BRAKE, the UK’s leading road safety charity, is as fed up as the rest of us with drivers who treat our roads like their own personal race tracks.

The charity has called on police and courts to crack down on motorists caught flouting the speed limits.

In January this year the number of fines issued to drivers in West Yorkshire was 6,048 - more than three times the number issued in January 2016.

Either more drivers are ignoring the speed limit or the existing system of fines just isn’t working.

Earlier this month, the Association of Chief Police Officers started a debate over speed enforcement.

Under current ACPO guidance drivers enjoy a buffer zone - calculated by increasing the speed limit by ten per cent and adding 2mph. This allows motorists to get away with speeding at 78mph on the motorway without being punished.

So ACPO has floated the idea of scrapping the buffer zone and adopting a zero tolerance on speeding. This would mean a driver could be fined for doing 31mph in a 30mph zone.

Of course, even a zero tolerance policy would need to be applied with a degree of common sense. Anyone who has driven down Manchester Road knows how hard it is to keep to 30mph.

Instead of a crackdown on drivers doing 1mph more than the speed limit we’d rather see concerted action to ban danger drivers such as the one clocked at 160mph on the westbound stretch of the M62 between junctions 26 and 27 last year.