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Sunday 7 July 2013

Speed Cameras - is that all they look for?

The upper part of Stockport Road in Hyde between Dowson Road and Mottram Old Road is mainly used by local traffic - any vehicles travelling between Hyde and Stockport usually take the shorter route along Dowson Road. Along most of this stretch of Stockport Road there's a gentle downhill gradient as you drive towards Hyde town centre and about half-way down, just after a slight left-hand bend in the road, there's a speed camera. Unusually for Tameside the camera is painted yellow, the normal colour being a more inconspicuous dark green - "the corporate colour of Tameside" as a former Leader of the Council jokingly claimed. The gradient of the road is such that as you drop down Stockport Road from the point where it joins Mottram Old Road doing 25 mph and take your foot off the accelerator by the time you pass the camera you're doing 35-40 mph and get a fine and 3 points on your licence. Fair enough, the speed limit's 30 mph and you know what to expect if you exceed that. But look at the two photographs below:

This is the view from behind the camera looking up the gradient

This is the view as you approach the camera from the opposite direction

Look at the car coming towards the camera in the first photograph - it's had to move towards the centre of the road because of the car parked just before the bend (and with two wheels on the pavement). Any car going in the opposite direction would similarly have to move into the centre of the road because of the car parked on the other side of the bend - and this is a common occurrence as there are invariably cars parked on both sides of the road at this point. It's a recipe for disaster, particularly as the road is also a bus route. What I'd like to know is this: when the police prosecute a motorist for exceeding the speed limit do also prosecute any motorists seen on the relevant photograph to be parked in such a dangerous place, or do they just turn a blind eye as they do when they drive past in their police cars?

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