THERE was rush-hour chaos when a coach and a Mitsubishi 4x4 collided on the A19 at 8am yesterday.

North Yorkshire Police said they crashed near Abbotsway Boarding Kennels. The road was closed until 9.20am, but no-one was injured.

A marked speed camera van was spotted three miles from the incident by a motorist on the Easingwold bypass, but it failed to attend.

The motorist said: “Surely the question needs to be asked why the issuing of speeding tickets has greater priority than responding to an accident that potentially involved children and injuries to adults. Why didn’t the camera vehicle head immediately for the incident? It could have been there in two to three minutes!”

A force spokeswoman said the van did not attend because others were quickly on the scene. Civilian camera operators have no crash training and would only attend in an “extreme emergency”, she said.

She added: “They are not trained and he wouldn’t have known there was someone there.”