Speed awareness courses are a racket

I am not surprised that two million people have attended speed awareness courses (“Courses for speeding drivers steer £87m a year into police coffers”, News, last week). Speed limits have lowered across the country with little or no regard for long-standing criteria designed to ensure they are appropriate.
Before new limits are set, roads should be assessed, with 85th percentile checks to gauge the speed at which the vast majority of drivers pass. If this is not done — or if the result is disregarded and a lower limit is imposed anyway — drivers are likely to flout the law in large numbers. In my experience, they do.
The fact that otherwise law-abiding people are being offered “education as an alternative to prosecution” shows these £90 courses are just a means of extracting cash. Worse, for minor infractions of inappropriate speed limits, drivers now find themselves being treated not only as cash cows but as children.Malcolm Brockman, former area traffic inspector for Kent police, Maidstone
We have only ourselves to blame if we get caught. I have been on a course and it worked: it made me realise I needed to concentrate more on what speed I was doing. Embarrassingly, I was a police officer at the time — but maybe that’s why I realised I was in the wrong and took it on the chin.Simon Watson, Brighton
I’ve taken two of these courses in 20 years, and had to suffer the smug, condescending platitudes of the “instructors”. One was for doing 44mph on a dual carriageway that, for no obvious reason, had a 40mph limit. I received extensive “instruction” on the death and destruction my actions could have caused.DH Wilson, Hotham, East Yorkshire
I don’t get out much, so my course was a really good morning. One man grew very angry, which was entertaining, and I came away with a good pen (by accident), which was not claimed when returned. The instructor was excellent. It’s a shame you have to be caught speeding to go on one.James Hollingworth, Derby
The introduction of 20mph speed limits continues apace in rural Berkshire and Oxfordshire, but no one seems to have told Google’s sat-nav boffins. Returning to the East Midlands from the south coast, we drove through village after village sporting brand-new 20mph road signs — but the sat-nav stubbornly displayed 30mph. I wonder how long it will be before the programme is updated to reflect what’s really happening on the ground. Maybe I should google that.Peter Sergeant, Loughborough