Enforce the speed law

Crazily, the speed cameras in London's 30 mph zones are regularly being set so that they only catch drivers who touch 43 mph, the Evening Standard reveals today. "Ho, ho," some drivers may jeer. "What difference does it make? No one pays any attention." But it does matter. The accident rates are clear. Of pedestrians hit at 20 mph, 95 per cent survive. At 30 mph, 55 per cent are killed. At 40mph, 85 per cent.

Such brutal logic means that one recent tendency has been to increase the spread of 20 mph zones in residential streets, backed up by speed bumps.

I live in one such neighbourhood myself, where there are many young children.

I wholeheartedly approve. There are motorists who mutter at the restrictions, but to hell with that. A car's only a machine for getting from A to B. It's not a kind of metallic lover, wrapping its driver in a psychosomatic embrace - though, to listen to many drivers, you'd think it came ahead of wife or mistress in their affections. (I put it like this, because men are still the ones most likely to think this way, though sheer observation demonstrates that younger women are swiftly catching up.)

But what's the point of this array of regulations if the law isn't enforced? You might as well have a new sign put up alongside all the multitudinous street-side clutter, saying: "This is a zone where all the other signs should be ignored."

In the 17th century they had neighbourhoods called "Alsatias, " where everyone knew the law was just a scrap of paper. One of the most notorious was the London district then known as White Friars, through which Fleet Street now runs. It was a sanctuary for all kinds of criminal (just as it later was for lawyers and journalists). We're supposed to have outgrown this way of organising cities, though in parts of Harlesden or Hackney you might not think so.

London is fast becoming a social monument to laws that are not enforced. The Government promises, for example, a new law against beggars. But begging has been illegal since mid-Victorian times, under legislation against vagrancy. These days, the law is simply not applied.

Soft-heartedness, and memories of Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, are misplaced. Very few of London's beggars are without beds, food or a bit of spare cash.

I once did the night soupandsandwiches round with the Salvation Army, starting from their "citadel" in Oxford Street. We didn't set out until midnight. Why? To make sure that those who had to catch the last Tube home had already left the streets. This was by far the majority of those you see panhandling round Leicester Square, the Strand and every other corner of central and inner London.

Are speed restrictions now set to join the vagrancy laws as "just one of those things," like the ancient law against practising archery on a Sunday, which was, until recently, still on the statute book?

Already the everproliferating speed cameras have a strong tinge of farce. According to the AA, only one in 10 nationally has any equipment in, apart from a flash-bulb. And it's not long since the Norfolk police acknowledged that every single one of that county's cameras was a filmfree fake.

Here's a clue to how to solve London's policing crisis, I suppose. Stand blow-up coppers on every street corner - I'm sure the Ann Summers shops will be happy to act as suppliers - and cross your fingers that burglars and vandals, like car drivers faced with empty cameras, will respect the symbol as much as the reality.

Few people realise - and nor did I till I spoke to the AA yesterday - that no motorways at all have cameras policing the supposed 70 mph limit. Those camera-like objects you often see on motorway bridges are sensors, checking on traffic flow and congestion. All this helps explain why the going rate for motorway speeds is 80 mph. No one ever gets notified of an offence until far above that. And the VIP going rate - for royal princesses or government ministers - seems to be about 100 mph.

Of course, like almost every present-day failing in the public services, the speed camera story has its technological explanation. The expansion of speed cameras in London, we are told, has produced such a long list of offenders that the processing unit, down in darkest Sidcup, hasn't been able to cope. One cobbled-together solution has been to raise the implicit speed-limit to 43 mph. The longer-term solution - please stop giggling at the back there - is "a major overhaul", which will involve "re-programming" and "new technology."

The joke is that, under London's so-called cash-forcameras scheme, introduced a year ago, an upsurge in the number of fines was meant to fund an ever-increasing proliferation of cameras (several of them, I dare say, with film in). It was like a pyramid selling scheme, supposed to bring wealth beyond the dreams of avarice to every fool who falls for it. And like all such schemes it has imploded. The scheme found itself facing a £1.4 million deficit within six months.

Thus does law enforcement descend into low comedy. Technology watchers should keep an eye out for the proportion of the congestion charge which, as with speed cameras, eventually slithers away into computer costs and administration. But much more important for road safety: the dead zone of the congestion charge has, by displacement, put greater pressure on all roads between it and the North and South Circulars. You can observe here how congestion provokes red-light jumping - even by buses - and, once drivers break free, speedlimit busting.

The law is the law. It should either be enforced or, if it can't be enforced, it should be officially abandoned. Then we shall at least know where we stand. For law-enforcers, as for the rest of us, honesty really is the best policy.