…because adding cameras to watch the public for ‘safety’ has never been horribly abused.
Additionally, any driver traveling more than 100 mph on city streets can expect a $500 ticket from the cameras.
What sort of lunatic is going that fast on dense city roads, and why is it not escalating straight to an arrest warrant and a revocation of their driver’s license?
Lol right. I haven’t been to the part of San Francisco where 100 mph driving wouldn’t be insane. Maybe on some kind of super street bike but even then…
I thought the cab I was in that was hitting 60 mph on those hills was insane, 100 seems terminal.
That sounds terrifying.
It was like a roller coaster with no tracks! So yes, absolutely. I just grabbed my husband’s hand for moral support and hoped the driver was driving like this because he knew what he was doing, haha.
People race through GG park at night. They used to race on great highway too, but I guess they don’t anymore since it’s closed to car traffic now. Of course that never stopped biker gangs so I guess they still do crazy stunt shit.
It might be the night time street races that can hit 100 between lights when commuter traffic is next to none.
In Toronto you got most people driving 20 above the posted limit like it’s nothing mostly during the day, but come night when the roadways are clear and empty some are going 30 over.
Speed cameras are very common in the UK and while they don’t eliminate speeding altogether, they are effective.
Apart from the risk of either a fine, doing a ‘speed awareness’ course or losing your license, it also means that people who are driving too fast regardless are more likely to simply get stuck behind other drivers who are observing the speed limit.
Maybe if they’re truly ubiquitous on all roads everywhere, then maybe. But if they’re just scattered around here and there then i doubt they achieve much beyond fattening they city’s ticket income
The trick is to mix fixed speed cameras with mobile speed cameras that move around regularly—police sit in the back of a van parked next to the road with a big camera pointed out the rear window. Because these move around, they could be anywhere. And because they could be anywhere most drivers will act as though they are.
No, the trick is section control.
Mobile speed cameras don’t work due to e.g. Google Maps having speed camera warnings integrated. People slow down when the sat nav warns them and speed up later as well.
Section control is a system where license plates are photographed when a car enters a section and again when it leaves. The time stamps and the known distance are used to calculate an average speed. That means, accelerating and slowing down doesn’t help, and it’s the only way to force people to drive the speed limit over a longer distance.
Edit: We had fixed speed cameras and mobile ones for at least 50 years where I live. It’s funny to see people theorizing about them as if they were some entirely new concept.
Average speed cameras only work on motorways. In the stop-start traffic of a city they’re completely irrelevant.
Edit: We had fixed speed cameras and mobile ones for at least 50 years where I live. It’s funny to see people theorizing about them as if they were some entirely new concept.
Not sure why you think I’m theorising as though it’s a new concept. I was speaking as to what clearly works based on the fact that it’s what we do here in Australia and have done as long as I can remember, and that our death rates are so much lower than in America, on both a per capita and per vehicle-km basis.
I mean, it’s easy to have lower death rates than a country where you can do your driver’s license without ever leaving the parking lot.
In stop-start traffic all sorts of speed cameras are mostly irrelevant.
Average speed cameras work on any stretch of road where people actually exceed the speed limit. The cool thing about average speed cameras is that the technology is so incredibly simple and cheap that you can just place them on every junction on a road.
In stop-start traffic all sorts of speed cameras are mostly irrelevant.
What I meant with that previous comment was not bumper-to-bumper traffic, but “regularly stopped by traffic lights” driving. Where some people absolutely will speed if they think they can get away with it, so maximising the fear of getting caught is a great way to reduce speeding.
In that case, average speed cameras still work, and they still work better than single-spot speed cameras.
Is there data showing speed cameras reduce anything other than people’s wallets? I know that slower speeds reduce fatalities, but I’m unconvinced that speed cameras do
I work in government in a city where cameras designed to detect license plates for active warrants, stolen vehicles, and vehicles from Amber/Silver alerts have been deployed. It was crystal-clear from Council that those were the only authorized uses as a condition of their installation.
Within a week, the police were using them to identify cars for other purposes.
This paper seems to suggest so, but also mentions “Previous empirical work on this topic, which shows a diverse range of estimated effects […]” - so it seems like other factors will play a role. (Disclaimer: I read only the abstract)
Personally, it helps reduce noise pollution in my residential street at all hours. We get a lot of hoons otherwise.
Really depends on where you put them, and if you couple them with other common sense changes like infrastructure redesigns and public outreach.
As much as I don’t belong in the community, the answer to that is to start reducing lane/intersections/roads until people start taking it seriously
As much as I don’t belong in the community
Why? You sound to me like you belong just fine.
Because I like driving. I just hate commuting and think surface and higher grade roads and parking is a blight and waste of space. I also believe in proper design. Cities are for people and should be people centric.
I’m totally of the belief that the fuck cars mentality isn’t incompatible with personally liking cars. If you recognize that forcing everyone’s lifestyle and community space to revolve around cars is unsustainable and undesirable then I’d say that’s basically it, with a bit of sensible road design to prioritize pedestrian safety sprinkled in.
Because I like driving.
I do too. I own multiple “fun” cars for things like autocross and off-roading. I just don’t use any of them for commuting (my ‘daily driver’ is a bicycle).
Trust me when I say, folks like you belong here just fine.
Meh I’ve met people in either this or the other fuckcars community who don’t believe in interim measures and anything short of tear up all the roads is car brained…
That’s basically what everyone else thinks here too my friend, you’ll fit right in.
I enjoy driving too, the little of it I actually do
That’s exactly what all of us are for too. “Fuck cars” doesn’t mean “eliminate all cars and all driving infrastructure”. It means exactly what you said - cars and car infrastructure should be minimized in places where they aren’t good to be.
I find these threads entertaining because it pits Lemmys hatred of cars against its hatred of police departments
This. I’m quickly learning Lemmy is populated with an interesting group of folks.
Yeah it leans very hard leftist. I hope as the platform grows it will get a little more diversity of opinion but I love the concept of open-source social media (if you can even call it that). For now I just block all the news and political communities; occasionally something gets through but that’s fine.
Fuck this shit, fuck how they target minority communities with it, fuck how every technology is eventually used against you by the state
Speed cameras need to be accompanied by roads that are designed to physically calm traffic.
I used to drive a lot in London, and there are speed cameras all over the place there, and it certainly helps when they are ubiquitous, but what really makes people slow down are the narrow, curved and winding roads.
Fuck, surveillance capitalism with my golden fucking dick, fuck this, design better roads, not better cameras
Speed cameras (and by extension red light cameras) are generally nothing more than a money grab by a municipality.
