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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!"
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 wonβt 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
doesnβt 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.
People won't speed if they cannot speed safely.
You have more faith in humanity than I do.
Honest to god, it's not that hard to do 40 km/h in these zones. They post a sign telling you there's a speed camera coming up. You just have to go 40 for like 20 meters to avoid a ticket.
Why should we socialize the cost of "fixing" the road design, when we can instead make the individuals who speed pay?
Both is good, because the way our streets are designed are both dangerous and expensive. Narrowing that 40 zone by the school can remove excess road space that now doesn't need to be maintained, cleaned, plowed, or salted. The excess space could be used by school, have trees planted, or be used for alternative transport like transit or bikes.
The roads are currently designed to prioritize driver throughput and provide "wiggle room" for driver error, often at the expense of people outside of the vehicle. Many of the concepts that engineers use to make highways safe were applied to city streets, which in hindsight maybe we don't want our city streets to be designed like highways.
The problem is that people are AWFUL at evaluating their own risk when driving, and drive at speeds that ARENT safe. Look at how few people leave appropruate stopping distances between vehicles, which is the #1 factor in preventing accidents.
The methods you proposed would likely decrease the speed vehicles travel at (ie from 80 to 60) because drivers feel like they can't travel at that speed, but the road likely still isn't safe for vehicles to travel at 60 when its that narrow.
Speed cameras catch everyone speeding, 24/7, and are the single best, economical, way to eliminate speeding from a road. Cop can't pull over every vehicle going 80 on a 4 lane road rated for 60, but the camera can ticket them all.
For sure, promote a narrower road, encourage MUP over sidewalks, and encourage safer driving when you talk to your councilors, but road reconstruction happens, generally, once every 25-50yrs. We can't wait for that timeframe to fix these problems.
We donthat because we found that wide roads make people drive faster unconsciously. If you design roads badly, people will speed, it will be dangerous. Design roads better and you save lives.
Putting up signs is what most countries have done for decades with exactly 0 results.
A slightly different post had road fatalities in a graph for the US, Canada, and Australia, showing insane levels of road deaths. A secondary graph was added showing the Netherlands at a fraction of those countries, even though the Netherlands is much more densly populated.
Wanna know why? Because the Netherlands does this all the time. Any time an intersection has a lot of accidents, they break up the damn thing and put in a completely newly designed one, and traffic deaths go down. A road has too much speeding? They'll tear out that crap, put in a new road designed in such a way that people will automatically drive the correct speed et voila, speeding stops, Ross fatalities go down
That's why you want to do that
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!
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.
Where do you live with a 50km/h school zone? That is psychotic.
I don't know about the guy you are asking, but I have multiple school zones with a 50kph limit in my area as well.
The school zones in my area are 30kph, and a lot of people find that excessive and want it slower, so 50 is wild to me.
I believe rural school zones are sometimes 50km/h. In context the non-school zone speed limit is usually 80km/h or more, often with visibility from one horizon to the other and a sprawling parking lot, it's not quite the same as a congested urban school with a driveway big enough to fit a single bus and dozens of cars parked along the curb.
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.
Have you ever seen an idiot driver in a roundabout?
That's why they put raised safety platforms at the entrances and exits of roundabouts
This is the way, but good luck getting that implemented. NIMBYs and "frustrated motorists" will push back, and it only takes a few to ruin good ideas.
Fun thing about design changes, the motorists get less frustrated.
A big part of our frustration whole driving is that (at least in Ontario) design speed MUST be at least 20kph higher than posted speed.
So yeah, you get frustrated doing 30kph on a road designed for 60kph. You get less frustrated on a road with no posted limits anywhere that jsut naturally nakes you want to drive a speed that feels safe, and happens to be 30kph.
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 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.
I can't even remember the last time I even saw a cop doing speed enforcement in Toronto. Definitely not on the highways. It makes total sense to automate this, and I highly doubt anybody lost their job over it.
It may actually be a net positive in job creation between the installation, maintaince, and bureaucratic stuff.
Surely with Toronto Police Services' budget they could better protect speed cameras if they wanted to
They just have to pretend that every speed camera is a Millionaire. Considering anticipated revenue they may as well be.