UK we have had speed cameras for ages. There was a trend for people to either spray paint the lens or even firebomb the camera. So they had to put in a second (video) camera mounted as high as possible to protect the first camera, quite amusing that a safety camera has to be kept safe by another safety cameras, its cameras all the way down.
Personally I think speed cameras that monitor a fixed point are pretty dumb unless that fixed point is an accident black spot such as outside a school or a red light camera for dangerous set of traffic lights. Its far better to have average speed cameras for a large section of road but those are more costly as you need way more cameras to make them work outside of motorways as you need to cover all the junctions properly.
Latest cameras we have in testing can see if you do not have your seat belt done up or are using your phone. Just stopping people from using their phone has to be the biggest step forward we can make with modern road safety.
One of the first speed cameras I remember in Belgium was just behind the crest of a highway. Drivers would give more power to drive up the hill at the speed limit, they’d cross the crest and that same power would make them overshoot the speed limit. So they put a camera right there to maximize the fines. Without the camera there was nothing special about that spot, but with the camera there were a lot of front end collisions. Fine revenue was apparently more important than safety.
Placement of new speed cameras has gotten more sensible with time fortunately, but those old speed traps are still left in place unfortunately. For highways we now have a lot of average speed tracking and that has really improved the flow of traffic. And for villages/towns, there is often a clearly visible lone camera box at the beginning of the low speed zone, those work so well that there is often no camera in them, just the box is enough.
Ah yes, the good old UK where it’s normal to arrest people for saying mean things on the internet and you’ve disarmed the working class, not to mention the UK created the biggest human rights problem in the middle east when your prime minister Balfour released the balfour declaration and now we have a settler colonial ethno nationalist apartheid state flagrantly committing genocide while using DARVO psychological abuse tactics and pretending to be the victim. thanks for all that white anglo saxon British imperialism!!!
Thanks for your contribution!
Lmao, ill take the downvotes, better than living in lala land like the brits and not accepting the reality of what you’ve all been trying to pass off as civilized behavior for the last millennia has stained the world while normalizing genocide and exploitation. But god save the king right?
How about instead of speed cameras you change your road designs? People won’t speed if they cannot speed safely.
Make your roads less wide. Add some curves, depending on required max speed, you make the curves larger or smaller. On lower speed roads, add obstacles to drive around.
There are many forms of traffic management that don’t require speeding cameras but then again, speeding cameras are for making the government money, not for traffic safety
I agree. T. Has a sports car so i don’t speed on eteiaght lines but i go into corners 2x as fast as the people who speed in straight line think is possible.
People won’t speed if they cannot speed safely.
You have more faith in humanity than I do.
Where do you live that nobody drives unsafely and infrastructure can just be overhauled as soon as a problem is identified? I want to move there!
Why make it more complicated for self driving cars? Several companies already have decent AD systems. Realistically more than 100% of cars will be driven with some degree of automation in the next decade.
Just ticket as a percentage of total wealth. Even billionaires can’t afford too many $250M tickets.
People won’t speed if they cannot speed safely.
…
I get it, good road design helps stop speeding but the idea that safety even crosses the mind of people going 80 in a 60 is laughable.
The fines should be compounding, after each ticket the fine goes up 10% until people learn to just drive the fuckin limit.
Any crime you can pay your way out of without any other repercussions just punishes poor people. To the wealthy it’s just cost of having fun.
This is something that has been proven over and over. Make the roads smaller and people automatically start driving slower.
Sure, thereay still be an eventually asshole but with the right design you could make a risky (for you) 80 in a 60 zone, but you can’t do 100 because you wouldn’t make it. That already helps curbing the worst but it’s also a psychological thing that makes most people slow down to the speed that you want. It’s much more effective than speeding cameras but it doesn’t make money
doesn’t make money
It also COSTS an incredible amount of money. Ontario has some pretty terrible, unmaintained roads, before we start hand holding BMWs so they don’t get tickets we should be repairing our existing infrastructure and maybe putting in some more bike lanes.
It’s not about actual safety, but perceived safety. If the design directly prevents you from feeling like you can go fast, you don’t do it.
Honest to god, it’s not that hard to do 40 km/h in these zones. They post a sign telling you there’s a speed camera coming up. You just have to go 40 for like 20 meters to avoid a ticket.
Why should we socialize the cost of “fixing” the road design, when we can instead make the individuals who speed pay?
We donthat because we found that wide roads make people drive faster unconsciously. If you design roads badly, people will speed, it will be dangerous. Design roads better and you save lives.
Putting up signs is what most countries have done for decades with exactly 0 results.
A slightly different post had road fatalities in a graph for the US, Canada, and Australia, showing insane levels of road deaths. A secondary graph was added showing the Netherlands at a fraction of those countries, even though the Netherlands is much more densly populated.
Wanna know why? Because the Netherlands does this all the time. Any time an intersection has a lot of accidents, they break up the damn thing and put in a completely newly designed one, and traffic deaths go down. A road has too much speeding? They’ll tear out that crap, put in a new road designed in such a way that people will automatically drive the correct speed et voila, speeding stops, Ross fatalities go down
That’s why you want to do that
Both is good, because the way our streets are designed are both dangerous and expensive. Narrowing that 40 zone by the school can remove excess road space that now doesn’t need to be maintained, cleaned, plowed, or salted. The excess space could be used by school, have trees planted, or be used for alternative transport like transit or bikes.
The roads are currently designed to prioritize driver throughput and provide “wiggle room” for driver error, often at the expense of people outside of the vehicle. Many of the concepts that engineers use to make highways safe were applied to city streets, which in hindsight maybe we don’t want our city streets to be designed like highways.
The problem is that people are AWFUL at evaluating their own risk when driving, and drive at speeds that ARENT safe. Look at how few people leave appropruate stopping distances between vehicles, which is the #1 factor in preventing accidents.
The methods you proposed would likely decrease the speed vehicles travel at (ie from 80 to 60) because drivers feel like they can’t travel at that speed, but the road likely still isn’t safe for vehicles to travel at 60 when its that narrow.
Speed cameras catch everyone speeding, 24/7, and are the single best, economical, way to eliminate speeding from a road. Cop can’t pull over every vehicle going 80 on a 4 lane road rated for 60, but the camera can ticket them all.
For sure, promote a narrower road, encourage MUP over sidewalks, and encourage safer driving when you talk to your councilors, but road reconstruction happens, generally, once every 25-50yrs. We can’t wait for that timeframe to fix these problems.
There will always be new people that speed. And people not knowing the place that speed.
People vandalize speed cameras
Toronto city council decided last week that it will install “larger, more visible and clearer” signs to warn drivers where automated speed enforcement cameras are located in the city.
“HEY VANDALS! THE SPEED CAMERAS ARE OVER HERE!”
They need cameras pointing at the speed cameras to catch the vandals, and maybe cameras pointing at those cameras just in case.
I would bet good money on it being only a matter of time before they vandalize the cameras watching cameras.
It may get to a point where tax dollars are wasted having undercover cop cars, maybe even plain clothes officers, watching the cameras for vandals
Temples fingers
Ex…cellent!
I don’t really care that much either way for speed cameras. They work in a very limited fashion, but they punish the poor the most, and the money goes to cops.
At the end of the day speed cameras are a solution to a problem that doesn’t need to exist. We are failing to use technology available to us for basically no reason - we already know how to slow people and calm traffic without any kind of economic/punitive incentive.
Hey I got a ticket for going 57 in a school zone where the posted limit is 50, except the road only borders the far end of the school yard at the tip of its soccer field, with no way for students to exit, and the road itself is 4 lanes and should really have a speed limit of 60, and it was Sunday… Easter Sunday to be precise, so it was literally a school zone surrounded by days off.
Imagine if I hadn’t been caught! I’m a Menace II Society, for sure.
Where do you live with a 50km/h school zone? That is psychotic.
I don’t know about the guy you are asking, but I have multiple school zones with a 50kph limit in my area as well.
The school zones in my area are 30kph, and a lot of people find that excessive and want it slower, so 50 is wild to me.
I believe rural school zones are sometimes 50km/h. In context the non-school zone speed limit is usually 80km/h or more, often with visibility from one horizon to the other and a sprawling parking lot, it’s not quite the same as a congested urban school with a driveway big enough to fit a single bus and dozens of cars parked along the curb.
Even when I lived in rural areas, the zones were 30kph where I am from. Parks, and playgrounds, are also generally included.
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but they punish the poor the most
They punish people who speed the most. If you make the needle on your dash point to the number that is posted on the road signs, you don’t get a ticket.
I’ve gotten a ticket for going 1 over on a downhill. If you think that’s reasonable, you’re likely one of the idiots who created these things.
Citation needed. They don’t set them at 1 over because it’s hard to prove they are that accurate, your speedo also only has to be +/-3% in Ontario.
Demands citation. Makes claim. Leaves no citation. Stay classy, San Diego.
but they punish the poor the most
Does being poor compel people to speed or something?
The problem is two-fold: one is that our roads are designed to encourage bad driving behaviour, and drivers feel entitled to drive in a way that’s convenient (but not safe).
Have you ever tried to get traffic calming measures implemented in a community, especially around school zones? It’s excruciatingly difficult, and a few complaints from NIMBYs will have those measures removed, wasting taxpayer money and not solving any problems.
It’s infuriating that low powered micromobility devices like e-scooters are so severely restricted, but multi-ton weapons can be operated with almost no enforcement or consequences.
Does being poor compel people to speed or something?
No, but $100+ to a poor person could be the difference between literal life and death.
$100+ to someone well off or rich is nothing but pocket change.
The solution to this is sliding scale fines. The better off you are the more you get fined.
Why should a poor person have to spend 90% of their money on a fine when a “rich” person only has to spend 0.0009% for the exact same infraction.
No, but $100+ to a poor person could be the difference between literal life and death.
Sure, but nobody is compelling someone to break traffic laws. Someone who can’t afford a fine will probably drive way more cautiously.
But very few poor people can even afford a car these days, so this doesn’t seem like a real concern.
The solution to this is sliding scale fines. The better off you are the more you get fined.
I do agree with that. And more than that, the consequences should include lost time. Imagine some rich asshole who has to do 40 hours of community service. They’d look like a total ass in front of their boss or employees.
Poor people generally don’t own cars, and if you can afford to own a personal vehicle, you can afford to pay for driving like an asshole in one.
What a strange disconnected reality you live in.
That or you’re just a troll.
Either way im blocking your dumbass.
You know that you can drive a car you don’t own right? And not every person who is ticketed is driving like an asshole. I got a 100 dollar ticket for driving 57 in what was normally a 50 km zone, but there was brand new signage up that I had literally 4 seconds to read (I went back and timed it) that gave: months of the year, days of the week, and hours of the day that the new 40 km/h speed limit was enforced. But because I can’t read at the speed of light while driving down the road, bam, ticket.
It isn’t illegal to go under the limit. If you were unsure of the timing of the 40 zone, the safe thing would be to just do 40 anyway. I agree its still not a great system, my area typically has a 40 sign with yellow lights that flash during times the 50 zone drops to a 40. It’d be better to just always have it be a 40 zone.
It doesn’t help if this was a long time ago, but you could contest the ticket with the information you gathered.
I know someone who got a ticket but the sign was obscured by a tree branch. After contesting the ticket, the ticket was dropped and the signage was fixed
You know that you can drive a car you don’t own right?
You know it costs money to gas, maintain, insure, and/or rent a car right?
And not every person who is ticketed is driving like an asshole. I got a 100 dollar ticket for driving 57 in what was normally a 50 km zone, but there was brand new signage up that I had literally 4 seconds to read (I went back and timed it) that gave: months of the year, days of the week, and hours of the day that the new 40 km/h speed limit was enforced. But because I can’t read at the speed of light while driving down the road, bam, ticket.
Fact of the matter is you were speeding before they adjusted the sign, it is your responsibility as a driver to obey all posted signage, and if you cannot abide by the rules of the road as well as be capable of reading and responding to signage I do not believe you should be allowed to drive because you are a risk to everyone around you.
You deserved that ticket, and I wish they had suspended your license until you were retested.
LOL, a suspended licence for going 7 kms over the regular speed limit. Yeah, you’re a rational person alright, and I should take any argument you have seriously. Ok.
And you know that you don’t have to gas, maintain, insure or rent a car that you borrow from a friend of family member, right?
Going 7 over the regular limit does not make me a danger to society you absolute lunatic, and it is the responsibility of the government to make sure that signage is CLEAR and READABLE to people on the road.
Have a nice day.
You were going 17 over the posted limit, as per your story, and weren’t aware enough to know about it.
You shouldn’t have a license.
Take care.
Replace speed cameras with road diets and other geometric choices that restrict traffic speed without relying on drivers following rules (they don’t)
The Ottawa Protocol
90 kph
Speed camera
50 kph
Past speed camera
90 kph
Nobody drives 90 in Ottawa. Especially not on the 417.
While not ideal, this can still be useful. In Sweden, we employ speed cameras strategically around areas of higher risk, such as intersections with cars coming onto a larger road with an obscured view. Reducing the speed in that particular spot does probably save lives.
Still, adjusting the design speed is the preferable alternative, but that does not make speed cameras completely ineffective.
Have you ever seen an idiot driver in a roundabout?
That’s why they put raised safety platforms at the entrances and exits of roundabouts
Based on your response to my question, I am going to assume you have never seen an idiot driver in a roundabout.
Based on your response you have never seen a roundabout with raised safety platforms
Again, you underestimate idiots.
Look up about them
I know what they are, that doesn’t change my point.
There are more design choices than just roundabouts…
There are more design choices than just roundabouts…
Do I have to list every single one for you to get the point?
Have you considered installing the roundabouts anyway and removing the driving licences of those incapable of manoeuvring around a simple roundabout?
Driving is not a right. If they can’t perform simple manoeuvres without endangering others, they shouldn’t be controlling a machine that can easily accidentally kill.
I agree. My point is the problem is bad drivers are bad drivers so roundabouts, etc are a waste and won’t do anything to solve the issue.
They solve the average driver. A certain number of drivers are jsut shit that need their licences removed, there’s no question about that.
But let’s consider the majority, myself for example.
I’m keenly aware of vulnerable road users, and active at the municipal and provincial levels in improving road safety, I take active and public transportation whenever practical.
When I lived in Montréal, I rarely sped, logs of questionable accuracy show somewhere around 10% of the time. Now that I’m in Kingston it’s around 80% of the time.
I’m even a less aggressive driver in Kingston, but the geometry of the roads here leads me to unconsciously speed a lot.
This is the way, but good luck getting that implemented. NIMBYs and “frustrated motorists” will push back, and it only takes a few to ruin good ideas.
Fun thing about design changes, the motorists get less frustrated.
A big part of our frustration whole driving is that (at least in Ontario) design speed MUST be at least 20kph higher than posted speed.
So yeah, you get frustrated doing 30kph on a road designed for 60kph. You get less frustrated on a road with no posted limits anywhere that jsut naturally nakes you want to drive a speed that feels safe, and happens to be 30kph.
You get less frustrated on a road with no posted limits anywhere that jsut naturally nakes you want to drive a speed that feels safe, and happens to be 30kph.
Nah, I don’t believe that’s what happens, because we’ve had so many single vehicle crashes because people have no idea what feels safe. They drive like they’re behind a screen, like a video game. Except that screen is a windshield and their face can go through it.
Someone going 100km/h in a 40 zone is an asshole who has no regard for human life. No road design will make them care, and the solution to that problem is to not allow certain people to drive.
Equip vehicles with behaviour sensing tech, and if someone is routinely driving aggressively, not stopping when they should, speeding, and parking in areas that put others in danger, they should lose their license.
Bigger problem is people are bad judges of risk while driving. People’s perception of how fast they can safely travel doesnt line up with their actual abilities.
Roads are built with a design speed 20kph higher than the posted limit because that’s the margin left for safety. That covers things like balding tires, like a distracted driver not paying attention, or bad weather.
There can be some changes (ie the number of municipalities that insist on a 4m wide lane is RIDICULOUS for residential roads), but the vast majority of the factors that make it “safe” to drive that speed are there for a reason.
I like reminding my friends in professional law enforcement that these cameras are exactly what losing your job to a machine is about.
We literally do not have enough law enforcement to properly enforce traffic laws. It is part of why average speeds have crept up to 10-20 over the limit. In fact enforcing traffic laws was kinda just something that was thrown at the police when cars were invented and we’ve never really stopped to think about it since.
I can’t even remember the last time I even saw a cop doing speed enforcement in Toronto. Definitely not on the highways. It makes total sense to automate this, and I highly doubt anybody lost their job over it.
It may actually be a net positive in job creation between the installation, maintaince, and bureaucratic stuff.
Surely with Toronto Police Services’ budget they could better protect speed cameras if they wanted to
They just have to pretend that every speed camera is a Millionaire. Considering anticipated revenue they may as well be.
Instead of wasting money on speed cameras and reducing speeds, we should be aggressively ticketing distracted drivers and pedestrians, and people who struggle to reach the limit in the first place.
Ticketing people for going under the limit is not wise. The biggest issue is due to inclement weather. We don’t want people driving faster than is safe for conditions due to fear of a ticket.
That’s fair, but easy to do: don’t have the cops issue tickets for driving slowly on days where there is inclimate weather.
wasting money
Who’s got a higher salary, a cop or a camera?
Ticketing pedestrians
How about fuck no not in a million years. The LAST thing we need is to tell cops to go out and aggressively harass anyone who “looks distracted.”
Even if cars were the responsibility of people walking (they aren’t, wtf?) there’s a 0% chance this could go smoothly.
Who’s got a higher salary, a cop or a camera?
What’s more effective at changing bad driving behaviour, being caught in the moment and spending 10 min on the side ofbthe road getting a ticket, or getting a ticket in the mail a couple if weeks later when you’ve probably done gotten that you were even on that road at that time?
Then you tick the court date box and mail it back to them. Then two or three years later, you get a court date, so you dust off your form letter charter 11b challenge, send it off to all relevant parties, head down to the Winchester and wait for all of this to blow over.
Depends on how often the camera needs to be repaired/replaced and where the money goes for the tickets it writes.
Cops need to start ticketing:
- people changing lanes without indication
- people turning without indication
- people driving in the inside lane when they’re not passing
- people who take more than 2 seconds to react to a light change
- People following bumper-to-bumper forming left-turn trains through yellow/red lights
- People who take more than a few seconds to get back up to speed
And also:
- Pedestrians who stand on the edge of the curb at the corner waiting for the light to change so they can cross
- Pedestrians standing literally on the edge of the road at the corner waiting for the light to change so they can cross
Traffic calming designs and devices should be preferred over speed cameras.
Narrow streets, chicanes, pedestrian zone height transitions, narrowing the street at pedestrian crossings, etc.
This is more “fix the symptom instead of the problem” though I do agree that we need better pedestrian infrastructure.
Speeding is an inherently human problem, you cannot solve the human, you can only trick the human into solving the problem for you, i.e. scaring them and making speeding actively risky for their own car.
Ultimately, on top of traffic calming, we need way better public transit and making driver’s licences harder to acquire with longer, more rigorous training. That way, driving is not an obligation and those who don’t want to drive or should not be driving do not have to drive. Not everyone was meant to drive.
Fuck it, gotta go fast. It would go faster though if all the office workers just took a bus or train. As a service tech, the traffic caused by unneeded trips is maddening when It takes me 45min to go 10km.
Best of luck with that. Many drivers don’t like walking. People will fight for the closest parking space to the door of a gym, for crissake.
“It highlights the bigger problem, such as the frustration that the motorists have,” Lacroix said.
Frustrated that they can’t speed??? Frustrated enough to commit a crime because they can’t commit a different crime??? 🤔
Since it was installed in April 2022, the camera has issued over 65,000 tickets and more than $7 million in fines, according to Safe Parkside.
This highlights the bigger problem, such as the complete lack of care that motorists have. 🤭
Keep fining them. And catch the people or persons who are vandalizing the cameras so they can spend the rest of their life paying for the damages.
I don’t know how it is up there, but down here in the states those traffic cams are pretty much all run by private for profit companies who take like 99% of the fines for themselves.
So I’ve got no problem with folks destroying them.
Yea we’ve avoided the mass privatization of speed cameras so far and the vast majority of the fines goes into the city municipal budget, where it can be spent pretty much anywhere but often is spent on the roads themselves.
Our cameras directly benefit the community, so people who destroy them here are criminals with no redeeming justification.
Yes, yes, ban all cars, cars bad, drivers bad, noxious exhaust bad, aggressive drivers bad, and so on and so on, ad infinitum. See y’all in December-March at -400C on your electric scooter that is totally non-polluting (what? is electricity totally non-polluting?) trying to navigate uncleared, dilapidated, pot-holed. roads to get anywhere.
Or better still, let’s spend billions beginning with car-friendly infrastructure destruction; neglect regular road, bridge, and tunnel maintenance; and create nodes of community: 15-min walking cities. (*walking times vary by mobility, weather, and your health).
Well, villages.
Well, enclaves.
Well, compounds.
Do car-haters ever think farther than the end of their noses? Do they know what cause and effect is? Do they understand that 15-min walking cities make NIMBY communities? New mental health facility? NIMBY. New correctional facility? NIMBY. New addictions treatment center? NIMBY. Who gets them? The Untermensch who cannot afford to resist their placement.
All in the name of regressing away from cars and making tribal enclaves of like-minded, equally righteous, and (perhaps, most importantly) fiscally advantaged homogeneity.
Hating on cars is the tissue paper veneer of classism and, by extension, racism.
You really want to fight climate change? Too late: you have missed that during your fixation on one aspect (exactly as the petro-industry wanted) of the fight. Now start looking at how you’re going to survive it’s effects. Cause while you were raging against cars, we have passed the PNR on climate devastation.
And if your scooter doesn’t have A/C, it’s pretty useless in the April-November +400C period as well. Because that’s what climate change is: extremes.
You sound completely sane of mind.
At no point did the article claim a desire to ban cars, we are just asking cars to go the posted limit. The idea that hating car dependancy is classist and racist is absurd. Providing free public transit can be one of the most effective ways to lift people up in society. Plenty of people would use their electric scooter in the winter. Tons of people have fun all winter in cold conditions riding snow mobiles, the same gear that works for them could keep a scooter rider warm. The bigger issue for scooter riders is our cities refuse to maintain safe infrastructure for them.
There is no world an escooter can be ridden even 3/4 of the year in a place like where I live, doesn’t matter the gear. (Sask)
I’m sure the city loves these cameras. Did you speed? Doesn’t matter, the camera says you did so pay up. Also these will ticket you for going even half a kilometer over, you can get a ticket for going 71 in a 70 where a human cop would just let that shit go
… Where a human cop would light you up, slowing down all the traffic around you to safer levels, and give you immediate feedback.
But no you’ll just get the same ticket for 10 over 5 days in a row before you notice the camera, and then get 5 tickets in the mail a month later.
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