Meantime this very newspaper reported last week that more than 4,000 motorists have been fined for speeding on the North Shields end of the Coast Road, and that their fines total more than £276,000.

This is what happens. Motorists, especially at rush hour, join the seemingly interminable queue up to the Billy Mill roundabout.

Many of these motorists are already stressed and irritable; their house prices are in retreat, they are rapidly becoming obese, food prices have shot through the roof, charvers have thrown eggs at their windows, they have shares in Northern Rock, they can no longer smoke in their local, petrol is now the price of vintage wine, and next week (if the tour operator doesn't go bust and the air traffic controllers aren't on strike) they're flying on holiday via Terminal Five at Heathrow.

Slowly they inch their way forward in the queue, grinding their teeth, biting their already chewed-down nails.

How they long to be on the open stretch and away! Finally they are past the roundabout and onto the dual carriageway, and some kind of fleeting (if illusory) freedom beckons. They stick their foot down and roar into action!

But hang on – what's this? After only 300 yards, just as they're getting into top gear and really hitting that juice, just as the thickening of the arteries is slightly arrested, large signs loom with the words '30mph'. Serried ranks of traffic cones appear, and the number of lanes shrink. There is not a sign of anyone working, nor any immediately obvious reason why they should slow down.

For many drivers, this frustration ranks as a kind of motorised coitus interruptus, and is the final straw. They have reached breaking point "To hell with this!" they yell, and in what is to be a doomed show of rebellion, refuse to slow to what they consider is an insulting crawl.

The cameras click, the fine comes through the post and the rest is history.

But in truth they have been stitched up, and it is left to this column to expose the real facts.

The official explanation for the road works is that it's 'bridge strengthening'. Ask yourself – do we have any proof of the bridge being weak in the first place? Has anyone heard any creaking sounds? Has the bridge been sagging in the middle?The answer to all these questions is no. The weak bridge is a red herring, an illusion. There is no weak bridge!

To prove this, I recruited two dozen Sumo wrestlers, and in the middle of the night had them jump up and down in unison on the bridge. Result? Not even a hint of that bridge collapsing. Sound as a pound (or at least a euro). So what is happening?

The entire exercise is a ruse. Both national and local government are in such dire straits, and so unable to raise the funds to see us through the present and future financial crises, that the word went out from the powers-that-be to find 'surrogate taxes', ways of raising money for which the politicians would not be blamed.

It was worked out by traffic psychologists that the most effective way of making motorists exceed the speed limit, (and hence cough up on speeding fines) was to slow them right down at the exact moment when they thought they could speed up to 70mph.

A certain percentage of the short-fused species was guaranteed to crack.
Thus the pretence of bridge repairs.The outlay – traffic cones, a handful of specially made construction signs, a few out-of-work actors in orange dayglo tops, speed cameras, administration charges – was no more than £50,000, with the return more than five times that amount and growing daily.

Expect similar sleights of hand throughout the country soon. It is, as they say, cost-effective.

PETER MORTIMER