EDIT: since apparently a bunch of people woke up with the wrong foot this morning or forgot to check the group they’re in:
This is a joke. Do not steal or vandalize speed enforcement cameras (or anything else for that matter). That’s against the law and you will likely get arrested.
If you’re addicted to crack or any other drugs, please seek professional help.
Gotta enforce speed limits.
And these things don’t shoot you if you look at them wrong – or are black.
Edit: "No, you can’t just stick a camera worth a couple of thousand [local currency] next to the road, that takes photographic evidence of infractions. You gotta rip out the entire surface, redesign the sides and introduce a few sharp curves by demolishing a few blocks of buildings here and there. In the mean time speed is only enforced by violent cops who feel like you were speeding.
It’s the only logical way."
And they fucking work!
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/annoying-thing-speed-cameras-ottawa-they-work-1.6786951
https://driving.ca/column/lorraine/speed-cameras-work
I can’t believe that people don’t want to see them installed in every school zones at least, if there’s one place where you don’t want people speeding it’s there!
“It’s a road design issue!” Yeah? What’s cheaper and can be done quicker, changing the road design or installing speed cameras?
Where I live they are mostly used in school zones and residential areas, and they only trigger when going 12+ miles over the limit. Seems pretty reasonable.
12 mph over in a school zone is proportionally a fucking lot!
Yeah people not respecting speed zones around schools is a real problem. I can’t believe how people drive, and I’ve always got some Dodge Ram or Ford F150 riding my ass because I’m driving the proper speed.
Even if there was no posted speed limit, there are children everywhere and children are unpredictable.
Rule of thumb: if you feel like you need a huge trophy truck to feel protected on the roads, chances are you drive like an asshole.
I mean, I agree people hating speed cameras is nonsense, just drive the speed limit! However, traffic calming is legit and makes the road a much safer place for pedestrians, and usually it’s by narrowing the road, not widening it.
They also can’t testify in court, depriving accused speeders of their constitutional right to due process.
But back to your first claim: “gotta enforce speed limits:” No, we do not. Speeding is a symptom of a street that was designed wrong to begin with. The correct solution is to fix the design, not install a speed camera as some sort of big brother band-aid.
Edit: why do y’all apparently hate the idea of improving street design? As a former traffic engineer, I’m telling you that that’s the only way to truly fix the problem of speeding. I don’t get why that’s controversial.
Sorry, but that is a gross misinterpretation. Drivers are not victims of an intrinsic speed devil that they cannot escape. They still choose to violate the speed limit in most cases.
What was done in these countries is to acknowledge, that physical design is more effective as enforcement, than the cop with a speed-meter.
Still the explicit intent is to enforce speed-limits, knowing that people would violate them if they could, but they can’t because they would wreck their car. Still those people choose to violate and are responsible for their actions.
I gotta be honest; I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make. First you tell me I’m wrong that it’s essential to fix the design of the street to facilitate the correct speed, then you agree with me that “physical design is more effective as enforcement,” then you say that the risk of people wrecking their car effectively deters them from speeding, then you say they choose to speed anyway.
You say that speed limits shouldnt be enforced as they would be a “symptom” of poor road design. This abolishes the speeding drivers from their own responsibility for violating the traffic rules.
You misinterpret the design choices shown in the video as the opposite of “bad road design”, therefore “good road design”, which implies a generality. However these design choices are made solely and explicitly to enforce speed limits. They have disadvantages in other ways e.g. if you make spots where only one car can pass at a time, it makes traffic less efficient. These disadvantages wouldn’t be needed if people would uphold the traffic rules by themselves.
Good design or bad design, many people will speed if they can get away with it. With a proper enforcement through speed cameras, and proper penalties for speeding, e.g. losing your licences for repeated offenses or having your vehicle impounded, could equally serve for enforcement. They are just more expensive, so making design choices is prefered by some countries.
But still people who speed chose to speed. They chose to violate the traffic rules and they chose to endanger other people and themselves. So speeding is never a “symptom” of road design. It is always a “symptom” of selfish assholes that should not be given the right to operate dangerous vehicles.
No, they’re designed to discourage people from exceeding the design speed, which is different.
Jeez, it’s not as if the vast majority of speeders are mustache-twirling villains doing it for the evulz who are incorrigible short of being punished by the law! They just think it’s safe to be driving that speed because the overly-generous street design misleads them.
Look, here’s the bottom line: the whole concept of a “speed limit” only exists in the first place because of a mismatch between the design speed and the speed people want to drive, which makes it unsafe. If you fix the geometry of the street to eliminate the mismatch such that the speed people want to drive at is safe, you don’t need the limit anymore and can just fall back on “reasonable and prudent.”
Y’all are acting like we need speed limits for their own sake, just to have something to enforce.
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overly-generous street design misleads them
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And there is disagree. We don’t need speed limits for their own sake. They are the speed that is deemed appropriate in the area for a multitude of reason. Primarily safety, but also things like noise and emission reductions.
It is the same question of whether someone wants to uphold rules like right of way, or red lights. They have been implemented to order traffic in a way that is deemed beneficial. Anyone who deliberately violates speed limits is deliberately violating the rules that have been put in place to provide safety to everyone. subequently it is also people that are more likely to violate right of way and other rules.
Your argument again is to be apologetic for people deliberately violating the rules. Your idea of simply designing streets in such a way that everyone will drive safely doesnt work out. It is still individual actors with a highly subjective idea, of what it safe and what isnt. But traffic as a global system needs reliable actors, who can be predictable for other actors too. That is why we will always need a set of global rules, to which a speed limit belongs just as much.
I am all for designs like speed bumps to additionally discourage reckless driving. But being apologetic of people who are reckless and subsequently often killing or injuring people doesn’t fly. Especially as there is still enough people who are not stopped from driving over chilren in front of schools, despite speed bumps and other measures. The only thing that works for these kind of people is to permanently remove them from operating motorized vehicles and to give them some time in prison to think about what they have done. being apologetic of them instead, encourages lax traffic laws and lax consequences for people who are injuring and killing other people in traffic.
I am particularly aggrevated at that, because in germany drivers who kill pedestrians or cyclists are often given a slap on the wrist and allowed to drive again soon. This includes particularly elderly people who are clearly unfit to drive, but being a car nation and all that, it is apologized by the courts. But how do you design streets in such a way that it is impossible to drive on the wrong side of the road, which one elderly women did, killing two cyclists? How do you design the road in front of a school that an already convicted of traffic offenses mother doesnt slowly roll over a young girl on her way to school, smashing her under her SUV? You can’t. It is simply impossible to design car traffic areas in a way that makes them safe by design.
You can only make them more or less safe. But it will always be necessary to identify and punish reckless drivers. And if necessary that means prison sentences and permanent exemption from driving. Being apologetic of them is in no way helping traffic safety.
No, that’s what the design speed is. Speed limits are just a crutch to enforce the design speed when the engineers screwed up and the design fails to do it itself.
Your argument again is to be apologetic to incompetent engineers, which is way worse!
I know, from first-hand experience, that traffic engineers in the United States are systemically bad at a lot of what we do. A lot of the industry’s standards of practice are outdated, misguided, or misapplied, and the whole profession needs reform. Often, the goals that we’re trying to accomplish in our designs aren’t even the correct goals to begin with.
And by the way: No. No, I am not, in any way, shape, or form, trying to excuse bad drivers. Never mind that you’ve strawmanned my argument to the point of unrecognizability; even if I did want to abolish speed limits like you seem to think I do, “reasonable and prudent” would still be a thing and it would still be possible to punish dangerous drivers!
Frankly, you’re way the fuck out of line.
You clearly don’t realize it, but in actual reality, attitudes like yours are part of the problem! Having speed limits divorced from design speeds breeds contempt for the law, which is why consequences are often so lax. Everybody speeds when the speed limit is set too low – that’s human nature whether you like it or not – so of course even judges and juries who speed themselves won’t think speeding is a big deal and will give offenders a slap on the wrist. By prioritizing enforcement of speed limits over fixing street design, you are actively trying to perpetuate that contempt.
I’m starting to think you’re so bloodthirsty to punish people that you’re willing to put more people at risk by accepting bad design just so you can manufacture more violators!
Now you are just making things up. At every point i said, i think design to enforce the speed limit is a good thing. But you are claiming it is good design by itself, when it is only necessary as design, because people intentionally violate the speed limit, what you are still trying to be apologetic for. You switching cause and effect around and you do that in order to apologize for people who willfully endanger other people.
Sorry but it’s a black and white thing in this case, r either you’re under the speed limit and not breaking the law or you’re over the speed limit and breaking the law.
Also, tons of people object to speed camera tickets and win, the only difference is that there’s no officer there when the event happened to tell them “Say that to the judge if you’re not happy.”, the end result is the same.
We also need to keep in mind the mechanism it is using to detect speed. If it uses radar it will need regular calibration. Handheld units for example are supposed to be spot checked before and after each shift with tuning forks and sent back to the manufacturer to be recalibrated every 6 months or so.
Lidar and optical flow most likely have different requirements, but I am not as familiar with them.
Lidar is supposed to be checked like radar. You have a standardized distance and you check that the machine is exactly matching.
Bullshit. You are allowed to cross examine your accuser which you can’t do for a camera. It is not the same. Random tech should not be judging humans for crimes.
This isn’t actually true. It’s entirely possible to be breaking the law while driving under the speed limit: “driving too fast for conditions” is very much a thing.
But that’s beside my point, which really was just that changing the design of the street to make people not want to speed in the first place is way more effective (and frankly, way less totalitarian) than punishing them after-the-fact for doing so.
“Driving too fast for conditions” won’t be enforced by cameras, will still exist if the road is modified and is 100% subjective which is a problem speed cameras don’t have so you should be happy about that.
It might be more effective, it’s still not possible to change all roads as quickly as speed cameras can be deployed.
It’s also a very stupid argument, that’s like saying “If that person didn’t want me to steal from them they shouldn’t have left their car unlocked.” The rule is there, it’s your responsibility to respect it no matter what the road looks like. Both things need to be used in conjunction, roads need to be adapted to their limit but you need something to enforce the limits too.
What if the speed limit is unreasonably high or low?
“unreasonably low”
Eh… What? Car drivers can get fucked in this case, they don’t have a right to travel quickly, it’s a privilege.
“Unreasonably high”
Then a police officer there won’t change a thing and the road design won’t change.
Eh … What?
Never said it was fine, I said the issue lies elsewhere and the solutions we’re currently taking about aren’t the ones that will solve it.
If the speed limit is too high it’s an administrative decision, they won’t change the road design because they decided to have a high speed limit, a speed camera or a police officer won’t charge people who are driving fast unless they’re going over the speed limit that’s already too high.
So you consider the law to be the definition of safety?
My question was intended to get you think about the fact that laws (and speed limits) are made by people, with all their flaws and biases, and they don’t always do a good job.
I don’t know how you can come to that conclusion from my message.
Good day to you!
What would you prefer? That some people drive slightly over the speed limit? Or a spot where people suddenly slam on the brakes to avoid getting a ticket, endangering those who might be behind them with their sudden change of speed?
Because the latter is what these devices tend to do.
Show me evidences that they increase accidents please, I’ve provided two sources showing they work in another comment, surely you can provide one that they cause accidents.
Not Just Bikes?
*checks link*yep, Not Just Bikes.Yeah, speeding is a symptom of poor infrastructure design. It means one of a few possibilities:
Or worse, incite a bunch of extra passing maneuvers, making the road less safe.
Isn’t that part of “you piss off everyone else on the road?”
No. Although they often go hand-in-hand, it is possible to either piss people off without them doing anything in response or to incite people to feel the need to pass you without them getting mad about it.
I’m sure it varies by area.
Where I live they install speed cameras in residential areas, school zones, and bus routes. They also only trigger when you are going 12 or more over the limit, and the highest speed limit I’ve seen with one these was 45mph, 35mph during school times. They also have an officer review and sign the citation, it is a flat fee, and no points. If needed, the officer who reviews will testify in court.
If someone is going 12+ over on school zones, school bus routes, and residential neighborhoods, then they deserve their fine.
They are illegal in my state
I don’t find improving road safety through intelligent engineering controversial, I think blaming the street design instead of the idiot deciding to speed through it is controversial. In the end it is the driver who accelerated, not the road engineer.
In fact I actually like how much attention has been brought over the past years to road design. I’ve always been scared of cars.
I’m a big fan of NJB (shout out to !notjustbikes@feddit.nl), but I’m not going to argue against speed cameras. That’s ridiculous. Yes, if I have to choose one or the other I’ll take the better road design. But even with good road design, some people will choose to be dicks because they can, or they see it as a challenge or some shit. And speed cameras can be implemented right now, whereas better road design waits (even in the Netherlands!) until that street is next due for repaving.
I think people are intuitively understanding that it’s not really a possibility in a country as large as America. There are only 139,000 km of public roads in the Netherlands, compared to 6,743,151 km of roads in America. We also have different types of traffic compared to the Netherlands, more large vehicles and people without access to public transportation for daily commutes. Compounding all this with the fact that the federal government has no control of how most of these roads are built… It’s understandable why people don’t see this as realistic option.
Their cynical intuition is wrong, though, and the “large country” argument in particular falls apart at the slightest scrutiny. So what if we have more roads? We have commensurately more traffic engineers, too! There is no excuse not to design properly.
Anyway, NJB has an entire video debunking that, so I’m just going to cite it instead of wasting my time arguing the point myself.
Vehicle size is irrelevant. Lack of access to public transportation is indeed a problem; however, in general “we shouldn’t fix problem A because we also have problem B” is not a valid argument. It just means you should fix problems A and B.
Sigh… look, you’re not wrong to argue that that’s a popular perception; however, that’s much more a consequence of the shitty state of civics education than it is an accurate description of reality. There’s a bunch of different ways the Federal government exerts control, including things like taxation and funding (including for state- and local-maintained roads in a lot of cases, not just U.S. Highways) and collaboration between the FHWA (government) and AASHTO (industry) on design standards. It’s more complicated than just a unitary central government dictating things, but rest assured, roads are designed in a relatively standardized way nationwide.
I think we’re having a problem determining the difference of what is possible and what should be possible. Your argument is ignoring the most important aspect of any public project. There isn’t enough political will in this country to pass universal healthcare, something that would end up saving the country billions of dollars. In what world do you think American politicians are going to replace 4 million miles of working roads?
I don’t have the time ATM to watch this, I’ll give it a try after work. However, I doubt they’re going to be able to explain how they would get through the gridlock of our current government.
Traffic congestion won’t improve unless we improve public transportation. It doesn’t matter how well you build the roads, unless there is an alternative to driving there will be too many people on the roads. My argument is if we have to solve problem B before we work on problem A, there is no real reason to address problem A.
I think we’re just just getting into sematics now. Yes there is somewhat of a standardization of roads, but that does not mean they have the power to unilaterally create a new standard in which they could enforce with the power of the purse.
Your argument is ignoring the magnitude of funding and state and federal cooperation that would be required to revamp the entire transportation network of a huge country. Even if you could get a bill passed through our current Congress, how much money would it take, how much time?
Do I think we should be designing walkable cities with ample public transportation, of course. Do I think any politician in America would actually care about that…? No.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
NJB has an entire video debunking that
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
NJB has an entire video debunking that
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Ah yes, “tHe UsA iS tOo BiG, wE cAnT sOlVe ThIs”
Yes you can fix this. The Dutch bicycle culture was started by municipal votes, where resolutions passed municipal governments with margins of single votes. If American politicians can pull their heads out of their asses and even only pass a resolution that:
Then in the next thirty odd years, I think that the worst offenders can be rebuilt.
Do note that few things are as good at destroying themselves in regular, correct use as car infrastructure.
This is my entire point… It is unrealistic to believe that American politicians would do something for the good of the people. Especially when a large portion of Americans themselves rarely vote for their own self interest.
What would be the cost of redesigning and paving 4.19 million miles of road? Well let’s do some real conservative napkin math. Let’s choose the cheapest type of road, a rural minor arterial on flat ground. The reconstruction for this single lane would be 915,000 per mile, per lane. Assuming every road is just rural and two lanes the cost would be around 7.7 trillion dollars. Roughly a third of America’s GDP.
That’s the absolute minimum according to The most recent estimate for road reconstruction and while using the least expensive options available.
No politician is ever going to ask for 7.7 trillion dollars for infrastructure.
yeah see that’s what I was talking about. you don’t have to ask for 7.7 trillion dollars all at once, because we already spend a pretty ludicrous amount on road maintenance already. you just redesign the road the next time the maintenance schedule comes around, which works out to be like. what you were already gonna spend, + the cost of paint you were already gonna use, + maybe some bollards, - the projected amount you would save by making it so people can take more trips by bikes and walking. which decreases car usage, which decreases the frequency with which you have to do road maintenance and upkeep, because cars weigh a lot and wear down the roads way more than any other use of roads.
That’s how every congressional budget is configured… When they run scare tactics about universal healthcare going to cost trillions of dollars they don’t mean all at once. When they pass something like an infrastructure bill they also have to explain how to pay for it and for how long.
That’s not how roads work… The maintenance schedule is just fixing the top layer of paving. The bulk of the cost is in reshaping land and pouring the concrete foundations. If all you’re doing is repaving the top layer it’s not going to make any significant changes.
more than you might think, again, even just with paint. a road diet can take a four lane road down to two lanes, and can add bike lanes and a turn lane, which cuts down on traffic accidents from lane changes, and potentially road speed. you can do a lot with on street parking, and then you can increase the width of bike lanes and increase their traffic separation even more, if you really want to encroach on the space cars are taking up. you can focus larger projects on given intersections, you can increase the size of curbs, once foot traffic increases, and it becomes easier to justify. I don’t have solutions for like a six lane fully stroaded out shithole, outside of maybe trying to make it into a boulevard with planters and trees and pedestrian islands in the middle, because the crossings are too long. you can also do that shit they did with covid and just cut off a street for a weekend and then see whatever the increase in foot traffic ends up being, and then present the results of that trial, which is a good way to get the idea across and raise support in the community.
if none of those, combined with changing zoning laws to allow more mixed-use development, and more built up development, if none of that strikes you as “significant changes”, then I don’t really know what to tell you. it takes a while to accomplish, and at this point in most places in america is a multi-generation effort, but I dunno, that’s just kind of the way it is. if you’re really cynical, I guess there’s caltrops? like I dunno, what’s your alternative here?
Shit like this is why I think the only thing that will save America is a complete purge of state and federal government, and a very clear and specific explanation why the US governments have been forcibly emptied and rebooted.
It should be governments’ jobs to act for the betterment of their subjects. The fact the US doesn’t, and happily marches the troops into places where they do “too well” if you’d ask them and read between the lines of their answers, is a crime against humanity.
I think we’re about 40-50 years too late for that option unfortunately. I think the whole world is going to be a little too busy addressing our rapidly deteriorating climate to do anything meaningfully good anytime soon.
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designed wrong
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I’m not a fan of them because
they have been known to cause accidents in the past from people trying to slow down and not get ticketed.TIL this is bupkiss. I’ve read it so many times I took it for granted. That and it only slows people down in that specific area. You slow down, drive past it, then just speed back up.I think Europe uses a better system, where you post two cameras on either end of the road you want to regulate the speed of. You take pictures of the license plates and time how long they were in the road for, then divide the distance by time to determine average speed. If that speed is above the legal limit, you look up the plate and they get a ticket in the mail. It’s lower tech because it doesn’t need LiDar, it’s harder to ‘cheat’, and it can be pretty cheap for regulating long stretches of road without exits.
While the system you describe does exist a lot in Europe the single cameras are much lower tech. They don’t have to read the license plate (twice!) correctly – they just take a picture. And while the mobile ones (non-descript grey van with blacked out rear windows parked at the side of the road) do use LIDAR, the static ones use just induction coils that are put into the road surface about 2m apart, rivht where the camera is looking. In Germany they’ll often put these coils in both directions of the road and just randomly turn the camera around, though newer ones just work in both directions all the time.
“They have been known to cause accidents”
No source of that (obviously because it’s bullshit), but there’s sources that show they reduce the number of people speeding this making the roads safer for non driver users by reducing the number of accidents.
Good call. I’ve taken those accusations for granted for a while. I’ve now edited the original comment.