Freeway”s speed eyes ”acurate”

Hamish Heard
Controversial speed checks on the Princes Freeway between Geelong and Melbourne are accurate, according to a joint Independent and Victoria Police experiment.
The finding has poured cold water on motorists’ claims that dodgy readings have cost them speeding fines.
Doubt over the readings have reached state parliament where Upper House Member for Western Victoria David Koch said a constituent had complained he was “unjustly fined” after inaccurate readings at the overhead checks.
The motorist claimed to have recorded a reading of 92km/h at the Vicroads advisory speed check when his speedometer showed he was travelling at 100km/h, Mr Koch said.
“There is little doubt that my constituent’s experience is not unique,” Mr Koch told parliament.
“If the overhead speed check readouts are inaccurate and known to be so then surely this government is just revenue raising.”
But the checks returned accurate readings in the Independent and police test this week.
The Independent accompanied Geelong Traffic Management Unit Senior Constable Andrew Hines as he drove through the advisory speed check twice in each of the three lanes.
The readouts from the speed checks matched the reading from the police car’s calibrated speedometer to within 1km/h in each of the six tests.
“Speedometers on police cars are regularly calibrated to within 2km/h, so you could take our little experiment as pretty good evidence the speed checks are, in fact, accurate,” Sen Const Hines said.
He likened motorists’ complaints about unjust fines because of the speed check to “a tradesman blaming his tools”.
“I just think they have got themselves caught and they have to blame something, so they blame the advisory speed checks,” he said.
Sen Const Hines urged motorists noticing discrepancies between their speedometer readings and the speed checks to have their speedometers checked and calibrated.