From the magazine

Speed traps are designed to make you fail

Melissa Kite Melissa Kite
 ISTOCK
EXPLORE THE ISSUE 24 May 2025
issue 24 May 2025

The builder boyfriend returned from a trip to London to inform me he was being done for speeding at 32mph, for crying out loud.

He was flashed by a camera crawling uphill in a 30 zone going through the almost middle-of-nowhere in the Ashdown Forest, on his way to visit his sister in Sussex for the weekend. A few weeks after I completed a speed awareness course for doing an improbably incorrect 40mph on a dual carriageway during a trip to see my parents in Coventry, we were going round the same rigmarole with him.

He showed me his letter from the Sussex Police on his return to Ireland. It was slightly less obnoxious than the one from West Midlands Police, but it amounted to the same thing: a £100 fine, sorry speed course. This means the cost of the driving penalties to visit the UK is more than twice the cost of the flights.

I know the spot where he got done, and it is nigh-on impossible to get up this steep hill at less than 30 near the very top without either stalling, changing down so suddenly you wreck your gearbox, or by putting your foot down very slightly. He didn’t manage it. He went 2mph over. It’s not about making people drive safely, it’s about challenging them to deploy the mental and physical agility to hit the exact number on the speedometer they say you have to hit, at the exact point you have to hit it, which makes British driving more like taking part in the Krypton Factor, if you remember that.

Why don’t the police make drivers get out of their cars at random roadblocks to climb a frame, swing from a rope, land on a bar, walk across the bar, jump into a pit of mud and crawl through the mud beneath a net to emerge at the other end by a certain time, then run back to their car, jump in and proceed on their way when a drill sergeant waves a flag at them?

A speed trap – aptly named – is designed to make you fail. They don’t want you to do the right number. They put the camera just before the brow of a steep hill in a 30 stretch because they want you to tease the accelerator slightly, fearing you won’t make it up the hill without stalling. They put a 30 limit on a main dual carriageway in a spaghetti junction of bypasses near Coventry, with a camera to monitor it, so that any slowcoach doing 40 on a road that looks like it might be a 60 is served up on a platter to be fined.

Back in rural Ireland, where the Garda can’t be fecked, and where you’d struggle to find a driver slowing down to 30mph to go up their own driveway, I helped the builder b log into the same system I had used to book my speed course.

He is about as computer illiterate as me. But I had done it a few weeks earlier, so I knew how it all went down. I was full of myself as I showed him which course to book and how it would work.

Except that now it didn’t work, because – using the same Microsoft Teams software as I had used a few weeks ago – all the upcoming courses were showing as unavailable.

‘I could book a physical one, and go back to London for a few days to do it,’ suggested the BB. ‘Are you mad?’ I exclaimed. ‘And get another speeding fine?’ Obviously, the course would be somewhere that involved him driving on a road that was 30mph the last time he was there and was now 20.

I wonder how many people have been done for speeding on the way to or (perhaps more comically) from a speeding course? You could entertain guests at dinner parties no end if you knew how many drivers are caught each year doing the exact same wrong speed again while on their way to or from the course where they were being penalised for doing it in the first place.

The BB rang a phone line and spoke to a nice lady who found him a date. I then tried to explain to the builder b how to take part in online conferencing. He stared blankly at me and did his thing of saying ‘I’m sure it will be fine’, which means he is not really listening because what I am saying is boring him to tears.

Lord only knows how I am going to get him to sit in front of my laptop and bypass his personality. I tried to explain to him that he can’t swear, he can’t tell rude jokes or make remarks that might be judged to be politically incorrect.

‘Just stare into the screen and listen without commenting on anything, no matter how ludicrous it is. Only speak to answer the trainer’s questions when he talks to you, and say what they want to hear,’ I explained. ‘Don’t interrupt, don’t argue, and above all don’t tell any jokes. Got it?’

‘I’m sure it will be fine,’ he said.

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