I'm ok with this, 11 is enough that is not just a oops. But speed limit signage better be prominent.
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2026
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11mph is egregious (46 in a 35) number that I hope most people will find reasonable. Introducing cameras in a reasonable way like this should help with driver acceptance. Hopefully they didn’t put it at the bottom of a hill where the speed drops from 60 to 35 (ie revenue focus).
Signage is nowhere near as important as street design. The design should say 20mph by having cobblestone, narrow curving streets and tight corners.
Speed cameras always end up devolving into a petty political football that creates more opposition and resentment than harm prevention. If you need to consider speed cameras at all, it means you definitely have an infrastructure design issue. That's where both the attention and the money should be going.
The money from these camera tickets must go to improving road safety. And the city must not decrease the amount of money they put towards road safety either.
Speed camera ticket fees should go solely to servicing the municipal bonds issued to pay for road diets, and if you're bringing in more ticket fees than you have bonds to pay then you need to issue more bonds to pay for more road diets.
You’re right about civil infrastructure, it’s a shitshow of road layout in some parts of Oakland.
However, they’ll print money with these cameras the way people drive.
What’s really interesting is that between Oakland and Berkeley, there are so many cyclists risking their lives every day
This specific community has lit me up for pointing out how shitty these scameras are to the average citizen. It's a revenue driving privacy invasion. Fuck speed cameras forever.
No kidding. Yes, let's install cameras that can identify and record every license plate (and face, too, if the camera has resolution for one it has resolution for the other) that passes them.
Surely our government will not use this capability to track the movements of its political enemies.
I'm confident Oakland's notoriously honest and professional police department will not use them to harass whistleblowers and stalk the estranged spouses of police.
And of course it's overly paranoid to imagine the "third party vendor" processing all this license plate data could be hacked or compromised or sell the data to other entities.
Christ.
Not to mention when they're in error, it's your word vs. the bot's.
You can easily design them to be privacy preserving. And usually you would, too. It's the efficient way to build them.
11 mph is pretty generous, but its bad design to need something like this. If you design roads correctly traffic will need to stay under the speed limit to avoid hitting bump strips and safety barriers.
Also without a demerit system this is just restricting driving fast to rich people. Incredibly dumb social incentives.
11 mph? In the land down under 3 kph (~1.86 mph) is enough to be fined and get demerit points.
And I fucking hate it. Camera at the bottom of a hill near me in a 40kph zone and they fined me for doing 43kph.
get a hammer on the end of a long stick
Imagine if drivers maliciously complied and drove the minimum.
Imagine if road safety and air quality would magically increase.
Look Doug Ford, it works, PUT OUR CAMERS BACK ASSHOLE
Oakland
Oof. So that's where the city budget went this time
Prove it was me driving then.
They can tie it to your cell phone location data.
Tell me you didn't read the article without telling me you didn't read the article ("the cameras take pictures of a vehicle’s rear license plates")
Can you ticket a car for driving infractions? How does license plate identity the driver, not just whoever registered the vehicle?
It's treated like a non-moving violation. Like a parking ticket, it doesn't matter who was driving. The registered owner is responsible for paying.
In Australia, you can nominate someone else who was driving the vehicle after you receive ticket. But the ticket always goes to the person whose name is under the car registration.
Likewise in the UK. I'm less sure about the efficacy and ethics of speeding fines than many people in this community -- not to say they shouldn't exist, just that I've seen plenty unreasonably low restrictions in places where there's no heightened risk to the public, and that I'm not convinced that motorway/interstate restrictions are useful to the degree they're enforced -- but having the registered owner take the risk if the driver doesn't own up seems entirely reasonable.
Agree with you. All speeding cameras where I live are on rural highways (110km/h zones), and usually at the bottom of a big hill.
Yes, as the car is licenced to a person, this person pays. It works probably everywhere in the world that has speedcameras.