“SpeedSpike” will it reduce speeding or is it another “Big Brother” invasion of secrecy?

In many cities it’s almost impossible to walk around without your movements being recorded by surveillance cameras. In fact, driving anywhere in Britain means having a picture of your car and license plate being snapped multiple times per journey. But what if you were being tracked from space, by satellite? It sounds spooky, but it’s now a reality in some parts of the world. Speed cameras which communicate with each other by satellite are being secretly tested on British roads.  “SpeedSpike” is a hi-tech device that can follow drivers’ progress for miles to calculate whether they have broken speed limits. It combines number plate recognition technology with global positioning satellites and they can be set up in a network to monitor tens of thousands of cars over huge areas for the smallest breach. The system uses similar methods of recognition as the cameras which enforce the congestion charge in London, and allow two cameras to ‘talk’ to each other if a vehicle appears to have travelled too far in too short a space of time.

After a covert national trial which has not been publicised until recently, just days after a report showed motorists have been fined almost £1billion in speeding tickets under the Labour government, authorities hope the new cameras will enable them to re-create the system used on motorway contra flows.

The Home Office is currently testing them at two sites – one in Southwark in London and another on the A374 between Antony and Torpoint in Cornwall.

Details of the secret trials emerged in a House of Commons report and immediately attracted criticism.  Conservative MP Geoffrey Cox, whose Devon constituency is close to the Cornish test site, said fundamental questions had to be addressed before such an ‘alarming’ level of surveillance was extended.  He said: ‘You always have to ask if it is really necessary to watch over people, to spy on them and film them.  ‘We will get to a point where it becomes routine and it should never be a matter of routine that the state spies on its citizens.’

Is this a deeper descent into a “Big Brother” society while decrying the technology as an invasion of privacy or will this really reduce the amount of speeding on the roads of Britain and actually make it safer to drive on the roads or be a pedestrian?

The technology, explains Andy Howard, head of road safety at U.K. motoring group AA, is not quite as sinister as it might sound. “It’s just a normal speed camera,” he says, but one that is hooked up to a network of speed cameras that use GPS satellites to track their locations, rather than directly tracking a driver’s route. Every time a car is photographed by one of the speed cameras, the time is recorded, and then the system calculates the average speed between two cameras to determine whether the driver was actually speeding.

“Theoretically, you could guard every entrance to a town and see if anyone averaged 30 mph inside,” Howard said. “But we don’t think this is likely.”


It would be “mathematically difficult” to calculate if a motorist has broken speeding laws if they had travelled through multiple speed zones, according to Howard, like driving from a 45 mph limit to a 70 mph zone on a highway. The technology would be most applicable on a long-distance run along a single highway, say, from London to Edinburgh.



“We already have ‘average-speed’ cameras through road works (construction zones). Cameras snap your license plate as you go in and as you go out,” he said. These cameras have been in service recording driver information since the year 2000. The only difference is that while these cameras are connected by wire, the new cameras would use GPS.

In the company’s evidence to the House of Commons Transport Committee, it boasted of ‘number plate capture in all weather conditions, 24 hours a day’ as well as pointing out the system’s low cost and ease of installation.

The company believes the cameras can be used for ‘main road enforcement for congestion reduction and speed enforcement’, can help to ‘eliminate rat-runs’ and cut speeds outside schools.

It said: ‘We have an urban test site at Salter Road in Southwark and are working in conjunction with the Metropolitan Police.

‘We also have an inter urban test site located on the A374 from Torpoint to Antony at which we are working with the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary.’

The trial is being carried out in conjunction with the police and the Devon and Cornwall Safety Camera Partnership.

Superintendent Tim Swarbrick, chairman of the partnership and head of roads policing, said it was being tested ‘on a live road system to assess how effective and accurate it is’.

Last week a report showed that motorists have been hit with speeding tickets worth almost £1billion under Labour.  However receipts have fallen since police were stopped from keeping part of the money raised from speed cameras.  It suggested that the explosion in the number of cameras was used as a ‘cash cow’ and that forces no longer have an incentive to install them.

Drivers were clobbered with 1.23million tickets in 2008, of which 1.03million were issued by speed cameras, the Home Office report revealed.

The tickets raised more than £73million for the Treasury that year, or £200,000 a day.  In total, 16million tickets have been issued since 1997, raising £913million.

The responses gathered from U.K. motorists when they were informed of the new satellite tracking experiment were uniformly negative. This instinctive recoil strengthened when it was mentioned that a unit of an American company, Tennessee-based PIPS Technology, is the one implementing SpeedSpike. PIPS did not respond to requests for comment. Similarly, the British government said it does not comment on trials that are still underway.



Dylan Sharpe, the campaign director of U.K.-based Big Brother Watch said: “We’re very much opposed to more surveillance. The government now knows exactly where we’ve been and how much we drive.



”We’ve had GPS systems, satellite navigation systems, it was only a matter of time before an agency worked out how to [use] GPS [to] track cars and their speed.”


But Howard says any data collected by the system and the transmission of driver information is regulated by the government, so “if you have the right guidelines and rules then the system wouldn’t be inappropriate”.

Support for regular speed cameras across the U.K. runs between 69 and 74 percent, according to AA’s figures. So while there are undoubtedly concerns over the spread of this sort of speed camera tracking, it seems as if the general public — and the media — are perhaps being just a little narrow-minded on the issue and this really is a trial to reduce deaths by speeding & to really make the roads safer.