Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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Speed cameras are very common in the UK and while they don't eliminate speeding altogether, they are effective.
Apart from the risk of either a fine, doing a 'speed awareness' course or losing your license, it also means that people who are driving too fast regardless are more likely to simply get stuck behind other drivers who are observing the speed limit.
Maybe if they're truly ubiquitous on all roads everywhere, then maybe. But if they're just scattered around here and there then i doubt they achieve much beyond fattening they city's ticket income
The trick is to mix fixed speed cameras with mobile speed cameras that move around regularly—police sit in the back of a van parked next to the road with a big camera pointed out the rear window. Because these move around, they could be anywhere. And because they could be anywhere most drivers will act as though they are.
No, the trick is section control.
Mobile speed cameras don't work due to e.g. Google Maps having speed camera warnings integrated. People slow down when the sat nav warns them and speed up later as well.
Section control is a system where license plates are photographed when a car enters a section and again when it leaves. The time stamps and the known distance are used to calculate an average speed. That means, accelerating and slowing down doesn't help, and it's the only way to force people to drive the speed limit over a longer distance.
Edit: We had fixed speed cameras and mobile ones for at least 50 years where I live. It's funny to see people theorizing about them as if they were some entirely new concept.
Average speed cameras only work on motorways. In the stop-start traffic of a city they're completely irrelevant.
Not sure why you think I'm theorising as though it's a new concept. I was speaking as to what clearly works based on the fact that it's what we do here in Australia and have done as long as I can remember, and that our death rates are so much lower than in America, on both a per capita and per vehicle-km basis.
I mean, it's easy to have lower death rates than a country where you can do your driver's license without ever leaving the parking lot.
In stop-start traffic all sorts of speed cameras are mostly irrelevant.
Average speed cameras work on any stretch of road where people actually exceed the speed limit. The cool thing about average speed cameras is that the technology is so incredibly simple and cheap that you can just place them on every junction on a road.
What I meant with that previous comment was not bumper-to-bumper traffic, but "regularly stopped by traffic lights" driving. Where some people absolutely will speed if they think they can get away with it, so maximising the fear of getting caught is a great way to reduce speeding.
In that case, average speed cameras still work, and they still work better than single-spot speed cameras.
But an average speed camera doesn't really work if they only get a few hundred metres, maybe a couple of kilometres at best, before they have to stop, and if during those couple of kilometres there's a mixture of times when they're speeding and times when they have to slow down because of other cars who aren't speeding.
They really can only work on motorways, with many kilometres between cameras and on- and off-ramps.