What's going on Canada?
🍁 Meta
🗺️ Provinces / Territories
🏙️ Cities / Local Communities
Sorted alphabetically by city name.
🏒 Sports
Hockey
Football (NFL): incomplete
Football (CFL): incomplete
Baseball
Basketball
Soccer
💻 Schools / Universities
Sorted by province, then by total full-time enrolment.
💵 Finance, Shopping, Sales
🗣️ Politics
🍁 Social / Culture
Rules
Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage: lemmy.ca
How about instead of speed cameras you change your road designs? People won't speed if they cannot speed safely.
Make your roads less wide. Add some curves, depending on required max speed, you make the curves larger or smaller. On lower speed roads, add obstacles to drive around.
There are many forms of traffic management that don't require speeding cameras but then again, speeding cameras are for making the government money, not for traffic safety
People won't speed if they cannot speed safely.
You have more faith in humanity than I do.
People won’t speed if they cannot speed safely.
...
I get it, good road design helps stop speeding but the idea that safety even crosses the mind of people going 80 in a 60 is laughable.
The fines should be compounding, after each ticket the fine goes up 10% until people learn to just drive the fuckin limit.
Any crime you can pay your way out of without any other repercussions just punishes poor people. To the wealthy it's just cost of having fun.
This is something that has been proven over and over. Make the roads smaller and people automatically start driving slower.
Sure, thereay still be an eventually asshole but with the right design you could make a risky (for you) 80 in a 60 zone, but you can't do 100 because you wouldn't make it. That already helps curbing the worst but it's also a psychological thing that makes most people slow down to the speed that you want. It's much more effective than speeding cameras but it doesn't make money
doesn’t make money
It also COSTS an incredible amount of money. Ontario has some pretty terrible, unmaintained roads, before we start hand holding BMWs so they don't get tickets we should be repairing our existing infrastructure and maybe putting in some more bike lanes.
Where do you live that nobody drives unsafely and infrastructure can just be overhauled as soon as a problem is identified? I want to move there!
People vandalize speed cameras
Toronto city council decided last week that it will install "larger, more visible and clearer" signs to warn drivers where automated speed enforcement cameras are located in the city.
"HEY VANDALS! THE SPEED CAMERAS ARE OVER HERE!"
They need cameras pointing at the speed cameras to catch the vandals, and maybe cameras pointing at those cameras just in case.
I would bet good money on it being only a matter of time before they vandalize the cameras watching cameras.
It may get to a point where tax dollars are wasted having undercover cop cars, maybe even plain clothes officers, watching the cameras for vandals
UK we have had speed cameras for ages. There was a trend for people to either spray paint the lens or even firebomb the camera. So they had to put in a second (video) camera mounted as high as possible to protect the first camera, quite amusing that a safety camera has to be kept safe by another safety cameras, its cameras all the way down.
Personally I think speed cameras that monitor a fixed point are pretty dumb unless that fixed point is an accident black spot such as outside a school or a red light camera for dangerous set of traffic lights. Its far better to have average speed cameras for a large section of road but those are more costly as you need way more cameras to make them work outside of motorways as you need to cover all the junctions properly.
Latest cameras we have in testing can see if you do not have your seat belt done up or are using your phone. Just stopping people from using their phone has to be the biggest step forward we can make with modern road safety.
One of the first speed cameras I remember in Belgium was just behind the crest of a highway. Drivers would give more power to drive up the hill at the speed limit, they'd cross the crest and that same power would make them overshoot the speed limit. So they put a camera right there to maximize the fines. Without the camera there was nothing special about that spot, but with the camera there were a lot of front end collisions. Fine revenue was apparently more important than safety.
Placement of new speed cameras has gotten more sensible with time fortunately, but those old speed traps are still left in place unfortunately. For highways we now have a lot of average speed tracking and that has really improved the flow of traffic. And for villages/towns, there is often a clearly visible lone camera box at the beginning of the low speed zone, those work so well that there is often no camera in them, just the box is enough.
I don't really care that much either way for speed cameras. They work in a very limited fashion, but they punish the poor the most, and the money goes to cops.
At the end of the day speed cameras are a solution to a problem that doesn't need to exist. We are failing to use technology available to us for basically no reason - we already know how to slow people and calm traffic without any kind of economic/punitive incentive.
Hey I got a ticket for going 57 in a school zone where the posted limit is 50, except the road only borders the far end of the school yard at the tip of its soccer field, with no way for students to exit, and the road itself is 4 lanes and should really have a speed limit of 60, and it was Sunday... Easter Sunday to be precise, so it was literally a school zone surrounded by days off.
Imagine if I hadn't been caught! I'm a Menace II Society, for sure.
Replace speed cameras with road diets and other geometric choices that restrict traffic speed without relying on drivers following rules (they don't)
The Ottawa Protocol
90 kph
Speed camera
50 kph
Past speed camera
90 kph
While not ideal, this can still be useful. In Sweden, we employ speed cameras strategically around areas of higher risk, such as intersections with cars coming onto a larger road with an obscured view. Reducing the speed in that particular spot does probably save lives.
Still, adjusting the design speed is the preferable alternative, but that does not make speed cameras completely ineffective.
Nobody drives 90 in Ottawa. Especially not on the 417.
I like reminding my friends in professional law enforcement that these cameras are exactly what losing your job to a machine is about.
We literally do not have enough law enforcement to properly enforce traffic laws. It is part of why average speeds have crept up to 10-20 over the limit. In fact enforcing traffic laws was kinda just something that was thrown at the police when cars were invented and we've never really stopped to think about it since.