From News and Star article: Since 2007, Cumbria Road Safety Partnership has been allowed to site mobile cameras where it wants. Previously, it had to stick to 50 so-called ‘accident hot spots’.

Mike R [aka Wyvern46]
Go 530T - unsupported
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Kia In-dash Tomtom

Being a Cumbrian, I can categorically state that Cumbria Police see speed cameras as a cash machine.

The DO NOT use them in accident blackspots, but instead choose the best locations to generate the largest number of fines - ie places where the scamera van can see you from the furthest distance away, on the safest sections of motorway.

TomTom - various

Some councils just don't seem to get it - the more money they generate, the more they are giving to the Government! They seem to have forgotten that they don't receive the money themselves any more

Mind you, I suppose it could help pay for some of the debt the last lot landed us with...

Drive carefully; the Government needs all the Taxpayers it can get.

Cumbria is a dysfunctional county run by a county council peopled with ego-tripping ignoramusses who seek to demonstrate their superiority by wasting more public money than anyone else.

Councillors doubtless preen themselves at whatever unnecessary Local Government conferences they attend -- "oh, we pay our chief executive more than you do", "we pay our management people more than you do" -- by way of signalling that when it comes to Local Government of the macho kind, Cumbria is supreme.

The fact that this bunch of smug self-serving incompetents unnecessarily jacked up the salary of a chief executive who having received it promptly went on gardening leave and retired on a massive pension deters the county council not one jot. The fact that councillors then had to hike all the salaries of the management tier beneath that of the departed chief executive for parity reasons means not one jot.

Cumbria County Council's 'road safety partnership' is a typically unctuous phrase deployed in a laughable attempt to disguise the truth. With roads that are crumbling and an infrastructure that was far from good in the first place, the Council clings to the revenue generated from getting motorists nicked on sunny Sunday mornings on an empty M6 (including me) as well as (for example) from a mobile camera it regularly positions at the top of a hill with the lens pointing downwards to catch any vehicle which inadvertently over-accelerates on its upward climb and thereby exceeds 33mph.

However, such is the Third World condition of that particular road -- Durranhill Road -- that all vehicles have to move carefully to avoid damage. Sadly, some don't move as carefully as they should, and so swing out into the path of oncoming vehicles to avoid the ruptured surface in front of them, such manoeuvering being an accident waiting to happen.

This obviously unsafe road has been the subject of complaints for at least a year, but the County Council's concept of duty has nothing to do with serving its residents, only feeding councillors' own self-regard, whilst safety has nothing to do with the protection of road users but everything to do with bagging cash in as sleazy a way as possible ("Safety Partnership".)

NB: The most ludicrous Local Authority in the country is, of course, the one which has so mismanaged its affairs that it has had the nerve to ask the NHS to grit its roads this winter. (Yes, that's right: the NHS.)

And yes, too, that Local Authority is none other than Cumbria County Council.

Advice: if you don't need to come to Cumbria, then stay well clear. Your absence might impact on a tourism economy without which Cumbria would probably be bankrupt, but don't worry about that: the County Councill will ensure that even more cameras are positioned in more places on the area's crumbling roads, and then spend the cash on patronising its own managers in another pre-pubertal exercise to demonstrate that it can pee higher up the wall than any other little boy.

Councils make more money from mobile cameras - but are putting a "nice spin" on removing the fixed cameras to look good.

Need proof? I picked up a speeding ticket from a mobile camera in Swindon recently. After almost a month my license hadn't returned and I eventually located the processing office and I needed it to hire a car on an overseas trip. A very helpful lady (yes, truly helpful and apologetic about the delay) explained that since the switch from fixed to mobile cameras around Swindon the number of tickets has sky rocketed and she plus one colleague couldn't cope with the volumes any more. She located my licence, processed the fine and posted my licence back the same day - wierdly I was very happy to jump that queue.

The true answer is fixed cameras don't make enough money. By the way my crime was 78mph on a totally empty dual carriageway. Strange why the target easy places like this when the most dangerous roads in the country are single carriageways, especially B roads. We live on one and buses, trucks, police cars and every other manner of cars drive at high speed though our 30mph limit, setting off the illuminated 30 sign.

I was also following a mobile speed camera van the other day past Kemble Airfield in Gloucestershire, we were both doing a steady 60mph except I lost sight of the van when I came to the next village and slowed to the signed 30mph limit - it hurtled off ahead. And arn't mobile vans subject to the same speed limits as other vans, namely 50mph on single carriageway A & B roads?

That's my gripe over with, you can't beat 'em and you wouldn't want to join 'em. A bunch of hyocrits - except for the nice lady who processed my speeding ticket of course!!