Speed awareness course

Maybe if enough time has elapsed in between they get another go.

I was not offered one on my first offence in thirty years, which I thought was a bit of a swizz.

I know someone who has done three, but two were in different police areas.

Chris

I know a lady who has been on two SA courses. She is 80, and shouldn't really be driving according to someone who occasionally has a lift off her. :-( I don't know how long it was between the two courses.

I had the Traffic Signal Awareness course after I was nicked for the first time in about 57 years driving, but only after I wrote an apologetic letter or email saying that I had covered the same stretch of road containing 16 traffic signals every Friday evening for about 10 years, it was my first offense, and I had felt sure I'd passed through on amber. The first thing I learned on the course was that amber means STOP. ;-)

You can take another course if the points you would otherwise have received expire under the totting up procedure, i.e every 3 years. I understand that the process for checking this across police authorities may not be very robust, so you can probably take courses more frequently than this if you speed in different parts of the country.

Amber means STOP *if* you can stop at the line, assuming that your brakes are roadworthy.

Amber means you should try your best to stop at the line.

But if you are so close that you can't stop, and your brakes are roadworthy, then timing is such that you should not encounter RED.

Crossing on yellow is bound to happen statistically a few % at the times. But you should not follow a car already crossing on yellow.

This devive is often used; the car behind closes up instead of stopping; to simulate a longer vehicle crossing on yellow :(

It makes me wonder what are actually the rules e.g. for a long arti lorry crossing traffic light. It would be difficult to judge for the driver if he can get clean through on yellow alone. But what if he can't stop for yellow?

Just STOP whatever is obviously a physical impossibility.

The main rule: Take your time; it is not F1.

I know all of that! The simple rule is to treat amber as a stop signal.

At the time the camera triggered I was roughly halfway across the junction and my speed was 26mph. Perhaps if I'd been doing 30....

That ties up with what we were told; if you transgress again within three years you get charged, no offer of a course.

I understood that red light cameras do not trigger till around 2 seconds after the red shows.

They told us that the camera cannot trigger before the red light shows, there are buried cables/sensors, and I suppose I would reach the place where the photograph placed me about 2 seconds later, in the centre of a fairly wide junction. It was a fair cop, I suppose...

However, since it also registered my speed, it is probably capable of triggering by speeding cars?

I might have this wrong, but I think 2 seconds at 26mph equals 76 feet, so it must have been a very big junction to be half way over.

A gentleman of your age! Tut, tut, tut.

:-) Thanks for the maths, I've been out at a Xmas Eve dance.

Obviously it must have been less than 2 seconds, but the crossroads are at Alan Turing Way and Ashton New Road, Manchester 11. Google Earth shows it as quite a large junction.

The speed measurement is a by-product of the camera triggering mechanism. To prove a speeding offence there is usually a requirement for a ruler painted on the road to measure the distance travelled between two timed pictures accurately. I have never seen a combination speed/traffic signal camera site but yes, it would be possible.

Maybe it measured my speed between the stop line and the point at which I reached when the photo was taken.

This might be of interest:

Interesting. It does tie up with what we were told, ie - the camera can't be triggered until the lights are on RED, which was enough to convince me that I had _really_ passed a red signal.

A mate 'jumped the lights' in a big orange council bus and appealed. They sent him the photograph, clearly showing him with the bus across the line and the speed etc. They also added 25 quid on the fine for the photo. ;-)

My dad was also accused of doing similar (but not in a bus ) by a couple of Policemen monitoring the lights that day. He took it to court and represented himself and as soon as the two officers stated (under oath) that they started duty at the same time but also stated different times, the case was immediately dismissed. ;-)

The thing that frustrates me with all these camera as whilst few of us would argue we were doing what we were caught doing at the time, that it doesn't allow for any discretion surrounding the build-up to that action (if there was such). Like, say you had just swerved to avoid a child running into the road and then gone across the lights *just* as they turned red (or whatever).

Going though a speed camera a just above the trigger threshold on an empty dry road at 3am as opposed to going though a camera at just under the trigger point outside a school at 3pm in the fog.

Cheers, T i m

I'd quite like to see you try that one in court.

"Sorry, m'lud, but I couldn't stop in time for the lights because there was a child in the road..."

Hmmm... They didn't send me a photo, they gave me a URL, and they didn't charge me. :-)