Why not? It’s obviously a huge hazard and people can’t be trusted to use it safely. So for the public health and safety this road should be closed. This also means the poor council doesn’t need to maintain this road anymore saving money in the long run. Maybe a train could even replace where the road was increases throughput and safety for everyone.
Because that’s hardly what can be considered a realistic solution. Again, not against it, but what, are you gonna close down like 90% of roads? Only some of them, if so, which ones, and how is stuff handled on the ones that remain open?
Traffic calming and speed cameras are carrot and stick in lowering the speed of roads. Lowering the design speed of roads alone is never going to stop drivers in a hurry from driving dangerously fast. People aren’t deterred from commiting crimes by heavy penalties, they are deterred by the chance of getting caught. Automatic traffic enforcement raises that chance to 100%.
Lowering the design speed of roads alone is never going to stop drivers in a hurry from driving dangerously fast
Why wouldn’t it? If drivers feel unsafe speeding down a road then they won’t speed, rendering speed cameras unnecessary. If you see a speed bump ahead of you aren’t you going slow down?
Speed cameras are applicable to all roads, from the 30 km/h residential street to the 140 km/h highway. Speed cameras are also self-funding and thus have a negative cost. Fines collected by speed cameras can be used to finance road redesign and traffic calming measures.
The same can be said for anything that the government contracts out. Road building is another good example, and there’s a lot more money to go around there than with speed cameras.
Please explain to me where the money to redesign and rebuild like half the city’s roads is going to come from if not from a transitional period of speed cameras.
Say, why are you such a virulent opponent of speed cameras? Do you find yourself to be a chronic speeder?
If you don’t drive, you have literally no reason to oppose speed cameras. Speed cameras reduce the negative externalities of cars at literally no cost to you. If you don’t drive, you cannot get a speed ticket.
Also, for the China fans out there, consider how the widespread implementation of automatic traffic enforcement cameras in China that do things from watching if you’re speeding, to watching if you’re driving in multiple lanes at once, to watching if you’re wearing a seatbelt have massively improved driving conditions and reduced road chaos in China. Automatic traffic enforcement makes driving better.
Well yeah, because China is a functional country that wants to actually decrease traffic violations.
The point of American cameras is to raise funds. That’s why there’s no immediate feedback for when you get a ticket. They don’t want people to connect their driving to consequences, they want the consequences to be distant with no immediate impact.
All it would take is for traffic cameras to flash drivers when they get a ticket. It’d be that easy. Yet it will never happen.
The widespread implementation of automatic traffic enforcement cameras in China objectively has decreased traffic violations. Compare driving in China in 2008 to 2024. It is a night and day difference.
I agree with your assessment about American traffic enforcement being more about collecting an informal tax than actually being about improving road safety (see: speed traps). In the UK (which this article is about), the speed cameras do flash (and thus provide immediate feedback).
America does this thing where only some areas have cameras, creating huge dead zones with no camera enforcement. This is done to catch drivers off-guard so that more traffic tickets are given out. As I understand it, China just has cameras on every street because their goal is to decrease traffic violations and not just generate ticket revenue.
I still think my idea of traffic cameras flashing drivers when they get ticketed would be effective, but China has it figured out.
As I understand it, China just has cameras on every street because their goal is to decrease traffic violations and not just generate ticket revenue.
This is correct. Traffic cameras are present on basically every street, and they are highly visible, preceded by a road sign, and your GPS audibly tells you about them. They also flash at you.
China also has a better implementation of red light cameras. Green lights start flashing a few seconds before they turn yellow, allowing you to either make it across the intersection or slow down in time.
Oh wow, warning flashes for green lights would be so helpful! There’s an intersection on the way to work where I live that has a four way stop, but at highway speeds. You have to hit the brakes hard when the light turns yellow or you’ll blow through when it turns red 😅
I was once passed by someone who was speeding along a narrow, windy road while I was following the speed limit. That entire length of road is a no passing zone. If they had passed slightly later, they would have had a head-on collision with another automobile that was coming the opposite direction. Some people will just do dumb things, no matter the road design.
Better infrastructure would be great, but there will always be places where you will need to drive slower than the designed speed, and drivers should be able to follow that if they’re going to be allowed to pilot a large and dangerous vehicle.
Alright, I gotta ask. What’s the speed limit, and what’s the threshold that you get mailed a ticket?
I’m asking because in the state where I live in the US, speed cameras were outlawed unless a police officer was stationed to sit there and watch it all day. The reason being is that people were getting mailed $200 tickets for going 1 mph over the speed limit. This was problematic because no car’s speedometer is perfectly calibrated, and people who tried to do the right thing were getting a dozen tickets in the mail before they even realized they’d done something wrong.
Also, cameras were disproportionately being installed in poor neighborhoods, punishing more people without the means to pay the tickets. Which is obviously not a safety measure, but a punitive measure.
So going 39mph in a 35mph zone gets you a ticket? I’d probably cut down the camera too, in that case. You’d spend more time watching the speedo than the road, which would make the road less safe.
There are no 35mph zones in the UK. They’re all multiples of 10. The limits are well known and we’re taught how to follow them, it’s not the problem you’re making it out to be.
Um, you do know that being able to acutely control your speed is a critical prerequisite for being able to operate a motor vehicle, right? Being unable to keep it within a 2-3 mph range is not normal, and may indicate a minor neurological condition or lack of patrice and training. You should not be getting task saturated monitoring your speed, as beyond watching for people entering the road before you, monitoing for lights and signs, and monitoring the space between the vehicle in front of you, speed control is the fourth most important thing to keep an eye on while using our shared pubic road infrastructure.
Cruise control exists, and is an very useful way to reduce task saturation if you need to, but if you don’t have that in your vehicle may I suggest the radical idea of aiming for a speed slow enough you won’t unknowingly cross the limit by that much. The speed limit is the upper bound, not lower. Like just do try and do 30 or 25 if you can’t tell the difference. Thanks to how travel times work, it won’t even have that much impact on your arrival time at ranges short enough to be done on 35mph streets.
You are operating an device that can kill innocent unrelated strangers in an instant, it is YOUR job to do so safely within the bounds of the road networks design. If you are unable to do so, then you are unable to do so. There is no shame in that, much like there is no shame in needing glasses, but please, adjust your life so that you don’t risk killing innocent people at risk for your own convenience.
Being too attentative (distracted) to the speedometer is far more dangerous than the harm of going 5-9 mph over in many cases. And like mentioned earlier in tbe thread, many cars have a spedometer only accurate within 2-4 mph.
Being able to tell how fast your vehicle is moving to within a 2 to 4 mph range, what the law in question id designed to accommodate for, is not being too attentive to the speedometer. It is part of the very basic foundation of being able to control a motor vehicle. Again, I’m sorry you are only leaning this now, but being unable to do so is not normal for a driver.
Our common roads, vehicles, insurance, and laws are all designed under the assumption that going five over is an intentional act because for nearly all drivers it very much is.
I worry that like much like it might be hard for a child to realize they need glasses becuse they assume their normal and everyone else’s vision is as bad as their’s, you are assuming that everyone struggles with monitoing their speed to within five to ten miles an hour, they don’t. That’s one of the things that a drivers test is soposed to test for in the first place.
A speedometer that is only accurate to within 2 to 4 mph is still only off by 2 mph at most on average, given that the center of that range is going to be on the vehicle’s real speed.
At the speeds we’re talking about, being nine over is equivalent to an extra half a vehicle’s worth of kinetic energy on top of what the road was designed for, which has a very big impact on whether or not your vehicle’s breaks can act to dissipate that energy in the time the civil engineers who designed the road system assume it will.
Please provide a source that going 44 in a 35 is far less dangerous than what should be a subconscious part of driving. All I could find was this study, which shows that if you don’t see them come out from behind a parked car on the side of the road in time, and if you are struggling to monitor the speedometer that is likely, going from an impact speed of 32mph to 42 mph, doubles the odds of killing the person you just hit.
Damn right op, going at 30 rather than 20 is a terrible thing to do. Driving at 20 is the moral choice. Yes it means your commute will be 50% longer than if you’d driven at 30, but that’s a sacrifice we should all be willing to make, said no-one with a 2 hour daily commute.
Except it won’t be 50% longer, not unless you’re going cross country. If you’re driving anything less than 100+ MI =,10 mph isn’t going to make pretty much any difference in your commute time at all. Not to mention your just going to hit a light and someone traveling the actual speed limit will then pull up right along side you while you wait
That’s the point yes, looking purely at math assuming a completely 100% clear no stop Journey it would be faster. But that’s not how life works, you stop at lights, you slow down at ramps, you stop at intersections. All of these things together make it so that unless you’re traveling like a hundred miles or more it’s just not going to make a difference. I very regularly make trips between Seattle and Portland, the difference between trying to cruise control 65 the whole way and trying to cruise control 75 the whole way isn’t very large. Last time I remember trying I think it was about a 20 minute difference in a trip that is almost 3 hours Real world slowdowns end up equalizing much of the journey
As someone who commuted an hour each way for a year, I both calculated to the best of my ability and then tested. I could shave 5 minutes off by going 65 instead of 55 on the 55 mph highways, and fuel consumption was significantly higher. Going 30 in a 20 zone will do jack shit for someone commuting on surface streets
You use twice as mich fuel to accelerate from 0 to 30mph as 0 to 20mph, and if you hit a pedestrian at 30mph there’s a 20% chance it will be fatal Vs 2.5% at 20mph.
You are never going to average the speed limits throughout your drive, unless you’re speeding. In an urban environment, where 20mph speed limits are used, you will lose seconds on your journey.
But anyway, where is this coming from? The post is about speed cameras, not what the limits are set to. Why are you even bringing that up?
They wouldn’t make money if people managed to, you know, just follow the speed limit. If you can’t follow a basic rule of the road you shouldn’t be driving.
We live in material reality, not a fantasy in your head. Justifying bullshit that specifically fucks over the poor while not really affecting the rich (because fines are just fees you pay to break the law when you’re rich enough for them to be minor inconveniences) with what amounts to Cartman screaming RESPECT MAH AUTHORITAH is bullshit. You want people to actually slow down? Redesign the road.
This praxis does two things, it prevents the poor being fucked over if these are just there to make council money, or it causes them to give up on the camera and properly redesign the road when it’s actually about real safety concerns.
Given this has happened before and they only replaced the camera I’m siding with “it’s for council income not actual safety”. If they do it again I feel doubley vindicated in that opinion. If it’s actually about real safety concerns they’ll give up on the camera and add in pedestrian refuge islands to slow traffic instead. Love these badboys
The local community campaigned to get these speed cameras because people were speeding. Redesigning the road would be great, if the council had money to, but I doubt they do.
Poor people aren’t getting screwed over by this because poor people can’t afford to drive, they’re the ones that have to deal with the unsafe driving of the middle class dada on their German coupes that can’t bare to drive at less that 50mph.
The cost of physical redesign traffic calming measures is significantly cheaper to install than the cameras, whose cost is justified by councils because of the income they bring in thereafter.
The insistence on replacing it instead of doing something else is being justified internally because even with these attacks they consider it to be making more than it’s costing them.
Poor people aren’t getting screwed over by this because poor people can’t afford to drive,
Mate fuck right off. This statement just screams that you’ve never actually done any organising or volunteering with the poor in the UK. Please volunteer at a food bank for once in your fucking life and learn what kinds of people the 3million people in this country attending them are like. It will surprise you, expand your view of society a bit, and you’ll be doing an actually-good useful thing.
The poorest people own the fewest cars, and are the most affected by things like air pollution, and if they do have to own cars they’re the ones most at hurt by car dependency (which is perpetuated by road violence caused by things like speeding).
If you say utterly stupid ass things like poor people don’t own cars I will absolutely assume you don’t interact with the people struggling to survive in this country in any capacity. It’s a bloody stupid thing to say mate.
I mean what I said, go and volunteer and see for yourself.
I’m sorry I didn’t think I needed to spell it out that much to you. Obviously I don’t think all poor people don’t drive. But the poorest don’t, and statistically poorer people drive a lot less and are more impacted by things like this.
I don’t agree that speeding is ok if poor people do it, and I don’t think the removal of the speed cameras is a step to the better alternative, unless it’s part of removing cars from the road in question entirely.
Ok so what do you expect to happen when you rock up to the council and say “Hi, I want to replace this speed camera making tens of thousands in profit per year with this other solution that makes no money at all” ?
Please tell me what you think the pathway to the alternative better solution is.
I wouldn’t replace it. Some people will still speed even with traffic calming so the camera is still useful.
If you want to reduce the council’s income from speed cameras, the first thing would be to elect a central government that will properly fund local councils so they have the budget to make decisions like that.
You physically can’t speed with traffic calming, they will just crash and fuck up their vehicles.
This conversation is silly. Right from the start if you were committed to this fuck the poor nonsense you should have just been honest and admitted it so neither of our times would have been wasted on this ridiculous farce.
Not really that surprised, typical liberal bullshit. Gonna vote Starmer too yeah?
I’m not a lib, I’m not a fan of Keith, and I’m not saying “fuck the poor”. Poor people are the most impacted by car dependency which is perpetuated by dangerous driving. If you don’t want to have this conversation anymore you can stop replying.
Croydon council responded to FOI request stating it costs £2.5-£3.5k to install traffic islands. The cost of a speed camera installation on the other hand is £85,000 according to Bedford Council, with a £5000 annual upkeep cost.
Croydon cites average cost for roughly such an action at 2,5k - 3,5k in a denial of the FOI request which means there’s pretty much no way to know how much it actually costs depending on what they calculate the average on and if you have any idea about the cost of public works that number should strike you as very, very oddly low.
Wiltshire government here cites about 45.000k for a traffic island narrowing a road to one lane, all in all.
The source you cite for the cameras, however, puts those costs for 2 cameras, so 42,500 a pop / 2500 upkeep annual, albeit with returns via fines obviously.
You want people to actually slow down? Redesign the road.
I’ve posed this question elsewhere in this thread and: what until then? Like what do you do until a good, what, 50 - 90% of road depending on criteria, is redesigned?
The process and length of time it takes for either option are practically the same. It’s irrelevant. Not to mention a traffic island costs like £3k while a camera costs £85k (guess why they pick the camera despite the price).
Having been to court twice for online related stuff I will absolutely couch this shit.
I do not see how that question is doing anything but attempting some sort of gotcha or accusation that these people deserve to be fucked over instead of have real designs that don’t result in their lives being made harder.
Having been to court twice for online related stuff I will absolutely couch this shit.
Fair, I meant it more on “don’t do it on my accord”
I do not see how that question is doing anything but attempting some sort of gotcha or accusation that these people
Your these people just seems to have some very oddly drawn lines is the heart of it. It does include poor drivers, to whom speed cameras are a problem and not that much of a solution, it does not seem to include poor people not in a car, who profit from this. My FALGSOC doesn’t have speed cameras in it - who’s would - but it’s a long way from here to there.
deserve to be fucked over instead of have real designs that don’t result in their lives being made harder. It seems like spite to me.
This is running on the assumption that I think people deserve to be fucked over for speeding, and that’s the main motivation. Sure, some of them, but that’s not the kind of distinction a speed cam could make on account of how it works. I’d very much be open to them not issuing fines but other punishments - as appropiate - to not make them so classist. Loss of driving license, if you really, really fuck up in a sports car that gets impounded or such, but I’ll concede, even that is far out from today, but just to point it out,
My point here is that for every one it fucks over, it helps other people not being fucked over, because it does do something against speeding. My line of reasoning for speed cams is not that it fucks people over, it’s that it helps people. You wanna focus on the first part, I’m trying to get you to see the issue is more complex than that, at least if you include people outside of cars in your consideration. They’re not a good solution, by any means, again, I assume our optimal way of solving it is quite similar. For the meantime though, the fuck else do you do? Just abandon all traffic enforcement until all the roads get fixed? So what, 20 years of being vulnerable road users being even more endangered than now?
My point here is that for every one it fucks over, it helps other people not being fucked over, because it does do something against speeding. My line of reasoning for speed cams is not that it fucks people over, it’s that it helps people. You wanna focus on the first part, I’m trying to get you to see the issue is more complex than that, at least if you include people outside of cars in your consideration.
Well my line of reasoning is that there is an alternative that fucks no poor people over, and that taking action to achieve that end us a good thing. A negative in the short term leads to a longterm positive.
Also I see no other method of doing this. If you go to the council and say “I want to replace this highly profitable traffic camera making hundreds of thousands per year with a traffic island that will make no money at all” the decision that any team will make internally is obvious. That issue inevitably leads to destruction of these cameras as the only method of causing the alternative to occur.
A negative in the short term leads to a longterm positive.
I do not want to die a martyr to the fight against traffic cams.
Also I see no other method of doing this. If you go to the council and say “I want to replace this highly profitable traffic camera making hundreds of thousands per year with a traffic island that will make no money at all” the decision that any team will make internally is obvious.
That kind of poses the second question as to what, in the interim, will be cut as per budget, but that’s a sidenote. I guarantee you without change far reaching enough to societally gain a new understanding of public space and roads, when the last speed cam is dismantled you’ll find all the roads still suck ass and will not be redesigned. Once you have the change so far reaching that you can reunderstand basically every road, yeah, then you don’t need the traffic cams anymore and they can be dismantled.
I was ruder than I should’ve been, I thought you were the other person who has irritated me a bit.
I guarantee you without change far reaching enough to societally gain a new understanding of public space and roads
This is the weird fantasy part I was referring to. It’s like, just nonsense. It comes off like an american attitude being ported to the UK with absolutely no adaptation whatsoever to British conditions. Our conditions are nothing like america. Getting rid of cameras and getting traffic calming measures installed instead is not particularly difficult, it’s about the same. This idea of complete and widespread reinterpretation of public space? It doesn’t make sense here.
The particular road from the OP is a main road through rural space between major locations. By American standards it would be considered idyllic.
There’s no “reimagining” needed here. People don’t need to develop a new consciousness of public space. We do not live in a country that is utterly obsessed with cars like america. And we aren’t opposed to limiting them. There are zero political barriers to this, the only barrier is the profit/revenue barrier of the traffic camera obsessed crowd. I must stress, I am not just cherrypicking out rare projects that look good. This shit is bog standard, everywhere in the country already. In every town, in every village, in every city. Outisde every school. In every residential area. All over the country.
It is categorically not the same environment here and we do not share the same political barriers or problems.
Yeah… there’s certainly some progress in the works and the mayor in particular seems to get it. But I wouldn’t bet on Cleveland becoming Amsterdam either.
I live in Sweden but my girlfriend is from Seattle so I have visited there a couple of times. There are a few cultural differences that I think play a major part in why pedestrian deaths have gone up in America but not elsewhere.
As already mentioned in this thread Americans tend to be more relaxed about using their phones when driving. It didn’t seem like a big deal to read a text message or anything.
Another thing is reflective clothing. Driving at night in Washington I saw nobody wearing anything reflective at all. Here in Sweden outside of city centers at night more often than not pedestrians will wear something reflective to actually be visible.
Lastly the drunk driving culture was very different. In Sweden people would hesitate to have a drink with lunch if they knew they had to drive later that day. In America we went to a brewery whilst waiting for the ferry.
The tofu eating wokerati want to trap us on our homes! They want us to wear ankle trackers that ensure we don’t travel more then 15 minutes from the house!
They’re trying to ensure all the most important amenities are within walking distance so they can lock us down forever and control how we breed and what we think!
Then they’ll slowly replace us with the foreigners they’re shipping in on their small boats, and before you know it we’ll all be French! It’s an invasion from within!
It’s incredible. I went to a consultation forum regarding intruding 20mph speed limits and all these conspiracy nuts just came out of the crowd like some zombie apocalypse.
I don’t understand how someone can graduate elementary (or primary in England, I think?) school and still believe the 15 minute city conspiracies. They have to be some of the stupidest that I’ve ever heard. Like if you know how to put your shoes on and you don’t keep forgetting to breathe, you should be smart enough to know better.
(US Here) Even my more progressive friends won’t go downtown because every business doesn’t have free dedicated parking. Street parking is free for the first hour and when I still drove I had lunch with no problems that way 1000 times, but nope unless where they’re going has it’s own dedicated parking lot, they aren’t going.
This isn’t a great argument. There is so much open undeveloped space in the US that could be used to house people. This interchange isn’t taking space away from anyone. There are lots of good reasons to reduce cars, but this isn’t one of them.
That’s not really true here though. This is in the middle of an urban area, not in some big open empty space that’s unoccupied, like Montana, or North Dakota. This is in the middle of Houston, Texas, a very populous city.
anyone who’s terrified of driving should not drive. keep those people off the road. They are the ones who drive badly because they’re scared, And they make the roads dangerous for everybody else.
I’ve driven across the United States five times with no problem. You just have to follow all the traffic laws and keep a safe following distance and use your turn signals, stay 100% focused on the road at all times, easy peasy. people who can’t do those things should stay off the roads. It’s better for them and better for everyone else.
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