New UK police speed gun can read license plates from half a mile away at night • Hacker News Board

Re: New UK police speed gun can read license plates from half a mile away at night

#501

Post by bradknowles » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 4:16 AM UTC

flemhans wrote: post #482

slumdev wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same way in the United States. 40 km/h above the limit is the norm on our interstate highways. Perhaps only 20 km/h on smaller streets.

To be fair, you have low speed limits. And I think SA is a whole other level of breaking laws. Anecdotal: Coming from Northern Europe (Denmark), I found people in NYC, Boston, SF , and LA to drive very well-behaved compared to people back home. I had to take care to stop driving like a European, since it made my fellow American passengers cringe.

I lived and worked — and drove — in Belgium for almost eight years. I held my own in France and a Italy, too. When I moved back to the US, it took me a little while to accommodate, but not too long.

But to this day, when necessary, I can go back into Belgian mode, and drive like the other crazy-ass Texans here in Austin.

Re: New UK police speed gun can read license plates from half a mile away at night

#502

Post by alvah » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 4:53 AM UTC

7952 wrote: post #476

alvah wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"(exceeding the one-size-fits all speed limit) is evidence of bad judgement" This is not as self-evident as you assert. Do you have anything to back up your claim?

Judgement is subjective. I would argue that the safest way to drive is conservatively and with caution. And that your own emotions, time constraints, and judgement about safety are not sufficiently compelling to override that. Of course as a society we are forced to strike a balance between safety and utility. Where you strike that balance is political and not entirely objective.

It is completely possible to drive conservatively and with caution, while exceeding an arbitrary limit. Here's one for you, a 3-lane highway adjacent to a shopping centre and school. The 60km/h speed limit is too high during shopping & school hours, but stupidly low at 3am on a clear night with no traffic around. My opinion of a safe speed is very different for those 2 circumstances - I don't see how that equates to bad judgement.

Re: New UK police speed gun can read license plates from half a mile away at night

#503

Post by hedora » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 5:56 AM UTC

Scoundreller wrote: post #23

ISL wrote: post #17

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…

> but if you're loaning your car out to someone who speeds, at least some of the culpability falls on you. Not in Germany it doesn’t. Only the actual driver can be found guilty of speeding, even by speed-camera. I understand they’ll take pictures of the front of the vehicle and check against who’s lives at the registered address. Not sure if it’s an infraction for the registered owner to refuse to identify the likely…

In San Francisco they intimidate you and claim you’re legally obligated to tell them who was driving.

They did this to me when someone ran a red light in a car I’d sold (and electronically transferred) six months prior.

I’d suspect what they did wouldn’t hold up in court if it weren’t for the fact that the San Francisco court house was engaged in this behavior.

Apparently, this scenario is so common in California that places that accept cars as donations often have a specialist to help donors deal with extortion demands over revenue tickets.

Re: New UK police speed gun can read license plates from half a mile away at night

#504

Post by iso947 » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 7:32 AM UTC

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #306

iso947 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the U.K. excess speed is the 10th most common cause of accidents, way below “driver didn’t look properly”, which was 9 times as common. As far as deaths go, the most common contributory causes are loss of control and failure to look properly. Exceeding speed limit was a cause in just 16% of deaths. https://www.regtransfers.co.uk/content/common-causes-for-roa... https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/u…

> In the U.K. excess speed is the 10th most common cause of accidents That may be in part due to camera-based enforcement of the speed limits. Also, road accidents kill quite a lot of people. If it's the 10th most common cause, that could still be enough to kill more people than many other things that we regulate.

It could be. I lack the data at the moment but I seem to remember when deaths were higher 20 years ago (3400 a year vs 1700), exceeding the speed limit was higher in the causes.

What cameras may have done is change the culture of speeding, making it far more antisocial - like the drunk driving campaigns did.

If others don’t speed, then you generally can’t speed, especially in towns where it’s most dangerous.

My parents used to speed all over the place in the 90s, my peers don’t today. Perhaps the cameras don’t make any local difference, but are part of a larger cultural shift.

More people are killed by car drivers knocking down pedestrians than by car drivers speeding.

Re: New UK police speed gun can read license plates from half a mile away at night

#505

Post by arp242 » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 7:38 AM UTC

dm319 wrote: post #466

arp242 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Purely anecdotal, I noticed there were far more people in fancy cars going at ridiculous speeds in ridiculous stretches of roads with loads of pedestrians and cyclists around when I lived in Bristol compared to the Netherlands. I called them CICs: "Cunts In Cars". Road design probably plays part in this; a comparatively wide fully asphalted road probably isn't the best design for 20mph. Traffic calming and all that.

It's a prevalent attitude of successful people who are used to lower ethical standards applied to them and being given priority in their day-to-day life. An extra factor is that premium cars (irrespective of wealth) are sought after by people with negative personality traits [1]. I don't know why the difference between UK and Netherlands, maybe due to differences in income equity and judicial fairness? I imagine the…

In my observation, in the Netherlands someone with a flashy car is quicker seen as a show-off. Generally speaking, it has a somewhat more grounded and egalitarian culture. Someone calling themselves a "Baron such and such" or "Sir so and so" like they do in the UK? The entire country will roll their eyes.

In the UK, it's somewhere in-between the mainland European and American attitudes, where someone with a flashy car is seen as deserving of it through their hard work.

And not everyone who drives like an idiot has a flashy car by the way; lots of those pumped VW things and whatnot as well (in both countries).

Re: New UK police speed gun can read license plates from half a mile away at night

#506

Post by CraigJPerry » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 8:01 AM UTC

lmm wrote: post #498

CraigJPerry wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If we're not able to enforce existing rules then it's hard to see how introducing new rules could ever help anything.

Who’s suggesting adding new rules?

Re: New UK police speed gun can read license plates from half a mile away at night

#507

Post by CraigJPerry » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 8:27 AM UTC

yholio wrote: post #494

CraigJPerry wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

> the cost to the nation of traffic arriving 5 minutes later? 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…

>> road capacity does not increase with higher speeds

Fundamentally untrue. If you reduce the average speed of a section of road, say for example in heavy rain, the capacity or throughput of that section of road is reduced since less vehicles can pass through in the same time.

If you can keep drivers attentive enough to maintain safe distance between vehicles, you can increase the speed of a section of road.

>> Once you hit the peak for that road section

You can increase the practical peak in an imperfect world by increasing attentiveness of drivers.

For example, you could defer the onset of gridlock by X minutes by making more efficient use of the available road space. In some cases it will be possible to increase X such that gridlock is never encountered for the same traffic volume.

>> Some roads are exceptionally safe at low speeds

And yet the focus on speed means that roads which are not exceptionally safe at low speed have reduced incentive to be improved. Why improve a road (hard in some cases) when the impact is not measurable and speed is an easy band aid.

Better to pretend the immeasurable doesn’t exist and simply focus on speed. Even if other approaches could have a greater impact on road safety.

Re: New UK police speed gun can read license plates from half a mile away at night

#508

Post by lmm » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 8:58 AM UTC

CraigJPerry wrote: post #506

lmm wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're not able to enforce existing rules then it's hard to see how introducing new rules could ever help anything.

Who’s suggesting adding new rules?

Well what are you suggesting then? I think enforcing the traffic laws we have is one of the low-hanging fruit for cutting the huge rate of deaths from traffic collisions. Are you proposing something concrete that would be better to spend our time on, or just finding an excuse to do nothing?

Re: New UK police speed gun can read license plates from half a mile away at night

#509

Post by yholio » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 9:17 AM UTC

CraigJPerry wrote: post #507

yholio wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the cost to the nation of traffic arriving 5 minutes later? 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…

>> road capacity does not increase with higher speeds Fundamentally untrue. If you reduce the average speed of a section of road, say for example in heavy rain, the capacity or throughput of that section of road is reduced since less vehicles can pass through in the same time. If you can keep drivers attentive enough to maintain safe distance between vehicles, you can increase the speed of a section of road. >> Once…

The capacity of a sufficiently long road section does not increase with speed because the safety distance must also increase with speed. A good rule of thumb is to keep a 2 second (or 3 second) distance between vehicles, and that means that the peak throughput of any single lane is 0.33-0.5 vehicles per second regardless of speed.

The total time spent on the road increases and the utility of the road decreases since it gets you to your destination slower, but the capacity does not increase, it's the same capacity with an added delay line. In fact, the safety distance increases more than linearly with speed, precisely because the combined effect of reaction time, braking distance and severity of incidents is more than linear. The 2 second rule is just a rough approximation.

These are really "fundamentally true" issues that are well known in traffic engineering so there is nothing much to debate. The rain example is disingenuous since in rain the braking distance increases dramatically, drivers instinctively know this and maintain larger clearances. And the demand of the car traffic increases too in bad weather, for example people avoid using bicycles or walking and opt for a car, which injects additional vehicles into a road network and pushes it over into disequilibrium and gridlock.

Re: New UK police speed gun can read license plates from half a mile away at night

#510

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 9:23 AM UTC

manquer wrote: post #475

buran77 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lawyers enjoy an even better familiarity but not the same level of trust. Police officers are trusted to run after criminals and catch them so implicitly with the authority to do this also comes that trust. They need it to do their job. Otherwise they would face the same reaction when doing their job as you would as a normal person trying to act like a police officer. As for the punishment, there is no reasonable ana…

Lawyers can be in adversarial roles to the judge, i.e. it easier to antagonize a judge as a lawyer than a police officer. Lawyers do enjoy preferential treatment than you and me in the system for couple reasons, one they the rules and are likely to use/exploit them, also various agents of system tend to be careful about procedure around a lawyer, one of the reasons you should hire a lawyer asap if ever arrested.

[deleted]