Instead of wasting money on speed cameras and reducing speeds, we should be aggressively ticketing distracted drivers and pedestrians, and people who struggle to reach the limit in the first place.
this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
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Ticketing people for going under the limit is not wise. The biggest issue is due to inclement weather. We don't want people driving faster than is safe for conditions due to fear of a ticket.
That's fair, but easy to do: don't have the cops issue tickets for driving slowly on days where there is inclimate weather.
wasting money
Who's got a higher salary, a cop or a camera?
Ticketing pedestrians
How about fuck no not in a million years. The LAST thing we need is to tell cops to go out and aggressively harass anyone who "looks distracted."
Even if cars were the responsibility of people walking (they aren't, wtf?) there's a 0% chance this could go smoothly.
Depends on how often the camera needs to be repaired/replaced and where the money goes for the tickets it writes.
Cops need to start ticketing:
- people changing lanes without indication
- people turning without indication
- people driving in the inside lane when they're not passing
- people who take more than 2 seconds to react to a light change
- People following bumper-to-bumper forming left-turn trains through yellow/red lights
- People who take more than a few seconds to get back up to speed
And also:
- Pedestrians who stand on the edge of the curb at the corner waiting for the light to change so they can cross
- Pedestrians standing literally on the edge of the road at the corner waiting for the light to change so they can cross
You want to ticket pedestrians for standing on the edge of the curb, waiting for the light? Like, on the sidewalk, just really close to the road?
Who's got a higher salary, a cop or a camera?
What's more effective at changing bad driving behaviour, being caught in the moment and spending 10 min on the side ofbthe road getting a ticket, or getting a ticket in the mail a couple if weeks later when you've probably forgotten that you were even on that road at that time?
Then you tick the court date box and mail it back to them. Then two or three years later, you get a court date, so you dust off your form letter charter 11b challenge, send it off to all relevant parties, head down to the Winchester and wait for all of this to blow over.
My point is that does nothing to serve the stated goal of increasing safe driving.
Aware, and I fully agree. I am just adding to the point that not only does it fail to address the safety issue, but the massive uptick in tickets generated by this solution will inevitably spill over into an already overwhelmed court system, which will cost us economically and socially.
Traffic calming designs and devices should be preferred over speed cameras.
Narrow streets, chicanes, pedestrian zone height transitions, narrowing the street at pedestrian crossings, etc.
This is more "fix the symptom instead of the problem" though I do agree that we need better pedestrian infrastructure.
Speeding is an inherently human problem, you cannot solve the human, you can only trick the human into solving the problem for you, i.e. scaring them and making speeding actively risky for their own car.
Ultimately, on top of traffic calming, we need way better public transit and making driver's licences harder to acquire with longer, more rigorous training. That way, driving is not an obligation and those who don't want to drive or should not be driving do not have to drive. Not everyone was meant to drive.
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.
Ah yes, the good old UK where it’s normal to arrest people for saying mean things on the internet and you've disarmed the working class, not to mention the UK created the biggest human rights problem in the middle east when your prime minister Balfour released the balfour declaration and now we have a settler colonial ethno nationalist apartheid state flagrantly committing genocide while using DARVO psychological abuse tactics and pretending to be the victim. thanks for all that white anglo saxon British imperialism!!!!
Lmao, ill take the downvotes, better than living in lala land like the brits and not accepting the reality of what you've all been trying to pass off as civilized behavior for the last millennia has stained the world while normalizing genocide and exploitation. But god save the king right?
Thanks for your contribution!
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