from the speed detectors website...............
Road Angel Legality Confirmed ..
This is a question we are being asked a lot at the moment by our customers, driven mainly by press surrounding the proposed “Road Safety Bill” for Parliament.
The reality is that the bill may not get heard in the short term due to higher priorities amongst the 100 or so bills proposed for hearing this Spring. The current parliamentary activity which has been poorly documented in the press, is the first phase to decide if the bill will be progressed. If the bill is progressed, the process then starts to debate publicly and privately what they will and won’t ban, expected to take around 12 months. If that is agreed, it takes 6 months to become law, so the Department for Transport have confirmed in writing that the earliest any change could take effect is the second half of 2006, if at all.
The primary focus is to ban Laser Jammers, as these units prevent the police getting a speed on your vehicle. This is not part of the Road Angel product. They also intend to ban Radar detectors, which are again very different to the Road Angel product. Radar detectors are proposed for banning as they can determine which cameras are live and which are not, effectively allowing the user to speed through inactive cameras, working against the reason for having the camera installed at that location, “Reducing Speed”. In this scenario, Road Angel will remain unchanged and fully legal in it’s current format as it does not include either of these functions.
Secondly, but less likely, they could ban the use of passive laser detection, which the Road Angel does have, but without going into too much detail, this maybe very complicated to ban. If the bill does ban laser detection, Classic Road Angel (The black unit) will require the laser alert golf ball to be disconnected from the unit, making the Road Angel 100% legal. On the New Road Angel, the laser alert is integrated, but can be disabled on the unit by the owner, without intervention from ourselves. If the customer wants a more permanent fix, we can send a firmware upgrade via e-mail to remove that functionality, again making the unit 100% legal.
GPS Camera locators are not under review in the proposed bill and we have written evidence from the Department for Transport to that effect. The Government understand and fully accept the safety benefits of GPS based safety systems. Products like Road Angel warn of danger areas, advising users to reduce speed and be aware of the potential hazard ahead, supporting perfectly what safety cameras aim to achieve.