- “Speed on green” cameras sit at traffic lights and ticket Drivers for speeding even when the light is green — and they’ve been operating in Britain since 2019.
- In their first years in Leicester, one of them caught more than ten times as many Drivers as the area’s next busiest camera.
- Yet most Motorists still believe a camera at a junction only cares about one thing: red.
Picture the junction you drive through every day. The lights are green, traffic is moving, and you flow through with everyone else — maybe a touch over the limit, the way traffic often is when it’s keen to beat the change.
Three weeks later, a NIP lands on your doormat. Not for jumping a red light. For speeding — through a green one.
That’s not a paperwork error. It’s a camera doing exactly what it was designed to do, and most Drivers have no idea the design changed.
The Camera That Does Two Jobs
For decades, the deal at traffic lights was simple: the camera on the pole existed to catch red light jumpers. Cross on green and it had no interest in you.
“Speed on green” cameras ended that deal. They still record anyone jumping a red — but they also measure the speed of every vehicle passing through on green, and if you’re over the limit, that’s a speeding prosecution just as surely as any yellow box on a straight road.
They began appearing in Leicester in 2019, and by 2021 the city had five sites, on some of its busiest roads — Narborough Road, Glenhills Way, Redhill Way, St Margaret’s Way and Hinckley Road. The local safety partnership still lists speed-on-green sites among its core cameras today, and similar dual-function cameras have appeared in other parts of the country.
And the numbers they produce are remarkable.
Ten Times Busier Than Any Other Camera
In figures covering 2020, the speed-on-green camera on Leicester’s Narborough Road caught more than ten times as many Drivers as the area’s next most prolific camera.
One camera. At a junction. Out-ticketing every conventional speed camera around it by an order of magnitude.
Across Leicestershire as a whole, 48,819 Drivers were caught speeding in 2019, generating £4.8 million in fines. Even in 2020 — a year when lockdowns cut traffic by up to 90 per cent at times — 28,871 Drivers were still caught, and £2.88 million in fines still went out.
The safety partnership insists its cameras are placed on collision and casualty records rather than income, and publishes its site data to prove it. We’d simply observe that when a single junction camera catches ten times more Drivers than any other site, it isn’t catching ten times more dangerous Drivers. It’s catching Drivers who didn’t know the rules had changed.
Why Green Lights Catch So Many Drivers
Think about how you actually drive through a green light.
If anything, you speed up. The light might change; the junction is where you least want to be caught dawdling; the traffic around you is accelerating too. Generations of Drivers have learned that a green light means go — and that the camera on the pole is only interested in people who don’t stop for red.
Speed on green cameras are aimed at precisely that instinct. The junction is the one place on the road where Drivers habitually add a few miles per hour without thinking, and where none of them expect a speed check.
That’s what makes these cameras so productive — and it’s why the single most useful thing you can take from this article is a habit: treat every camera at a set of traffic lights as a speed camera. Because increasingly, it is one.
Don’t miss a story: join the free DriveProtect newsletter — straight-talking updates for British Motorists.
If One of These Tickets Lands on Your Doormat
A speed-on-green prosecution stands or falls on the same tests as any other speeding case.
The NIP has to be served correctly and on time. The device has to be type approved and properly calibrated — and dual-function cameras are complex pieces of equipment measuring speed in a busy, multi-lane environment, which is exactly where a specialist wants to see the evidence. The speed limit at the junction has to be lawfully signed. And if the case does stand, the penalty is still negotiable ground: course eligibility, Mitigating Circumstances, protecting a licence that’s already carrying points.
None of that is something to work out alone with a 28-day deadline ticking.
DriveProtect™ Members don’t have to. The moment a NIP arrives — from a junction camera, a van, or anywhere else — Members get direct access to a specialist Speeding Solicitor who reviews the case and advises them exactly what to respond, for a fraction of the normal cost of legal help.
The war on the British Motorist, straight to your inbox
Join the free newsletter — straight-talking updates on speed cameras, enforcement, and your rights as a Driver.
Got a NIP or points on your licence right now? See how DriveProtect Membership works — a specialist Speeding Solicitor in your corner from £25/month.
