Detective Superintendent Andy Cox, from Scotland Yard’s traffic teams, said 2,020 speeders were recorded between April 20-27 this year, compared to just 268 in the same period last year.
He said that wile the number of motorists on London’s roads has dropped during lockdown, the number of people suffering life-changing injuries in road traffic collisions is about the same.
“We’ve seen incredible speeds, incredible risk,” Cox told the London Evening Standard. “Some of the people we’ve stopped have said things like ‘because of Covid-19 we didn’t expect you to be doing enforcement’, but it’s an absolute priority for us — probably more so than ever because of the increase in speed.
“Every one of those extreme speeders is entirely selfish: they’re not considering other road users, the wider impacts. They are frankly disgraceful. We’ve had since the lockdown, nine fatalities, so many people seriously injured.”
He added that NHS workers were “walking and cycling in a lot of these zones” which is kind of weird when you think about it. Obviously he thinks that speeding motorists are more likely to pay attention to that fact.
He's probably right: some speeding motorists will only moderate their behaviour to save the lives of people who are saving people's lives.