiar and which call into question the integrity of police operations in relation to speeding.
These centre on the running debate as to whether mobile speed cameras and certain signage procedures are designed actually to reduce driving speeds or to generate the significant revenue they raise in fines.
Two examples of procedure are germane here.
Regular drivers of Scotland’s roads are well aware, in their own localities, of specific places where officers ‘hide’ their cars to assist a higher ‘catch’ of cars over the limit. Many such places are positioned in the exit areas from a speed limited zone, where speeds unwittingly creep up. (McGrigor’s 42 mph in leaving a 30mph zone is a typical instance of this and a far from obscene speed.)
An example of a regular ‘hiding’ place is on the A83 at Tarbet, shortly after it leaves the A82 at the Tarbet Hotel. At the end of the hotel demesne, the narrowed A83 has a right-angled left-hand bend at the Tarbert Tea Room, with a stone wall right on the left hand limit of the road itself.
With timber lorries regularly using this road to haul harvests out of Argyll, northbound traffic here has to slow to no more than a crawl to negotiate this corner, at which point the road starts to leave the township.
On the other side of this corner there is a long hill rising to the end of the 30mph zone around the railway bridge carrying the West Highland line. Engines have to be gunned to take the hill after the almost dead-stop speed at the corner and it is human if not legal for speeds to creep over the 30mph limit for this reason.
About half way up the hill, at the point where this might be expected to have happened, there is the upper entrance to Ballyhennan Crescent, shrouded by high shrubbery. This is the regular lurking place for police cars carrying officers with laser guns and it is a profitable one.
Everything about this sort of operation blurs the clarity of integrity of the argument that speed cameras are deployed to teach motorists safer habits.
The second example of questionable procedure we would raise relates to the signage of speed limit changes on Central Belt motorways.
Take the motorway with the heaviest traffice – the M8 – and the long section from the south side of the Erskine Bridge eastwards into Glasgow, familiar to Argyll drivers headed for the city.
Motorists expect motorways to have a top speed limit of 70mph. Traffic on this multi-lane multi-exit stretch is heavy. drivers must constantly keep an eye to either side and to their rear in order to gauge accurately their own driving behaviour.
The eye can safely pick up information on overhead signs, such as some positioned across the lanes on the M8 – mostly given over to the necessary lane directions.
However, this stretch of motorway has a series of wildly varying speed limits – down even to 40mph. These are signalled on lollipop signs on the left verge. Traffic in a middle or outside lane and with high sided vehicles on the inside – the normal experience – simply cannot see such signs.
If speed controls are vital at such points, it is imperative that they are displayed where they can be seen. Where they cannot be guaranteed to be visible it is against natural justice to penalise drivers who breach them.
The very invisibility of these signs actually damages safe driving practice. We have had several motorists tell us that, on this stretch of motorway, they find themselves so paranoid about accidentally breaching the suddenly changing speed limits that they are driving with an eye for the lollipops on the left verge rather than watching the busy traffic around them as well as they should.
Add to this the opaque criteria determining whether speed limits on major roads passing through small townships require traffic to reduce to 30mph or 40mph and we have a system which commands confusion and cynicism rather than understanding and respect.
The evidence for road safety being the priority determinant in speed limits, signage and in the use of mobile speed cameras is nothing like clear enough in practice.