Fixed speed cameras near Glastonbury have now been switched off

Fixed speed cameras in the Glastonbury area and across Somerset were switched off yesterday after budget cuts led to funding being withdrawn from the Safety Camera Partnership which was disbanded as a result.

Avon and Somerset Constabulary will now make use of a team of six (although they may in future increase that number) mobile vans to monitor and enforce speed limits across the region in a move that they state will offer them the greatest amount of flexibility in dealing with speeding motorists.

A statement from Avon and Somerset Police said that it would now work with other organisations on a wide range of other road safety initiatives while improving road safety remains a high priority for all the partners despite the challenging spending cuts.

While Somerset decommissions its cameras, across Oxfordshire the cameras were being switched back on again from 9am today (which is no April Fool’s joke for speeding motorists) as in the 8 months since they were turned off it has been determined that there had been an increase in deaths and injuries on the areas roads.

According to data from the Thames Valley area collated between August 2010 and January this 2011, there was an increase in accidents from 62 compared with 60 from the same period twelve months earlier. Meanwhile the number of people injured in these accidents went up from 68 to 83, while 18 people were killed at the end of 2010, compared with 12 during the previous year.

While 8 months isn’t really in my opinion a useful amount of time to collect data in such a controversial area, it will nevertheless be interesting to see how much the road accident statistics in Avon and Somerset differ in the next 12 months, when compared with the past 12.

Let us know what you think below.