great britain

We all know the drill. You see a speed camera, you slow down, you look at the camera, you check your speedometer and look for the camera again. But in the UK at least, reports now indicate that nearly half of the 1,000 speed cameras installed are entirely inactive.

Because many of the cameras installed in the UK during the 1990s failed to meet transportation department criteria for deployment, some 40% were immediately decommissioned. However, the boxes that house them are still there, even though many of them are empty altogether. Motorist groups are lobbying to have the inactive devices removed, citing them as a dangerous roadside distraction, but the government insists that whether they're in use or not, the visible presence of the camera boxes keep drivers' speeds in check.

BMW carried out a survey of 2,068 motorists in Great Britain and found that no matter what motorists claim to want, what they really want is a BMW. While 20% of respondents said they look at CO2 levels when they research new cars, 75% said they'd only buy a car if they saved money. Which really means they'd only buy a car that slurped less gas than the one in the driveway. Another notable tidbit in the "Driving Change" survey revealed that only 13-percent of people believed that other folks were really buying environmentally friendly cars because of reduced emissions. That means that those Britons know why you really bought that Prius...