491–500 of 525 posts
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They're focussed on the heavily used sections though, ie where they are more likely to be encountered. By that measure (kms driven), they're much more common.
I imagine that they would be on the motorways?
I once saw speed cameras as "un-sporting" until travelling elsewhere in the world where they are commonplace. In those countries, it seems like everyone just drives the speed limit. If the point of speed enforcement is to, you know, ensure that everyone is going the speed limit or slower, they're awesome. Norway's system of timed speed cameras are particularly wonderful -- they simply photograph a car and then photog…
I am a huge fan of replacing instantaneous speed cameras with average speed cameras. Our city has the most dangerous road in Canada, speeding is the norm not the exception, and I haven’t seen any debate about average speed cameras
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I sometimes flash people on roads where there are no speed traps. This way I achieve two things: defeating the usefulness of flashing people as a warning and also possibly making people drive slower than they would.
So you object to people speeding illegally, yet you have no problem with using your lights to illegally distract other drivers? How curious!
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Inattention is hard to measure and results in accidents that are made much worse by excessive speed, which is easy to measure. If the goal is to reduce overall traffic victims, then investing in speed control seems like the low hanging fruit. The energy of vehicle (thus, the energy absorbed during impact by every object contained or hit) is proportinal with the square of the speed. Meanwhile, the reaction time availa…
>> results in accidents that are made much worse by excessive speed Sure but there's no free lunch here. If you trade off speed in the non-accident cases, which is by far the majority of all miles driven, then there's a cost to that. It happens to be a really hard to measure cost so it's always completely ignored. How would you even begin to measure the cost to the nation of traffic arriving 5 minutes later? Not all…
Traffic delays are dominated by congestion and road capacity does not increase with higher speeds. Once you hit the peak for that road section, trafic grinds. If, for example, you have a 30 minute comute that spends 15 minutes in congestion-limited trafic and 15 minutes on a speed limited empty highway, you would need to drive 50% faster on those sections to recoup a full 5 minutes, so something like 105 mph on a 70 mph section for a full 10 minutes. That doesn't sound realistic.
There is a cost to low speed limits, clearly, but it is usually marginal - and when it's not, you should address that specific problem of a too low speed limit instead of making speed limits unenforceable throughout. If a section generates lots of speed tickets and no even minor incidents, it's clearly a sign to increase speed.
> drivers de-rating the risks.
True, but the risk rating they assigned to higher speeds was probably not proportional to the actual exponential increase to begin with.
> We don't have more accidents on the fastest roads in the UK.
That's moving the goal posts. The increase in risk is exponential on any given single road. Some roads are exceptionally safe at low speeds so you can increase the speed quite a bit and keep the risks low, hence the higher limits.
There's the old joke: "All those present that object to receiving speeding fines please raise your right foot". People object to speeding fines but receiving them is entirely optional. Personally, I'd rather they clamped down harder on tailgating, poor lane discipline and uninsured drivers than on motorway speed limits.
Speeding is one of the most obvious examples of government overreach. 1) The speed limit obviously an arbitrary choice - the chance of death is decent at 50k/h (standard "town" speed limit in Slovenia) (so why not 40hm/k or 30km/h), and e.g. Germany has no speed limit on the highways (in some places) so there's really no good reason to set a limit of 130km/h (why not 110km/h or 150km/h)? 2) The easiest objection to (…
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The point of distributing this technology is to make every motorist feel that nowhere is "safe" for them to speed. It doesn't matter if there are no cops around, their beams can get you and fine you, and hopefully that keeps people at safe driving speeds.
Yet it's well known many UK motoways have speed cameras at regular distances as well as average speed cameras in many places, and there are still huge numbers of people caught by them?
I'm curious about the context of the $13,000 price tag. Is this a slight upcharge? Or an order of magnitude? I'm what the Brits might call a "keen motorist", but as someone who considers speed enforcement a necessary evil, there's a world of difference between paying a bit more for much better tech, versus way more. If this costs 4x what a normal radar gun costs, one must ask "what is the problem we're solving", and…
The point of distributing this technology is to make every motorist feel that nowhere is "safe" for them to speed. It doesn't matter if there are no cops around, their beams can get you and fine you, and hopefully that keeps people at safe driving speeds.
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> And yet... road deaths are down over the same 20 years and mobility is up. > Road traffic enforcement isn’t even in the top 1000 issues facing the UK today. Road collisions are one of the biggest killers of young people in the UK. It's absolutely a big issue.
What’s the bigger issue: road traffic enforcement or avoiding pedestrian deaths by finding acceptable ways to remove vehicles altogether from pedestrian areas? Road traffic enforcement or reducing infant asthma in cities by moving tailpipe emissions away from populated areas? Road traffic enforcement or ... you get the point.
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If everyone is driving at the speed limit then it’s dangerous to be the outlier. Always go with the flow of the rest of the traffic.
An unfortunate extension of this is that sometimes, a speed limit will be set very low for no apparent reason, and almost everyone will exceed it significantly if it's not visibly being enforced. This puts a driver who wants to be both safe and legal in a no-win situation. Personally, I liked the idea put forward by one of the UK driver advocacy groups a long time ago. Speed enforcement measures should prioritise pla…
In suburban development especially, there is/was an initiative to make roads safer by increasing the physical tolerances relative to the posted limits. So you have all these residential neighborhoods with big gentle corners in them that any drunk idiot in a shitbox could easily handle at 60mph. And that is exactly what happens.
If 30mph is too fast for a pedestrian encounter, then 30mph needs to feel too fast for maintaining control / avoiding obstacles.
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An unfortunate extension of this is that sometimes, a speed limit will be set very low for no apparent reason, and almost everyone will exceed it significantly if it's not visibly being enforced. This puts a driver who wants to be both safe and legal in a no-win situation. Personally, I liked the idea put forward by one of the UK driver advocacy groups a long time ago. Speed enforcement measures should prioritise pla…
Risk compensation [0] is a relevant idea here. When you give people a highway they will treat it like one. If you want them to slow down, you have to make a road that feels slower. Tighter corners, narrower lanes, parked cars, bulb-outs, etc. In suburban development especially, there is/was an initiative to make roads safer by increasing the physical tolerances relative to the posted limits. So you have all these res…
Many American highways actually increase the length and size of the road markings in order to make speed feel slower than it actually is, which was likely a comfort thing at first but clearly it hides the present danger of speed.