More Women Caught in the Fast Lane

The Scotsman, Friday 18 th November 2005
ALASTAIR DALTON, TRANSPORT CORRESPONDENT

SPEEDING convictions among women drivers are soaring because of the increasing use of speed cameras which are impervious to the charms of the fairer sex, a motoring group has claimed.

Figures for the most serious speeding cases show those involving female drivers in Scotland have increased by more than a quarter over the past five years, while those for males have fallen slightly.

The AA Motoring Trust said in the past some speeding women may have escaped prosecution when they were stopped by the police, but now most offenders were caught by speed cameras.

However, police dismissed the claim as "churlish, sexist and without foundation".

Andrew Howard, the head of road safety for the trust, said of the figures: "I think this trend is largely down to speed cameras. When speeding tickets were only given out by police officers, I suspect you were more likely to get told off if you were a woman and more likely to get a court summons if you were a man. But cameras can't discriminate."

Over the last decade, the proportion of speeding offenders in Scotland who were caught by cameras has increased from 10 per cent to about 80 per cent. Although male drivers still account for the vast majority of the most serious speeding offences, those by female drivers increased by 26 per cent to 1,753 between 1998 and 2003. The male figure fell by 3 per cent to 10,273. There was a similar increase among women drivers south of the Border, of 24 per cent to 24,920, while male cases were down by 14 per cent to 115,078.

Ruth Bridger, of the AA trust, said: "There was once a case that if you were a woman, a policeman might be more lenient and you could get away with a warning. They just took the licence plate number and that was it. But speed cameras don't care who's driving and they don't accept excuses."

Ms Bridger added that the increase was also because women were being more assertive in their vehicles. "Over the years women have become more aggressive behind the wheel and are beginning to drive more like men," she said. "As a result, they are getting more speeding fines."

But Stuart Wilson, a spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland, said: "The statistic on women is just a plain statistic. It is churlish, sexist and without foundation to suggest that in 21st-century Scotland women escape speeding fines by being 'charming'." He added nearly all the figures related to drivers who had been caught by police patrols rather than speed cameras. He said: "In almost every one of these cases that will be drivers who have been stopped by police officers for exceeding the threshold for fixed-penalty notices. That means they have been going so fast that the officers who stopped them have reported them to the procurator-fiscal for court proceedings instead of dealing with it with a fixed-penalty notice. People caught by cameras will normally receive a fixed-penalty notice and are not included in these figures."

A spokeswoman for the Scottish Executive said: "There could be a number of reasons for these changing patterns."