The crux of the matter with constant monitoring from a classic car perspective ...
It's not easy being a classic car driver. Driving an older car in modern road traffic requires a lot of attention and in some disciplines the old vehicles are clearly inferior to modern cars. Everything is a little more leisurely, be it braking or accelerating.
This is where the modern surveillance culture on our roads quickly becomes a disaster. Red light cameras or speed monitoring systems are installed everywhere, mostly in the interests of road safety, but obviously also with interesting financial side-effects.
The classic car driver quickly falls victim to this constant monitoring, as it is much more difficult for him to maintain a constant speed than for the modern automobile equipped with cruise control and a digital display. An old speedometer can easily fluctuate between 50 and 60 km/h without the car changing speed.
It gets even trickier at controlled junctions. If the traffic light changes from green to orange, it may already be too late for a braking maneuver if you haven't been waiting for the light to change with your eyes peeled. An acceleration maneuver in order to cross the intersection in time when the light turns orange is also of little use in a slow-reacting classic car and the light flashes. And an expensive fine reaches the owner immediately.
Hardly any driver of an old car wants to break the traffic rules or gain an advantage by driving at breakneck speed; most of these fines are the result of minor mishaps that would very rarely have posed a risk to other road users. However, with state and local authorities soon to be monitoring all vehicles, driving in a van is becoming increasingly difficult and expensive ...
Note: After this article was published, there was a lot of discussion on Facebook and the basic tenor was that if a red light camera was triggered, it was certainly not the fault of the car, but of the driver. This is of course correct, because practically every classic car is capable of coming to a stop in time before the traffic lights if the driver is paying attention. However, I still wonder whether classic car drivers in particular do not "fall victim" to red light cameras or speed monitoring systems particularly often compared to the distance traveled ...
