Yesterday a story on the Today Tonight current affairs TV show (on Australia’s Channel Seven) annoyed me. Like countless other stories before it, this one featured an expert going on about how inaccurate police radars can be, if not operated correctly. It isn’t online, but this story from Channel Nine’s A Current Affair is in a similar vein.

The message of these endlessly recycled TV stories is that speed cameras and police radar traps are inaccurate and unfair revenue raisers, and that anyone driving lawfully will probably be hit with undeserved speeding fines. To these experts I pose a simple question:

If speed cameras are as inaccurate and unfair as you make out, then why, in 24 years of driving at the speed limit, have I never received even one speeding fine from an incorrect camera?

I’ve probably driven past between 2000 and 3000 speed cameras or hand-held radars in my driving years, within a couple of km/h of the speed limit. If all the TV reports were to be believed, I should have had many undeserved speeding fines by now … but I’ve had no fines at all, undeserved or otherwise.

I’m not saying that mistakes don’t happen. Some do, and that isn’t fair. However my experience suggests that mistakes and unfair speeding fines are nowhere near as common as current affairs TV shows portray. Its a human tendency to try to transfer blame for one’s own shortcomings, and giving people excuses to blame speed cameras is obviously popular with TV viewers.