At TheTruthAboutCars.com (which is a great site even if it is about cars), Robert Farago has a nice little piece about the unintended negative impact of excessively strict, and excessively enforced, speed limits in England:
The national government has “ring fenced” the money generated by speeding tickets: mandating that local “safety camera partnerships” must spend the revenue from speed enforcement on speed enforcement. This supposedly virtuous circle has led to an explosion of speed cameras, a huge increase in speeding tickets and a very nasty unintended consequence. Just as Prohibition eroded the American public’s respect for law and law enforcement, the United Kingdom’s extremely effective anti-speeding jihad has undermined the public’s respect for the police.I believe that speed limits are mostly useless, especially on wide-open highways. People drive (or ride) at a speed that's safe given the road conditions at the time, not because of some law, but because they don't want to die. And the reckless daredevils who blast along at unsafe speeds aren't going to obey the law anyway.
At the risk of alienating road safety-minded readers, many of whom have suffered personal losses from traffic fatalities, the issue of the public’s faith in its police force is far more important than speed-related road safety. When a law criminalizes a behavior practiced by the majority of its citizens, it criminalizes its citizens. When the police rigorously enforce this law, hypocritically enough, the public comes to resent the police.
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