And NRMA-ACT Road Safety Trust chair Professor Don Aitkin, who drove the section of road for a video for The Canberra Times, said Athllon Drive was ‘‘a perfectly sensible place’’ for the cameras.

‘‘It’ll have the same effect as Hindmarsh Drive had which is, once people get used to it, it slows down the traffic. People say, ‘I better watch it’,’’ he said.

‘‘Of course you’ll have the hoons who say ‘I know how to deal with this. I’ll speed up here and slow down around the roundabouts and speed up again’. But sooner or later they get caught because they forget. But a $100 lesson is a lesson you tend to remember.’’

Testing of the cameras, which cover a 3.8km stretch of Athllon Drive between Beasley Street and Drakeford Drive, has detected some high speeds. One driver was travelling northbound at an average speed of 116km/h and another was travelling southbound at an average speed of 103km/h, even with roundabouts and multiple exit points.

The stretch of road is subject to a 80km/h speed limit.

Overall, 12 drivers have been detected speeding over the 12 days of testing - about one a day.

The location of the cameras have been criticised because there are four points where people can exit the road without being detected by the technology including at two roundabouts, which also have the potential to slow traffic in any case.

Justice and Community Safety Directorate deputy executive director legislation, policy and programs Karen Greenland said the high crash rate on Athllon Drive was a significant factor in determining that point to point cameras should go on the corridor.

On the nominated stretch of Athllon Drive there had been 456 crashes between 2004 and 2008, including a double fatality, and 568 crashes between 2008 and 2012.

‘‘So we need to look at the impact not only on speeding and the related issue of infringements, but also what the crash rates look like after this has been in for a period of time,’’ she said.

The crash rate on Athllon Drive had been second only to Hindmarsh Drive among the 42 corridors across the ACT considered for point-to-point cameras. That was both in terms of crashes per kilometre per year and the number of casualty crashes - those causing injury. Both roads now have the point to point technology.

Ms Greenland said despite the exit points and the roundabouts on Athllon Drive, people were more than capable of speeding along the stretch. A driver travelling 116km/h or 103km/h - on average over the entire distance - must have been travelling at ‘‘phenomenal’’ speeds along the straight sections.

‘‘Certainly for mid and high range speeding the presence of those roundabouts is not something that inhibits detection of that sort of level of speeding,’’ she said.

Ms Greenland said about 25,000 vehicles travelled that section of Athllon Drive each day. Figures have shown thousands of vehicles are exiting the road before passing a second camera. The detection only works if vehicles pass by both cameras.

‘‘There is an acceptance that there’s leakage in terms of people who are not going to pass through both detection points, but to the extent that is a major arterial road, many thousands of vehicles a day are passing past both detection points and so there’s an opportunity to influence the behaviour of those drivers,’’ she said.

The cameras are still in their testing phase and no motorists detected speeding by the technology are actually being fined yet. That is expected to start some time in the next week when the cameras are formally certified.

Ms Greenland said on Athllon Drive, the point to point cameras had been a better option than fixed speed cameras which tended to influence driver behaviour at one spot and not over a sustained distance.

‘‘They are also seen as being a fairer system because they don’t penalise a momentary lapse, so essentially you’ve got to be speeding over a reasonably long length of road and the criteria we used to identify potential sites did include the requirement that they were not less than 2km long,’’ she said.

The experience in other jurisdictions was of fewer speeding detections by point to point cameras because the goal was a change in driver behaviour.

‘‘Typically, they do result in a lower infringement rate than you would get from other types of speed cameras and that’s because it needs to be sustained speeding, it’s not just speeding for a few seconds,’’ she said.

Professor Aitkin said he was generally in favour of speed cameras.

‘‘The whole point of these are to save lives. Slower traffic means fewer deaths,’’ he said.