The nestlé boycott has always struck me as mostly hollow. I mean sure, it’s not a bad thing to do, but it seems for the majority of people it starts and ends there. Like yup, that’s the one bad company
Speaking from germany, 33 in a 30 wouldn’t even trip the speed cams here. Earliest infraction is basically doing 6mph over on a 30mph road, which would come at 50€ fine. We apparently also have 50 times less speed cameras and it absolutely does not stop people from fucking malding over them. They have to be designed bulletproof here now and even those still get regularly blown up. None of the points you raise change anything about it, because the core issue is people are terminally car brained
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?
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?
I suppose if cars, in their same number and usage, were traded for horses, then besides the epic problem of feeding them all, many cities would be far more dangerous now from the great horde of horses marching through every day!
I’ll start off here: eh, maybe. Certainly a lot more full of massive amounts of poop everywhere, that was a common problem even with not every man, woman and child a horse, it’s where we got sidewalks from - so you could walk in not-poop.
Sure, and you also don’t refill them every 200 miles from the nearest highway hay-station. (Well, kind of…) But there were still horses clustered in many cities for a lot of the time, right? Where now there are cars?
Yes, but nowhere near the same extent. Check out old city street pictures from the 1910 and 1920s. Sure, you’ll see cars, they had been invented and hell, you still see horses, except pretty much all of them barring the ones with cops on it are pulling some thing or another. And also there’s trams and also there’s just a buttload of people walking - which is what most of them did.
The point I’m getting at is the notion that we basically just replaced horses with cars, for the most part, but that’s ahistorical. We’ve replaced horses and trams and walking and cycling - all of which were done a lot - with cars. People used and could use a variety of options, now, eh, not so much, they’re not really viable for a lot of people.
But then that’s not because cars are so inherently great for any and all transporation, it’s just we’ve built cities to accomodate cars first, foremost and nigh exclusively, to the detriment of everything else. You wouldn’t find me arguing to bring back the horses, but trams, cycling, walking? Absolutely.
Because we have pretty much gained nothing from cars. People still have roughly the same commute as before - they just live further away and travel the same time, except now the societal cost of doing that is 10x the price per trip. People have a time budget for travel, not a distance budget, and that’s stayed pretty much the same.
Funny thing about horses - apparently when cities moved over to cars from horses they became safer. Because horses spook: and one spooked horse can spook the rest and you get a stampede.
You seem cool enough / not carbrained that I’d like to suggest you to take a closer look at this. The perception of “horse -> car” as per transportation is pretty prevalent but it doesn’t really hold up in the sense this fun fact is often touted, it’s born out of a car based status quo applied backwards to horses mostly.
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.
I’m german tho.
By American standards it would be considered idyllic.
As such, I do not believe american standards as per roads are anything to go by
Parts of the road already have traffic calming measures.
That’s not really gonna stop anybody from speeding down the remaining lane(s) because they’re still very wide. It’s good for pedestrians, probably, don’t get me wrong, doesn’t really fight the speeding problem at all.
This is very easily expanded upon with the addition of chicanes, which are in wide use (hundreds of thousands) across the country.
These do
There’s no “reimagining” needed here. People don’t need to develop a new consciousness of public space.
Those are very much spotwork as per slowing down cars. They work for that spot, yes. It is however absolutely not hard to accelerate a car again. This is a good idea to slow people down before a busy or a school crossing or something, the third picture especially is just going to lead to slow down / wait -> mash gas pedal
We do not live in a country that is utterly obsessed with cars like america.
True, but also nigh about the lowest bar to clear right after like Saudi Arabia.
There are zero political barriers to this, the only barrier is the profit/revenue barrier of the traffic camera obsessed crowd.
And you accuse me of living in some fantasy reality?
In every town, in every village, in every city. Outisde every school. In every residential area. All over the country.
Same, could find similar features here by looking out my old apartments window. Hell, do you one better than that, we have shit like this
Sorry for the grainy pictures, didn’t wanna spend that much time on google. Now that’s a road you can’t speed on, on account of many chicanes and other built up enviroments, not just the single one and then it’s open road before and after.
Doesn’t mean the rest of it isn’t incredibly car brained and hostile, and as such, transportation by foot or cycling sucks major ass.
If your vision of not being carbrained is “do better than the USA”, yeah, you’re there, but that shouldn’t be the end goal
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.