English City Councils Plan Shutdown on Speed Cameras

Now here’s a magnificent dose of scathing irony to kick off your morning–several city councils (the current list of likely affected includes Bracknell Forest, Gloucestershire, Kent, Devon, Hertfordshire and Plymouth) in Great Britain are moving to shut down theirspeed cameras.  Why? Due to lack of funds.

Where before, the citizenry were decryingthe devices as nothing more than a way to extort funds from them for catching even the most minor of traffic violations, we discover now that they were a bigger money sink than previously indicated. See, they were funded largely by the Road Safety Grant, which following the general elections, took a forty-three percent slash to the guts. Apparently the British government, like a lot of other governments these days, is hemorraging cash and looking to staunch the flow, and the Road Safety Grant looked like a ripe target for savings.

And so, the devices once thought of as a big cash windfall to beleaguered cities is now being shut down because it’s too costly to maintain them. How’s that for morning irony?