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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
People won't speed if they cannot speed safely.
You have more faith in humanity than I do.
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.
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 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!"
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.
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.
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!!!!
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?
Thanks for your contribution!
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
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.
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 forgotten 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.
My point is that does nothing to serve the stated goal of increasing safe driving.
Aware, and I fully agree. I am just adding to the point that not only does it fail to address the safety issue, but the massive uptick in tickets generated by this solution will inevitably spill over into an already overwhelmed court system, which will cost us economically and socially.
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.
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.
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.
"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.