I once saw speed cameras as "un-sporting" until travelling elsewhere in the world where they are commonplace.
In those countries, it seems like everyone just drives the speed limit.
If the point of speed enforcement is to, you know, ensure that everyone is going the speed limit or slower, they're awesome. Norway's system of timed speed cameras are particularly wonderful -- they simply photograph a car and then photograph it again many kilometers later. If you get there too soon, then at some point, you must have been speeding.
These systems are safer for police and drivers as there are no traffic stops for speeding. Yes, the bill goes to the car owner, but if you're loaning your car out to someone who speeds, at least some of the culpability falls on you.
Can speed cameras be used as a revenue source? Yes. It is reasonable to place requirements on the determination of speed-limits and camera-locations to prevent abuse. Beyond that, if you don't want to get a fine, don't speed.
With no attack on the parent, this reminds me of the general driving attitude of South Africa where I am from. A combination of lack of road enforcement and public mistrust in the police have created an environment where the rule of law on the road, designed to protect lives, is treated merely as suggestions or guidelines, often ignored.
It’s extremely common to see drivers speeding from 10 to even 30 km/h above the speed limit, even on urban roads. Sometimes these drivers are so confident in their right (freedom?) that they’ll flash their lights at you from behind if you’re going too slow, even if you are a good citizen driving at the speed limit. And speeding is only one half of it...
When I came to Europe for the first time it was amazing to see how almost everyone respects the road rules (I know this isn’t the case everywhere) and it generally makes me feel much safer on the roads. Although it’s still scary as hell cycling in some cities without protected cycle lanes.
> but if you're loaning your car out to someone who speeds, at least some of the culpability falls on you.
Not in Germany it doesn’t. Only the actual driver can be found guilty of speeding, even by speed-camera.
I understand they’ll take pictures of the front of the vehicle and check against who’s lives at the registered address. Not sure if it’s an infraction for the registered owner to refuse to identify the likely driver.
Source: my German car rental company didn’t auto-pay anything, they forwarded me a “ticket” from the police department asking me to pay 20 EUR to go away or they’ll try to identify the actual driver and try to charge them a higher fine.
While this is more work, I think it’s reasonable for us to expect law enforcement to identify the guilty and not just convict someone that’s easy to blame.
Even better: in Germany, the cameras black out the passenger's side of the car automatically for privacy reasons, so that only the driver is identified.
This was a problem in 2008 when a car with steering wheel on the right systematically got caught speeding. The driver knew full well what was going on an placed a muppet in the passeger's seat. The picture is fantastic:
German here. Indeed only the driver of a car is punished for speeding. The burdon is on the officials to determine the driver. But they will send an official inquiry to the car owner to name the driver of the car, if the identification is not obvious by a photo. There are cases where no one gets the ticket, because the driver is not named by the car owner, sometimes for very valid reason. With a larger group of people having access to that car, this can be true. As a consequence, sometimes people get off their ticket.
There is a catch however: while you might get out of a ticket once or twice, the authorities can order you to keep a drivers log in the car. That means, a written log of every single drive has to be kept. So that there is never any ambiguity of naming drivers going forward. And having to keep logs of all your drives going forward is something you really want to avoid.
In Israel, it is up to the owner of the car to name the driver (or accept responsibility) if no other evidence is available.
Rental companies name the renter, which is what you describe, and it is then up to the renter to accept or name a sub-lesser; by default, the responsible party is the latest to accept, or for court to determine (but that would likely require dissenting potential drivers to file legal complaints against each other)
Occasionally, people use this to equalize penalty points in a household (say, married couples) because other than fines, there’s a point system where 3-5 nontrivial tickets in as many years will get your license suspended or revoked for a while, and other sanctions.
This practice - admitting a crime you didn’t commit - is of course illegal, and not very prevalent - but there have been a few high profile cases involving famous (and infamous) people caught doing that.
> Not in Germany it doesn’t. Only the actual driver can be found guilty of speeding, even by speed-camera.
-Same in Norway - ticket is sent to registered owner by default, if s/he contests the claim, s/he is summoned to the local police and shown the photo. If s/he claims not to know who drove the car or refuse to identify the driver, the police may investigate if it's a slow day in the office - say, call you for a formal interrogation (during which you are legally obliged to provide truthful answers or else get slapped for obstruction of justice), compare the speedcam photo to other members of your household &c.
In short, the owner of the vehicle will never be on the hook for a speeding ticket with unknown driver - but is required to assist the police in finding out who the offender is.
Two identical twins back where I grew up claimed to have gamed this system on numerous occasions - claiming they couldn't remember which brother had driven the car on the day in question.
After all, refusing to cooperate is a crime. Not remembering isn't.
In San Francisco they intimidate you and claim you’re legally obligated to tell them who was driving.
They did this to me when someone ran a red light in a car I’d sold (and electronically transferred) six months prior.
I’d suspect what they did wouldn’t hold up in court if it weren’t for the fact that the San Francisco court house was engaged in this behavior.
Apparently, this scenario is so common in California that places that accept cars as donations often have a specialist to help donors deal with extortion demands over revenue tickets.
As long as we are talking about a speeding ticket, you are correct. But since around 2017 it is a crime to conduct an illegal road race. This covers extreme cases of speeding with quite harsh punishments: impounding of the vehicle, high fines or jail time for the driver - and the owner if the owner could have reasonably suspected that the driver was about to do it.
In Alberta, Canada, speed camera tickets are treated more like parking tickets (at least last time I checked which was quite a while ago). They are issued to the owner of the car. There are no license penalty points, however, as they don't even attempt to identify the driver.
My state in Australia have heavy, heavy fines, even compared to the rest of Aus. It doesn't reduce the amount of poor driving but speeding at least is unambiguous. There is no grey area. If the speed limit is 60kmph then you will get booked for exceeding it by 5kmph, and the only reason you get that 5kmph leeway is to account for camera calibration and some grace for speedometer calibration. They would ping you at 61kmph if they could
We also have demerit points, so if you get caught speeding say three times in a row you will most likely have ran out of points on your license and automatically get a 3 to 6 month license suspension. Most of this is automated, so you may find out you were suspended by getting pulled over before the letter arrives. It's all very strict.
I think that's stupid for one reason. As an engineer I often considered 10% tolerance to be sufficient. I think enforcing speed limits to anything greater than 10% is just silly. I often drift +/- more than 10% of my intended speed. It's just human nature. I pay more attention to potential dangers and obstacles, and less on whether I am within a % of the speed limit, and I really hope other drivers do as well.
Australia is the most nanny state country that I know of. The driving rules are absolutely draconian. In fact when I was growing up there, I was baffled at how aggressive the enforcement was, while at the same time the general level of driving ability was so low. Would you like to be responsible and have a designated driver to drive your inebriated friends home safely? Nope. Not allowed. Drivers on their L or P plates are not allowed to have other people in the car at night. It's ridiculous.
I’ll assume you aren’t in the U.K. (which this article is about), because the U.K. system is almost exactly as you describe!
> Norway's system of timed speed cameras are particularly wonderful -- they simply photograph a car and then photograph it again many kilometers later. If you get there too soon, then at some point, you must have been speeding.
Uk has a combination of:
* Average speed cameras (as per the Norway example)
* Variable speed cameras (where the speed limit varies depending on the conditions of the road and congestion)
* Fixed speed cameras (traditional speed cameras dug in next to a road)
* Mobile speed cameras (as per the bbc article, with a purpose to make sure the position changes each day so locals don’t know where the cameras are).
> These systems are safer for police and drivers as there are no traffic stops for speeding.
Traffic stops in the U.K. are very rare, and even mobile cameras just send the documentation to your registered address with no stop. A stop would only be done in the U.K. if there was a belief that the driving was putting others at immediate risk (eg appears drunk).
As opposed to the U.S., where parked highway patrol cars conceal themselves in blinds where you can't see them until they've already clocked your speed. Most Americans believe they have a quota of speeding tickets that must be met.
"un-sporting"? It's not a game. It's about reducing the most common cause of preventable death. The harms to privacy or "freedom" or whatnot are more defensible here than pretty much anywhere else.
In the U.K. excess speed is the 10th most common cause of accidents, way below “driver didn’t look properly”, which was 9 times as common.
As far as deaths go, the most common contributory causes are loss of control and failure to look properly. Exceeding speed limit was a cause in just 16% of deaths.
"Norway's system of timed speed cameras are particularly wonderful"
It isn't wonderful at all. UK has average speed cameras as well and they are horrible. Every time I drive in average speed zones I spend more time looking down because
1) I don't want to go 5mi over the speed limit because I will get fined otherwise
2) I don't want to go 5mi below the speed limit because then drivers behind me have to break one by one which eventually causes a traffic jam
3) I can't overtake a lorry going 65 because it would take me too long and I might miss my exit, which then makes anxious because I have to extend my commute time if I get stuck behind one
4) I can't safely let people merge onto the motorway because if I speed up or slow down then 1) or 2) happen
5) I can't calculate my average speed and to avoid 1) and 2) I have to keep looking down not paying much attention to what's going on around me
This only works on roads with little traffic, like in Scotland, where you can set cruise control and drive for miles. It doesn't work in Cambridge where AADT is ten times higher.
"These systems are safer for police and drivers as there are no traffic stops for speeding."
You are comparing average speed cameras to traffic stops, rather than stationary speed traps...
"Can speed cameras be used as a revenue source? Yes."
No because the primary reason for speed cameras is ensuring road safety, not generating revenue in which case you are encouraging installing speed cameras where they are not required. Speed cameras are not as safe you believe they are, otherwise they would be installed every 100 metres.
"Beyond that, if you don't want to get a fine, don't speed."
That's like saying "if you have nothing to hide, you don't need privacy" using the same "don't do the crime, if you can't do the time" principle, which is flawed. There are plenty of situations where you would want to occasionally speed 10% over the speed limit, but that's not equal to speeding 100% over the speed limit for a very long time. Both will get you a fine. It's not as simple as black or white.
'Beyond that, if you don't want to get a fine, don't speed.'
Seems odd to me that Govt's struggle to raise revenue via normal taxes when they have a large pool of stupid people they could raise extra money from? Maybe making a regualr speeding fine a life changing amount rather than the negligable sum it is now would improve people's behaviour, raise some much needed revenue and save a few lives too?
> Seems odd to me that Govt's struggle to raise revenue via normal taxes when they have a large pool of stupid people they could raise extra money from?
Extracting money from drivers was one of the causes of community tension in Fergusson.
> Are excessive traffic fines and debtors' jails fuelling community tensions in suburban Missouri? Claire Bolderson reports on a network of ninety separate cities in St Louis County, most of which have their own courts and police forces. Critics say that their size makes them financially unviable and allege that some of them boost their incomes by fining their own citizens and locking them up when they can't pay.
> Maybe making a regualr speeding fine a life changing amount rather than the negligable sum it is now would improve people's behaviour, raise some much needed revenue and save a few lives too
The fine is negligible if you are well off. It isn't if you aren't. If you get points (for SP-30), the increase in insurance is about £300-400. So the actual cost of the fine is closer to £400-500 which is the rent for the month.
There has already been talk of making the fine be adjusted to how much you earn.
A friend of mine was traveling across france on a motorcycle (this was decades ago) and one day had to get home to england quite quickly. So he got on the tollway and went quickly. But apparently they checked entrance and exit times on the tickets and would calculate your speed, so he "lost" his ticket and paid the max cost to be safe. I guess it worked.
There are a lot of automatic speed radars (at a single point), and a bit fewer average speed radars but they work over a few km at most (and don't interact with the toll).
There are a fair few of those average speed camera setups near me and I love them, everyone just sits at the speed limit - far more effective than the trap cameras.
Also my GPS (via bluetooth headphones) tells me when I'm entering and leaving a zone (not that I speed).
We do not have average speed cameras in Sweden and I hope we never will. The privacy implications of taking a photograph of everyone, process "who they are" (reg plate, generally driven by family member) is horrifying.
What privacy implications? The government already knows who you are, they processed your vehicle registration and issued that license plate specifically to make your vehicle publicly identifiable.
Are you also terrified that just anyone can read your house numbers or the address on your mailbox?
>Beyond that, if you don’t want to get a fine, don’t speed
My concern with this kind of thing is less about the speed limit and more that I believe people should be able to move around in public without being identified and tracked by the police. It’s one thing if the police have to observe something suspicious and then take the time to stop you for ID to find out who you are. It’s another if they can track and identify everyone all the time passively.
> I believe people should be able to move around in public without being identified and tracked by the police.
You can. Just not in a car, because cars have license plates so not only can police identify you, anyone who can lookup a plate can. It’s non-anonymous almost by definition.
Where I live the registry is public so if I want I can ask for the owner of a license plate from the relevant authority.
But to what end? Ignoring the privacy aspect, the point should not be too ensure everyone goes the does limit or slower. The point should be that people are traveling at a reasonable and safe speed. Driving fast doesn't necessarily mean unsafe. You can be driving the speed limit and be going at an unsafe speed. So the speed cameras make it more likely that people will be under the speed limit. But are the roads safer?
Absolutely yes. Speed contributes in two major ways when it comes to accidents, which this is all about: reaction time and energy.
Going faster means you have less time to react and handle the situation.
If you're going 100 km/h instead of 80 km/h, and something happens 100m in front of you, you have only 3.6 seconds instead of 4.5 seconds to react and deal with it. This scales with distance.
If you're going at 100 km/h instead of 80 km/h, your car has 50% more kinetic energy. This translates fairly directly into increased breaking distance.
So as speed increases you have less time to react and in addition you require more time to slow down.
> Beyond that, if you don't want to get a fine, don't speed.
I got a 100€ fine for speeding on a 130km/h. My crime? I was driving 100km/h instead of the supposed speed limit of 80km/h.
Every day I drive down that section I slow down to 80km/h while everyone else rightfully drives at almost twice the speed at 130km/h or even faster without getting a ticket. I don't think this is safe. It's also not good for me psychologically. It means the rules are stupid and arbitrary and not worth trusting.
Take it another level. Every car should have a chip. Once you are in a speed limit - your car can't go faster. Oh wait, this wont generate revenue - so it wont work. Never mind.
> very car should have a chip. Once you are in a speed limit - your car can't go faster.
This is actually dangerous because people need the ability to use discretion.
Suppose you're transporting a part to repair a machine which is causing a fatality every five seconds as long as it's offline. Getting there 20 seconds faster saves four lives. Do you still want a chip that prevents you from exceeding the speed limit?
> Oh wait, this wont generate revenue - so it wont work. Never mind.
This is a major reason why the US doesn't have many speed cameras either. Also why most of the speed limits are set 10-15 MPH below the ordinary speed of travel. If violations are prolific and enforcement is sporadic, they can generate fine revenue whenever they want.
If enforcement is automatic then people figure that out and do what's necessary to avoid the fine, but then you're left with an expensive boondoggle that isn't generating revenue.
It also deprives the police of the excuse they currently have to pull over cars at whim when everybody is speeding at all times, and they wouldn't be happy to lose that at all.
Almost all cars can be set to respect a speed limit already; I do that when I drive on highways to make sure I don’t accidentally go over (which is easy to do especially when others around me do it).
Outside of the US (and perhaps a few other places, but not many), speeding tickets are not designed to be a revenue source. (They do produce revenue, of course - but are not optimized or planned for that purpose)
This idea goes back a long way. In 1923 42,000 Cincinnati residents petitioned for mandatory speed governors to limit cars to 25 miles per hour [1]. This was an era when pedestrians typically owned the streets, so the advent of high-speed traffic caused a lot of pedestrian deaths.
GPS isn't good enough for that yet. I have received warnings from my GPS because it thought I was driving at 70 mph in a 20 mph limit. In fact, I was driving at 70 mph on a motorway flyover above a residential street that had a 20 mph limit.
If it had been able to cut the engine (or, worse, apply the brakes) then that could have produced a dangerous situation.
There are situations in which that might be dangerous. On the other hand cars could be fixed (via the chip) with external and internal warning signals to show the world and driver that a speed limit has been exceeded. This might constitute a psychological barrier to breaking the limit when everyone around you knows you're in the wrong.
It’s common for trucks here to be governed to 70mph with a sign on the back saying so. Pretty sure it’s an insurance thing.
Recently I’ve seen the odd ones mentioning 40mph in town too.
Don't worry - in Brexit Britain the tailbacks will be so long you'll struggle to find a road you can break the speed limit on. And those you can all have bends on them.
I agree speed camera are necessary but "time of travel" speed cameras are absolutely violating the intent of the law, which is to have people drive safely.
Part of driving safely is that you may need to speed up to avoid a situation, or change lanes safely or what have you - a time of travel camera (in the way they get implemented which is identical to single-point speed cameras AFAIK) is essentially just a random ticket generating machine. If we're going to use these things, let's just require them to publish the license plate and time online, so our phone's can download the number and tell us if we're currently going to get ticketed going past them.
Because tickets aren't just monetary - at least in Australia, license demerit points mean you eventually lose your license, thus your ability to drive and very likely your job as a result.
For thought experiment, assume a five-mile stretch of road with 60mph limit, and "time of travel" ticket kicking in at 65mph. It takes 5 minutes to drive legally, and if you take less than 4:37 then you get the ticket.
Assume you drive at 60mph and then you suddenly have to "speed up" to 80mph to avoid a situation. How long can you drive at 80mph before you're ticketed? 69 seconds.
If you're driving for 69 seconds at 20mph above limit then you're not "avoiding a situation". You are speeding.
Time of travel are the only ones respecting the intent of a law?
Systems that measure your instantaneous speed will ding you for speeding up to avoid (or reduce the probability of) a collision. Time of travel as defined in GP only dings you if your average speed over many km exceeds the speed limit, a few temporary bursts of speed won't change your average speed significantly.
What a load of rubbish. Driving fast to overtake will not make a significant difference, unless you are one of those assholewz weaving between cars constantly overtaking.
It is ridiculous how blaze most roads users take speeding.
There are exactly 0 situations that require you to break the speed limit to become “safe.” The UK Highway Code and driving lessons are very explicit in how you respond to emergencies and “speed up” is not on the list.
Driving slightly under the speed limit (and perhaps bumping existing speed limits slightly upward before increasing the efficiency of enforcement) should address most of those concerns.
My main objection is that enforcement, at least in the UK is absolutely useless. The likelihood of actually coming across a speed trap is tiny, the likelihood of coming across a speed trap that isn't one of the ones that are regularly used is close to 0. So it's not like people who speed get fined. It's people who speed and get unlucky get fined (and points). I just think it's bad policy to have relatively huge penalties and relatively rubbish enforcement. It's capricious and ineffective. People still speed because being caught is highly unlikely, people who get caught face a penalty that is disproportionate for something so common. The increase of tools like this don't actually address that. Tools like this don't actually address the policy failure in speed enforcement.
Ironically you can pretty much only get caught by the irregular ones if you’re on a quiet road too - otherwise someone will flash you as you approach to let you know. At least in some places anyway.
The main issue is using fines as punishment, since people can affordably keep speeding if there aren't enough speed traps. The only way to solve most road problems is to forbid speeders from ever driving.
You already need a driving exam to drive, it doesn't seem crazy to now allow criminals who don't care about speed limits or safety from taking it.
> Personally, I'd rather they clamped down harder on tailgating, poor lane discipline and uninsured drivers than on motorway speed limits.
There's some interesting facts (?) that I've learned on the topic of traffic safety over time: certainly the speed one has is directly proportional to how bad an accident will be should a crash (née "accident") occur because of the kinetic energy involved.†
However, the speed differential between different vehicles also has a correlation to the accident rate because some folks are going 'too fast' but others are going 'too slow'. I've heard this used as an argument for variable/dynamic speed limits which are changed on factors such as road conditions and visibility.
† Numberphile has an interesting video on the topic: if a blue car is doing 70 (units/hour) and manages to just stop before an obstacle, what would happen to an identical model/mass red car going 100? Even though the red car was going only 30% faster, at the point that the blue car managed to (just) stop, the red car would be going 70.
The energy scrubbed from a starting speed of 70 is 70^2, so 4900; but going at 100 you have 10'000 energy (100^2): so if both cars managed to scrub ~5000 worth of energy, the blue car stopped, but the red car still at 5000 worth of energy left—i.e., 70 units/hour of speed.‡
‡ If you had the same blue/red cars going 55 and 100, while the red car would been going 'only' twice as fast, it would have had three times the kinetic energy because of 55^2 versus 100^2.
Speeding is one of the most obvious examples of government overreach.
1) The speed limit obviously an arbitrary choice - the chance of death is decent at 50k/h (standard "town" speed limit in Slovenia) (so why not 40hm/k or 30km/h), and e.g. Germany has no speed limit on the highways (in some places) so there's really no good reason to set a limit of 130km/h (why not 110km/h or 150km/h)?
2) The easiest objection to (1) is "society has jointly decided about acceptable risk limits" but that clearly isn't true. Speed limits are simply a bad idea. A much better idea is speed constraints - roundabouts, speed bumps, chicanes [0] - i.e. actually forcing people to drive slower or else they ruin their cars.
The fact that governments default to traffic cameras etc. is proof (revealed preference) that they don't actually care about safety and people driving slowly, but what they want most is making their citizens live in fear, punishing them and extracting money from them. This is particularly obvious when there's a hidden police / traffic control on some section of the road where it's obviously safe to drive fast, but it's just technically within city limits so it has a low speed limit.
Speed limits are important for non-cars. As a cyclist, I don't want people overtaking me 100km/h with a 1m gap. As a pedestrian trying to cross a small city or town street without dedicated crossing, I don't want drivers to suddenly appear with 100km/h from a small curve. I'd argue that 50km/h in a city is still too much. 30km/h should be the limit.
> 1) The speed limit obviously an arbitrary choice - the chance of death is decent at 50k/h (standard "town" speed limit in Slovenia) (so why not 40hm/k or 30km/h), and e.g. Germany has no speed limit on the highways (in some places) so there's really no good reason to set a limit of 130km/h (why not 110km/h or 150km/h)?
As are most limits.
I get that driving on a motorway at say 85 mph is probably not that much dangerous than the speed limit (70 mph) but 100? 120? 140?
I know about Germany, but would you say that Britain's or Slovenia's road are designed and kept to the same standard?
> 2) The easiest objection to (1) is "society has jointly decided about acceptable risk limits" but that clearly isn't true. Speed limits are simply a bad idea. A much better idea is speed constraints - roundabouts, speed bumps, chicanes [0] - i.e. actually forcing people to drive slower or else they ruin their cars.
how do you constrain speed on a motorway?
> The fact that governments default to traffic cameras etc. is proof (revealed preference) that they don't actually care about safety and people driving slowly, but what they want most is making their citizens live in fear, punishing them and extracting money from them. This is particularly obvious when there's a hidden police / traffic control on some section of the road where it's obviously safe to drive fast, but it's just technically within city limits so it has a low speed limit.
In this country (UK) there is this myth that the cameras are money making devices, when during the 2008 crisis they were turned off to save money for some constabularies, this is the same type of argument.
Putting limits on toxic compound X in food would also be an overreach according to your views. At some point we have curves of accident rate and estimated speeds of accident and a decision is made. For food, we have an estimated exposure (plus other factors such as lab tests on animals etc) plotted against chances to develop a disease later...
Roundabouts are not always a good solution, in US I kept seeing people taking them the wrong way going directly left..
Also what is your proof that cameras don't slow down traffic? Just talking about me it make me more conscious of my speed in the city to avoid getting fined. So I guess I'm the kind of people it is directed at.
Gosh isn't that the truth. I remember reading on reddit years ago about a "study" where college students drove on freeways in a wall, one in each lane, going exactly the speed limit no faster and no slower. It backed up traffic for miles.
Where I am in Southern California the freeway speed limit in most places is 65 MPH. EVERYONE drives over 65 MPH on the freeways. I think you are more likely to get pulled over on the freeway if you are in the left lane actually going 65 than if you are going 75-80 in one of the middle lanes (the speed everyone else is going so it looks normal).
This just creates a situation where basically everyone is "breaking the law" and gives cops a reason to arbitrarily pull anyone over that they want.
I fully agree with you that speed limits are not about safety they are about instilling fear in citizens that at any moment you could be pulled over and harassed (even worse for colored people) and about being a source of revenue to find this tyranny
Not really. If limits are overreach why does every country have them? Ask some people with kids if they want yobs to be able to race at 120 mph in their neighborhoods. Speed bumps are ok on side streets but not so much other roads.
Tailgating is my biggest hate while driving. The tailgating driver is way over confident that he can stop in time. Its me who will pay the price when he can't. (No I don't drive slowly and do drive in the correct lane when there is a choice.) I hope AVs will fix this.
We don’t need AVs for that. Adaptive Cruise Control with self-breaking cars can do this now; it’s very much how I prefer to drive on a motorway, knowing the car will deal with it if I lose concentration or react late for whatever reason.
Obviously these are optional extras on most cars, but the self braking and auto-distance-keeping could be made a legal requirement well before we see self-driving cars. I’d be all for that.
My car will comfortably sit at 110mph all day long, if I'm alone on a motorway in the early hours who am i hurting or endangering? It certainly isn't about safety because that same car will stop from 100mph in less distance than the highway code requires for 70.
Until you hit a pothole, a bird or other animal, aquaplane or any other thing that happens to thousands of people just like you every day. I hope you are an organ donor at least.
>that same car will stop from 100mph in less distance than the highway code requires for 70.
What car is it and with what tires? I'll be happy to look up the facts.
Maybe I'm missing something but the "The Drive" article and the article they reference [1] talk about reading license plates up to half a mile (750m):
> read the license plates of speeding cars almost half a mile (750 m) away. In actuality, the TruCam II itself is technically capable of clocking plates up to almost a full mile (1.5 km)
But the actual product spec of the device [2] says:
> Quickly view license plate details and collect crystal-clear images up to +/- 150 meters away!
I don't see anywhere it can actually read a license plate half a mile away. It only says in the specsheet it can do a speed measurement about a mile away:
> Maximum Measurement: 1,200 meters/1,500 meters; extended range can be modified by request
I'm curious about the context of the $13,000 price tag. Is this a slight upcharge? Or an order of magnitude?
I'm what the Brits might call a "keen motorist", but as someone who considers speed enforcement a necessary evil, there's a world of difference between paying a bit more for much better tech, versus way more. If this costs 4x what a normal radar gun costs, one must ask "what is the problem we're solving", and is it worth the money? Are there renegades out there going double the speed limit, then magically slowing to below the limit 1/2mi from a radar gun, somehow?
I'm certainly happier with the idea of an officer-operated speed camera than one parked by the side of the road with no discretion whatsoever.
Of course, there are plenty of people who rightfully point out that discretion can mean discrimination.
The point of distributing this technology is to make every motorist feel that nowhere is "safe" for them to speed. It doesn't matter if there are no cops around, their beams can get you and fine you, and hopefully that keeps people at safe driving speeds.
Driving in the UK is stressful enough. If I've driven down the motorway for long periods I am normally wondering if I've got a ticket because of the variable speed limits. I have no intention of breaking the speed limit, but I honestly don't know if I had because the speed limit in some places can be changing all the time. Great so I have more things to worry about when I drive to work. Brilliant.
Most of the drivers that drive at extreme speeds are usually very rich (they are always driving Mercs, Range Rovers, Audis and BMWs) and don't typically give a toss about the fine or the points.
Also there are many people (usually immigrants) who drive without a valid license and insurance.
Yet it's well known many UK motoways have speed cameras at regular distances as well as average speed cameras in many places, and there are still huge numbers of people caught by them?
If it were just the features (time of flight and image recognition), probably not 13k. I’m not an expert in police gear, but there are likely performance standards that the manufacturer has to prove so that the readings can stand up in court. That plus the durability required and range of operating conditions it has to perform in, and the fact that it’s a fault niche device will increase the cost. 13k still might be too high, but I wonder if an autoblog knows what a police department actually pays for it.
If police departments have any kickback from fines, that’s a massive organizational mistake.
It creates crazy incentives to maximize fines instead of reducing crime.
I thought only the US had made that mistake.
It's practically certain the major cost of a handheld speed camera is employing a hand. It doesn't have to be a lot more reliable/efficient to easily make up for the cost.
> To the inevitable dismay of U.K. street racers who
> primarily partake in their favorite illegal motorsport
> after hours, the TruCam II also features night mode
> whereas the first TruCam, which has already reportedly
> been in use for the past six years, only worked during the
> daytime.
I think this really comes down to the letter of the law vs the spirit of it. To the spirit of the law, i.e. saving third-party lives, on a non-busy road doing 35 mph in a 30 mph really going to kill anybody? Is doing excessive speed on an empty well-lit motorway going to kill anybody?
Ultimately if you're only a danger to yourself then personally I think the responsibility is on the individual. For example, as I understand it, persons living in Scotland can drive back home drunk in rural areas as the only person they are ever likely to hurt its themselves.
As a free person I think you need to have the right to make bad decisions and accept their consequences, as long as those do not impact others. For a long time there has been an unwritten rule (at least where I live) where greater speed is generally more acceptable at night with fewer road users. It's not uncommon for the local police to overtake you at 90 mph for example.
The spirit of the law is not just to save third party lives.
When you cause an accident, you drain society’s emergency response resources (and increase the premiums of those in your insurance pool).
35mph vs 30mph is a terrible example - this is the scenario where pedestrians and cyclists are most likely to be around. 75mph vs 70mph would have been a better example.
Driving at night is more dangerous than at day because of the reduced visibility.
Driving when fewer other road users are around is safer than when it’s busy, but you don’t have perfect knowledge and there may be road users you haven’t seen, especially at night.
There’s no objective moral cliff edge between 70mph and 70mph+ε, but there is one between complying with the law and breaking it. Society collectively draws the line somewhere and you don’t get to unilaterally decide everybody else is wrong. I’ve heard people saying “I was only going a little over 30!” called speedo pedos, because it’s exactly like saying “she was only a little underage!”.
Check out the sibling comments for examples of people who thought they knew better but didn’t.
The thing about Scotland is completely wrong, I have no idea why you would think that.
The "when you do $x, you drain society's emergency resources" is, IMO, an absurd argument.
If this is true, then you need to point the finger at so many things. Rock-climbing. Mountain biking. And it progresses, to "anything even remotely risky", where "risky is now the absolute lowest common denominator".
And of course, so many sports? Banned.
This sort of "walking on eggshells" view of life is quite disturbing to me.
So what might be unacceptable "speedo pedo"ism where you live might be completely normal going 5 miles over the posted speed limit elsewhere. My personal experience is that people tend to drive at a speed they feel safe at, and don't pay that much attention to the signs.
A few points on this: society doesn’t make speed limits, municipal administrators (and sometimes small town police themselves) do. The speed limits are often set by observation, and they intentionally leave a large number of drivers over that limit (they say this is for safety, but it seems to also be for revenue generation). Look up 85th percentile speed.
So some politicians and engineers draw a line so that 15% of the population is in violation and will change the speed limit at any point that this isn’t true (if nobody is in violation, they lower the speed limit). You can’t then cast moral judgment on that 15%. It’s intentional criminalization of the citizenry, even though it’s generally with the intent of saving lives.
> saying “I was only going a little over 30!” called speedo pedos, because it’s exactly like saying “she was only a little underage!”
I laughed at "speedo pedos", but is it though?
One of these crimes is clearly considerably more serious than the other, and legislators agree with me. That's why in UK law minor speeding offences attract a fine and points on your license[0], but no criminal record, whereas offences of pedophilia result in prison time, a criminal record, and addition on the sexual offenders register.
The line of thinking is superficially similar, the weight of the offence isn't, and we shouldn't trivialise serious offences by drawing false equivalences with those that are considerably less serious.
[0] This is generally the case, but if you accrue too many points you can of course lose your license. Similarly, more serious speeding offences attract more serious penalties, and may even result in jail time. There are plenty of other examples but, see, e.g., https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-34744.... The level of stupidity on display here is truly monumental.
"as I understand it, persons living in Scotland can drive back home drunk in rural areas as the only person they are ever likely to hurt its themselves."
As a person who grew up in the Scottish countryside I can assure you that is absolutely not the case, and drunk driving is _extremely_ frowned upon. In fact Scotland has generally had tougher drink driving regulations than England. (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-30329743).
This kind of comment could be interpreted as casual racism (casting Scots as child-like alcoholics living in a semi-regulated playground), but I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt, since its a Sunday morning and nearly Christmas.
IDK about the UK, but in Germany street racers have killed many innocent bystanders, just for the crime of crossing the street at night. So yes please, enforce rules more strongly.
In fact, even ambulances crash into each other every now and then at night, because they usually drive without their horns (technically then they aren't allowed to run red lights, only if it's been sounding for at least 15 seconds, but people want to sleep).
I'm in the UK, and by the time you've reached a certain age, we've all heard of families torn about by bad driving. The couple who we bought our house from, the mother pulled out in front of two racers just down the road from us and ended up with life changing injuries, unable to walk and with brain damage. A little boy at our local nursery died along with his father hitting a van head on who'd crossed the road taking a corner too fast.
It's not just boy racers, but plenty of older men and women who are reckless and inpatient in their usual driving. There are people who think that their luxury cars are an excuse to break the road rules as well as the rules of common courtesy.
Despite the UK having one of the safest road networks in the world, still around 75 people die or are seriously injured per week in car accidents. For a preventable injury that is still far too high.
Or specifically, not "speeding will kill someone" because we'll always have some level of accidents. But increased speed translates to increased accidents and increased accidents translate to more deaths.
Except if you do get hurt, and even if it is just you, the rest of us are, via social contract, obligated to spend common resources to come rescue you and pay for your medical bills. I know you could make this argument against any activity like rock climbing, but then lobby your government.
Even if I grant the response I’m expecting, I dont want to be saved or helped if I injure myself, one, bullshit. Two, even if that’s true, we still have to pay someone to come hose blood off the pavement and dispose of the wreck.
This driver was probably only doing a few MPH over the 40MPH limit which is quite fast enough for a rural road. There is an A-road alternative for those 'in a hurry' but such carnage is a regular occurance.
I actually used to live near there and have driven down that road numerous times.
* @7pm in the morning in the winter the whole area can be fogged up and it was dark. I've driven down and cycled down there when it wouldn't have been safe doing 15mph.
* Animals can be hard to see, even in good conditions. Especially the donkeys, they are grey, on a black road and the sky is normally grey in England. Many of the animals there have high-vis collars to make them more visible at night.
* It depends what section of the road. In one section of that road the visibility is excellent (when there isn't fog). In another stretch even in the summer,
the visibility is weird due to much of the road being in partial shade due to the trees.
* Drivers go much faster than the 40mph limit in that area almost all the time, especially on the high visibility parts. It doesn't help that if you come off the M25/A31 you would have been going about 70mph and so doing 40mph makes it feels so slow that you can step out of the car.
* The three A-roads near are either blocked due to heavy traffic especially in the summer (infrastructure in general is a joke in Hampshire and Dorset) or they don't go where you want.
I've heard this argument before a lot, but I imagine it doesn't actually apply. Although the likelihood of harming another is reduced by the fact that it's night and there are fewer people around, the likelihood is increased by (1) reduced visibility for both drivers and pedestrians, (2) likely reduced mental clarity due to the fact that it's late, (3) both pedestrians and drivers behaving more carelessly because they think there is a reduced chance of risk as a result of sparsity (meta, eh?). My guess would be that accidents are equally likely if not more likely at night as a result, so folks should be prudent at night.
It’s habit.
If you learn to flaunt the law half the time, you could inadvertently break it at a time of day when it could have dire consequences.
Best to be vigilant and cautious at all times for everyone’s benefit.
There’s lots of racetracks and race day Sundays to get your lead foot some action.
> i.e. saving third-party lives, on a non-busy road doing 35 mph in a 30 mph really going to kill anybody?
Yes, the stats show quite clearly that 30mph is the point where pedestrian fatality rates really start climbing. [1]
At 30mph, if you have a collision with a pedestrian there’s a 20% chance the pedestrian dies.
At 35mph it’s 50%
At 40mph it’s 90%
The article mentioned the car was doing over 35mph. Additionally in the U.K. 30mph zones are normally residential areas and city centres, places where pedestrians are very common.
The point is that whilst the danger of a collision goes up as speed increases, you're not considering the context - the conditions. It is unquestionably more dangerous to drive past a school at 8:30am on a weekday at 30mph than it is to drive in that same area at 2am on a Monday morning at 35mph.
If we're talking about safety, then the speed limits should be to reflect conditions, but instead what happens is we cap the limit at the lowest value considering worst conditions.
Realistically the way we deal with this is through selective enforcement, the police probably aren't going to give you a ticket for 35 in a 30 at 2am on a monday morning, but it's silly to pretend that conditions don't matter.
I seriously recommend you follow Surrey Traffic Police, who give some gruelling details of the effects of what people think is “safe” speeding: https://twitter.com/surreyroadcops?s=21
There’s a number of police Twitter accounts that you can follow in this theme to learn more.
Traffic stops in the US are a convenient bypass to the fourth amendment. Split traffic responsibilities from regular cops and people would be willing to be more acceptable of reasonable enforcement.
Maybe more enforcement isn't the solution? Traffic stops are far more common in the US than the UK, but the US has far higher road deaths, even when you adjust for the fact that Americans spend more time travelling by road. Maybe the cause of America's excess road deaths is something else?
It’s reasonable to believe the death rate is too high and there is too much enforcement if that enforcement focuses too heavily on a single aspect of the problem at the expense of focusing on other problem areas.
Speed enforcement seems to be the low hanging fruit. There’s (generally) no judgment call, readily accepted evidence, it’s politically palatable, and it’s like shooting fish in a barrel: there’s always someone you can tag.
It’s a lot harder to tag someone for driving onto the freeway at 30 mph and failing to merge properly. There’s no “merge trap” to witness it so the cop has to basically happen upon it. There’s not always clear evidence, there’s probably some judgment required too. People don’t like the idea of tickets for going “too slow”; everyone acts like it is absurd. You can’t even blame the LEO because he probably knows the ticket won’t stick. Yet this behavior is extremely dangerous and happens all the time.
Yet surpising how infrequently you see the 20mph being adhered to. These people, already travelling very short distances, must be saving at least 30 seconds a year?
20/35 is 4/7 the speed, and therefore it makes every trip take 7/4 as long. So you spend an additional 15 minutes on every 20-minute journey. You're rapidly going to waste more human lifetimes sitting in cars than you would ever save from driving slower.
> For example, as I understand it, persons living in Scotland can drive back home drunk in rural areas as the only person they are ever likely to hurt its themselves.
What an absurd comment. Scotland has stricter drink-driving laws than England.
> As a free person I think you need to have the right to make bad decisions and accept their consequences, as long as those do not impact others.
Peak Libertarian fantasy to think this should apply here. Unfortunately, the real world is never so ordered and predictable that you can know for certain whether the country road you're about to speed on is completely empty. Just like you, the rest of us have the right to use that road as well whenever we please.
Even if you were the sole victim in such an accident, you're ignoring all the second order societal costs. Who will pay for the police time spent investigating the accident, delivering the news to your loved ones, and the cost of bereavement leave on their employers? Who's going to pay for removing the wreck and fixing whatever infrastructure (e.g. the road surface) you might have damaged? What about the mental health effects on the unfortunate neighbour who discovers your mangled corpse? And if you're only injured, how about the costs of an ambulance and medical treatment? We don't all live in the USA where that is (supposedly) borne by the individual.
Whether you like them or not, speed limits exist for good reasons.
> doing 35 mph in a 30 mph really going to kill anybody?
Demonstrably yes. Check out this study by the UK's Transport Research Laboratory. The chances of killing a pedestrian rise dramatically from around 10% at 30mph. The likelihood roughly doubles at 35mph. Remember that kinetic energy increases with the square of velocity, not linearly, so even small increases in speed can have dramatic effects on accident outcomes: https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_...
James May must be really happy now. This means the "rozzers" have solved all the existing crimes and are now focusing on petty things like this. James must have gotten his telly back too!
Its a fair point though. They couldn’t even be bothered to look into my Dads stolen boat engine because it was only worth £10,000 - even though he had a pretty good lead about the organized outfit that did it.
Hahaha.. Thank you. James May is a legend. Even though he is friends with two petrol heads, he owns a Tesla and a Toyota Mirai. He has an open mind towards futuristic technologies. I like watching anything by James May. Seems like a good bloke. For some reason he doesn't like the French! :D
There’s too much focus on the easy to measure speed problem. I’m not saying inappropriate speed should not be enforced against but i strongly believe more effort should be applied to avoid the more common cause of major road traffic incidents - inattention.
You can’t easily measure inattention but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.
The solution doesn’t only have to be in penalties, it could be in making it harder to be inattentive to begin with.
That said, this is all low priority stuff in the UK. In the UK today there are basically zero road traffic police, you are exceedingly unlikely to come across any. Their numbers have been cut relentlessly as miles driven have increased. And yet... road deaths are down over the same 20 years and mobility is up.
Road traffic enforcement isn’t even in the top 1000 issues facing the UK today.
Inattention is hard to measure and results in accidents that are made much worse by excessive speed, which is easy to measure. If the goal is to reduce overall traffic victims, then investing in speed control seems like the low hanging fruit.
The energy of vehicle (thus, the energy absorbed during impact by every object contained or hit) is proportinal with the square of the speed. Meanwhile, the reaction time available to avoid the collision drops linearly with speed, while the braking or turn distance increases more than linearly.
So the overall probability of accidents and their severity increases exponentially with speed.
The problem is that naive arguments about speed and laws based on fixed numbers don't really help anything except ease of prosecution. Inappropriate choice of speed can obviously be dangerous, but what is appropriate to the conditions and what the fixed numerical speed limits dictate can be wildly different.
For example, the default speed limit in the UK on most residential roads is 30mph, but if you drive past a school at 30mph at the end of the afternoon when the kids are coming out and there are lots parked cars obscuring your view, that is still inappropriately fast for the conditions.
However, slower isn't always safer. On a motorway, the speed limit is usually 70mph, but in poor weather conditions and heavy traffic, everyone travelling at lower and similar speeds may be the safest choice. If you're the one driver insisting on unnecessarily doing 20mph when everyone else is doing a steady 40mph, you're also increasing the danger to yourself and others.
Another example is that the speed limit for heavy goods vehicles on many of our major roads was increased by 10mph in 2015, having previously been 20mph below what cars were allowed to do on the same roads. The results were notable for several reasons, among them that the actual average speed of those heavy vehicles only increased a little but the safety of the roads appears to have increased. This was attributed primarily to closing the gap in speeds between different types of vehicle and thus, among other things, reducing instances of queues behind and overtaking of the slower vehicles, both of which increase the risk of an accident.
Finally, we have the classic motorway speeding situation, where on an open road in good conditions, a competent driver with a suitable vehicle could do far more than the legal limit of 70mph with negligible increase in risk. Moreover, statistically our motorways are both our fastest roads and yet also among our safest. You could certainly print money by setting up a covert speed camera watching some stretches of motorway, but whether it is a good use of police resources if your objective is to increase road safety is a different question.
>> results in accidents that are made much worse by excessive speed
Sure but there's no free lunch here. If you trade off speed in the non-accident cases, which is by far the majority of all miles driven, then there's a cost to that.
It happens to be a really hard to measure cost so it's always completely ignored. How would you even begin to measure the cost to the nation of traffic arriving 5 minutes later? Not all 5 minute delays are equal, e.g the cost of delay to an ambulance rushing to hospital is different to the increased cost of delivering packages.
>> the reaction time available
In fairness, you could make the reaction time measurable in hours and it'd be insufficient to prevent some inattention caused road incidents.
Another problem with only looking at speed is the unintended consequence of drivers de-rating the risks. E.g. if a vehicle was limited to 5mph, this as you know is slow enough to be fairly unlikely to cause a pedestrian death even if there is an impact, it would have the un-wanted effect that some drivers would view the risks as lower and would be inclined to engage in more risky behaviours, e.g. taking their eyes off the road to turn around and argue with a child in the back seat where in 20mph traffic they might choose instead to just speak to the child.
>> So the overall probability of accidents
No that doesn't hold. We don't have more accidents on the fastest roads in the UK.
It has not been all that long that we had technologies we could put into cars to determine if a driver was paying attention; though exactly what that is is also subject to interpretation
With my Tesla I am able to have it chime if I exceed the speed limit by a set amount and even if a light turns green.
however the big danger is still cell phone usage and no one wants to take the step of disabling them while moving and the technology is there.
>> however the big danger is still cell phone usage
There’s more than just cell phone usage. Inattention comes in many forms and none of them is better or worse than the others.
Drivers paying more attention to the radio show they’re listening to while gently zoning out to the traffic conditions around them - this is really common on long motorway journeys.
Drivers fizzing with rage at the argument they just had before getting in the car.
What’s the bigger issue: road traffic enforcement or avoiding pedestrian deaths by finding acceptable ways to remove vehicles altogether from pedestrian areas?
Road traffic enforcement or reducing infant asthma in cities by moving tailpipe emissions away from populated areas?
Road traffic enforcement or ... you get the point.
A guy's car had issues and pulled over on a high way, police remotely helped him dialing the tow truck company, via speed cameras and a loud speaker.
The best part? The police was able to look at his phone screen clearly and yield over the speaker "no dude you got the third digit wrong with the phone number!!!"
Readit News
In those countries, it seems like everyone just drives the speed limit.
If the point of speed enforcement is to, you know, ensure that everyone is going the speed limit or slower, they're awesome. Norway's system of timed speed cameras are particularly wonderful -- they simply photograph a car and then photograph it again many kilometers later. If you get there too soon, then at some point, you must have been speeding.
These systems are safer for police and drivers as there are no traffic stops for speeding. Yes, the bill goes to the car owner, but if you're loaning your car out to someone who speeds, at least some of the culpability falls on you.
Can speed cameras be used as a revenue source? Yes. It is reasonable to place requirements on the determination of speed-limits and camera-locations to prevent abuse. Beyond that, if you don't want to get a fine, don't speed.
With no attack on the parent, this reminds me of the general driving attitude of South Africa where I am from. A combination of lack of road enforcement and public mistrust in the police have created an environment where the rule of law on the road, designed to protect lives, is treated merely as suggestions or guidelines, often ignored.
It’s extremely common to see drivers speeding from 10 to even 30 km/h above the speed limit, even on urban roads. Sometimes these drivers are so confident in their right (freedom?) that they’ll flash their lights at you from behind if you’re going too slow, even if you are a good citizen driving at the speed limit. And speeding is only one half of it...
When I came to Europe for the first time it was amazing to see how almost everyone respects the road rules (I know this isn’t the case everywhere) and it generally makes me feel much safer on the roads. Although it’s still scary as hell cycling in some cities without protected cycle lanes.
Not in Germany it doesn’t. Only the actual driver can be found guilty of speeding, even by speed-camera.
I understand they’ll take pictures of the front of the vehicle and check against who’s lives at the registered address. Not sure if it’s an infraction for the registered owner to refuse to identify the likely driver.
Source: my German car rental company didn’t auto-pay anything, they forwarded me a “ticket” from the police department asking me to pay 20 EUR to go away or they’ll try to identify the actual driver and try to charge them a higher fine.
While this is more work, I think it’s reasonable for us to expect law enforcement to identify the guilty and not just convict someone that’s easy to blame.
This was a problem in 2008 when a car with steering wheel on the right systematically got caught speeding. The driver knew full well what was going on an placed a muppet in the passeger's seat. The picture is fantastic:
https://gizmodo.com/the-muppets-animal-caught-speeding-drivi...
There is a catch however: while you might get out of a ticket once or twice, the authorities can order you to keep a drivers log in the car. That means, a written log of every single drive has to be kept. So that there is never any ambiguity of naming drivers going forward. And having to keep logs of all your drives going forward is something you really want to avoid.
Rental companies name the renter, which is what you describe, and it is then up to the renter to accept or name a sub-lesser; by default, the responsible party is the latest to accept, or for court to determine (but that would likely require dissenting potential drivers to file legal complaints against each other)
Occasionally, people use this to equalize penalty points in a household (say, married couples) because other than fines, there’s a point system where 3-5 nontrivial tickets in as many years will get your license suspended or revoked for a while, and other sanctions.
This practice - admitting a crime you didn’t commit - is of course illegal, and not very prevalent - but there have been a few high profile cases involving famous (and infamous) people caught doing that.
-Same in Norway - ticket is sent to registered owner by default, if s/he contests the claim, s/he is summoned to the local police and shown the photo. If s/he claims not to know who drove the car or refuse to identify the driver, the police may investigate if it's a slow day in the office - say, call you for a formal interrogation (during which you are legally obliged to provide truthful answers or else get slapped for obstruction of justice), compare the speedcam photo to other members of your household &c.
In short, the owner of the vehicle will never be on the hook for a speeding ticket with unknown driver - but is required to assist the police in finding out who the offender is.
Two identical twins back where I grew up claimed to have gamed this system on numerous occasions - claiming they couldn't remember which brother had driven the car on the day in question.
After all, refusing to cooperate is a crime. Not remembering isn't.
They did this to me when someone ran a red light in a car I’d sold (and electronically transferred) six months prior.
I’d suspect what they did wouldn’t hold up in court if it weren’t for the fact that the San Francisco court house was engaged in this behavior.
Apparently, this scenario is so common in California that places that accept cars as donations often have a specialist to help donors deal with extortion demands over revenue tickets.
We also have demerit points, so if you get caught speeding say three times in a row you will most likely have ran out of points on your license and automatically get a 3 to 6 month license suspension. Most of this is automated, so you may find out you were suspended by getting pulled over before the letter arrives. It's all very strict.
Dead Comment
> Norway's system of timed speed cameras are particularly wonderful -- they simply photograph a car and then photograph it again many kilometers later. If you get there too soon, then at some point, you must have been speeding.
Uk has a combination of:
* Average speed cameras (as per the Norway example)
* Variable speed cameras (where the speed limit varies depending on the conditions of the road and congestion)
* Fixed speed cameras (traditional speed cameras dug in next to a road)
* Mobile speed cameras (as per the bbc article, with a purpose to make sure the position changes each day so locals don’t know where the cameras are).
> These systems are safer for police and drivers as there are no traffic stops for speeding.
Traffic stops in the U.K. are very rare, and even mobile cameras just send the documentation to your registered address with no stop. A stop would only be done in the U.K. if there was a belief that the driving was putting others at immediate risk (eg appears drunk).
As far as deaths go, the most common contributory causes are loss of control and failure to look properly. Exceeding speed limit was a cause in just 16% of deaths.
https://www.regtransfers.co.uk/content/common-causes-for-roa...
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
It isn't wonderful at all. UK has average speed cameras as well and they are horrible. Every time I drive in average speed zones I spend more time looking down because
1) I don't want to go 5mi over the speed limit because I will get fined otherwise 2) I don't want to go 5mi below the speed limit because then drivers behind me have to break one by one which eventually causes a traffic jam 3) I can't overtake a lorry going 65 because it would take me too long and I might miss my exit, which then makes anxious because I have to extend my commute time if I get stuck behind one 4) I can't safely let people merge onto the motorway because if I speed up or slow down then 1) or 2) happen 5) I can't calculate my average speed and to avoid 1) and 2) I have to keep looking down not paying much attention to what's going on around me
This only works on roads with little traffic, like in Scotland, where you can set cruise control and drive for miles. It doesn't work in Cambridge where AADT is ten times higher.
"These systems are safer for police and drivers as there are no traffic stops for speeding."
You are comparing average speed cameras to traffic stops, rather than stationary speed traps...
"Can speed cameras be used as a revenue source? Yes."
No because the primary reason for speed cameras is ensuring road safety, not generating revenue in which case you are encouraging installing speed cameras where they are not required. Speed cameras are not as safe you believe they are, otherwise they would be installed every 100 metres.
"Beyond that, if you don't want to get a fine, don't speed."
That's like saying "if you have nothing to hide, you don't need privacy" using the same "don't do the crime, if you can't do the time" principle, which is flawed. There are plenty of situations where you would want to occasionally speed 10% over the speed limit, but that's not equal to speeding 100% over the speed limit for a very long time. Both will get you a fine. It's not as simple as black or white.
Seems odd to me that Govt's struggle to raise revenue via normal taxes when they have a large pool of stupid people they could raise extra money from? Maybe making a regualr speeding fine a life changing amount rather than the negligable sum it is now would improve people's behaviour, raise some much needed revenue and save a few lives too?
Extracting money from drivers was one of the causes of community tension in Fergusson.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05pqskm
> Are excessive traffic fines and debtors' jails fuelling community tensions in suburban Missouri? Claire Bolderson reports on a network of ninety separate cities in St Louis County, most of which have their own courts and police forces. Critics say that their size makes them financially unviable and allege that some of them boost their incomes by fining their own citizens and locking them up when they can't pay.
The fine is negligible if you are well off. It isn't if you aren't. If you get points (for SP-30), the increase in insurance is about £300-400. So the actual cost of the fine is closer to £400-500 which is the rent for the month.
There has already been talk of making the fine be adjusted to how much you earn.
NYC generally saw revenues decline after the initial installment of more cameras as drivers adjusted behavior: https://bklyner.com/revenue-camera-enforcement-nyc-sheepshea... The fine is only $50.
There are a lot of automatic speed radars (at a single point), and a bit fewer average speed radars but they work over a few km at most (and don't interact with the toll).
Deleted Comment
Also my GPS (via bluetooth headphones) tells me when I'm entering and leaving a zone (not that I speed).
Are you also terrified that just anyone can read your house numbers or the address on your mailbox?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recogni...
My concern with this kind of thing is less about the speed limit and more that I believe people should be able to move around in public without being identified and tracked by the police. It’s one thing if the police have to observe something suspicious and then take the time to stop you for ID to find out who you are. It’s another if they can track and identify everyone all the time passively.
You can. Just not in a car, because cars have license plates so not only can police identify you, anyone who can lookup a plate can. It’s non-anonymous almost by definition.
Where I live the registry is public so if I want I can ask for the owner of a license plate from the relevant authority.
Absolutely yes. Speed contributes in two major ways when it comes to accidents, which this is all about: reaction time and energy.
Going faster means you have less time to react and handle the situation.
If you're going 100 km/h instead of 80 km/h, and something happens 100m in front of you, you have only 3.6 seconds instead of 4.5 seconds to react and deal with it. This scales with distance.
If you're going at 100 km/h instead of 80 km/h, your car has 50% more kinetic energy. This translates fairly directly into increased breaking distance.
So as speed increases you have less time to react and in addition you require more time to slow down.
In all studies I read or heard about, speed is a huge factor for increasing injuries and deaths.
> You can be driving the speed limit and be going at an unsafe speed.
Then you are driving too fast according to the law. At least in France or Norway.
> So the speed cameras make it more likely that people will be under the speed limit. But are the roads safer?
Yes. The numbers talk for themselves whenever a new speed camera is installed in a road.
If so (and there is no inclement weather), then the speed limit is too high.
Our city has the most dangerous road in Canada, speeding is the norm not the exception, and I haven’t seen any debate about average speed cameras
I got a 100€ fine for speeding on a 130km/h. My crime? I was driving 100km/h instead of the supposed speed limit of 80km/h.
Every day I drive down that section I slow down to 80km/h while everyone else rightfully drives at almost twice the speed at 130km/h or even faster without getting a ticket. I don't think this is safe. It's also not good for me psychologically. It means the rules are stupid and arbitrary and not worth trusting.
Presumably this doesn't apply with a 'formal' rental arrangement?
This is actually dangerous because people need the ability to use discretion.
Suppose you're transporting a part to repair a machine which is causing a fatality every five seconds as long as it's offline. Getting there 20 seconds faster saves four lives. Do you still want a chip that prevents you from exceeding the speed limit?
> Oh wait, this wont generate revenue - so it wont work. Never mind.
This is a major reason why the US doesn't have many speed cameras either. Also why most of the speed limits are set 10-15 MPH below the ordinary speed of travel. If violations are prolific and enforcement is sporadic, they can generate fine revenue whenever they want.
If enforcement is automatic then people figure that out and do what's necessary to avoid the fine, but then you're left with an expensive boondoggle that isn't generating revenue.
It also deprives the police of the excuse they currently have to pull over cars at whim when everybody is speeding at all times, and they wouldn't be happy to lose that at all.
Outside of the US (and perhaps a few other places, but not many), speeding tickets are not designed to be a revenue source. (They do produce revenue, of course - but are not optimized or planned for that purpose)
1: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Cincinnati-speed-gov...
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/288592-eu-wants-speed-go...
If it had been able to cut the engine (or, worse, apply the brakes) then that could have produced a dangerous situation.
Part of driving safely is that you may need to speed up to avoid a situation, or change lanes safely or what have you - a time of travel camera (in the way they get implemented which is identical to single-point speed cameras AFAIK) is essentially just a random ticket generating machine. If we're going to use these things, let's just require them to publish the license plate and time online, so our phone's can download the number and tell us if we're currently going to get ticketed going past them.
Because tickets aren't just monetary - at least in Australia, license demerit points mean you eventually lose your license, thus your ability to drive and very likely your job as a result.
Assume you drive at 60mph and then you suddenly have to "speed up" to 80mph to avoid a situation. How long can you drive at 80mph before you're ticketed? 69 seconds.
If you're driving for 69 seconds at 20mph above limit then you're not "avoiding a situation". You are speeding.
Systems that measure your instantaneous speed will ding you for speeding up to avoid (or reduce the probability of) a collision. Time of travel as defined in GP only dings you if your average speed over many km exceeds the speed limit, a few temporary bursts of speed won't change your average speed significantly.
It is ridiculous how blaze most roads users take speeding.
And yes, most countries have a point system.
If the two cameras are more than 1km apart, that makes your point moot.
If you cannot safely pass someone without speeding, slowing down is generally an option too.
If you're speeding to escape a homicidal maniac, challenge the ticket later.
And the only monetary aspect is not the fine, it is the also the increased insurance premiums. The latter can be much more punishing than the former.
People object to speeding fines but receiving them is entirely optional.
Personally, I'd rather they clamped down harder on tailgating, poor lane discipline and uninsured drivers than on motorway speed limits.
The main issue is using fines as punishment, since people can affordably keep speeding if there aren't enough speed traps. The only way to solve most road problems is to forbid speeders from ever driving.
You already need a driving exam to drive, it doesn't seem crazy to now allow criminals who don't care about speed limits or safety from taking it.
There's some interesting facts (?) that I've learned on the topic of traffic safety over time: certainly the speed one has is directly proportional to how bad an accident will be should a crash (née "accident") occur because of the kinetic energy involved.†
However, the speed differential between different vehicles also has a correlation to the accident rate because some folks are going 'too fast' but others are going 'too slow'. I've heard this used as an argument for variable/dynamic speed limits which are changed on factors such as road conditions and visibility.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limit#Variable_speed_lim...
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00014...
† Numberphile has an interesting video on the topic: if a blue car is doing 70 (units/hour) and manages to just stop before an obstacle, what would happen to an identical model/mass red car going 100? Even though the red car was going only 30% faster, at the point that the blue car managed to (just) stop, the red car would be going 70.
The energy scrubbed from a starting speed of 70 is 70^2, so 4900; but going at 100 you have 10'000 energy (100^2): so if both cars managed to scrub ~5000 worth of energy, the blue car stopped, but the red car still at 5000 worth of energy left—i.e., 70 units/hour of speed.‡
* https://kottke.org/18/02/why-speeding-is-so-dangerous
‡ If you had the same blue/red cars going 55 and 100, while the red car would been going 'only' twice as fast, it would have had three times the kinetic energy because of 55^2 versus 100^2.
1) The speed limit obviously an arbitrary choice - the chance of death is decent at 50k/h (standard "town" speed limit in Slovenia) (so why not 40hm/k or 30km/h), and e.g. Germany has no speed limit on the highways (in some places) so there's really no good reason to set a limit of 130km/h (why not 110km/h or 150km/h)?
2) The easiest objection to (1) is "society has jointly decided about acceptable risk limits" but that clearly isn't true. Speed limits are simply a bad idea. A much better idea is speed constraints - roundabouts, speed bumps, chicanes [0] - i.e. actually forcing people to drive slower or else they ruin their cars.
The fact that governments default to traffic cameras etc. is proof (revealed preference) that they don't actually care about safety and people driving slowly, but what they want most is making their citizens live in fear, punishing them and extracting money from them. This is particularly obvious when there's a hidden police / traffic control on some section of the road where it's obviously safe to drive fast, but it's just technically within city limits so it has a low speed limit.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicane#/media/File:One-lane_c...
As are most limits.
I get that driving on a motorway at say 85 mph is probably not that much dangerous than the speed limit (70 mph) but 100? 120? 140?
I know about Germany, but would you say that Britain's or Slovenia's road are designed and kept to the same standard?
> 2) The easiest objection to (1) is "society has jointly decided about acceptable risk limits" but that clearly isn't true. Speed limits are simply a bad idea. A much better idea is speed constraints - roundabouts, speed bumps, chicanes [0] - i.e. actually forcing people to drive slower or else they ruin their cars.
how do you constrain speed on a motorway?
> The fact that governments default to traffic cameras etc. is proof (revealed preference) that they don't actually care about safety and people driving slowly, but what they want most is making their citizens live in fear, punishing them and extracting money from them. This is particularly obvious when there's a hidden police / traffic control on some section of the road where it's obviously safe to drive fast, but it's just technically within city limits so it has a low speed limit.
In this country (UK) there is this myth that the cameras are money making devices, when during the 2008 crisis they were turned off to save money for some constabularies, this is the same type of argument.
Roundabouts are not always a good solution, in US I kept seeing people taking them the wrong way going directly left..
Also what is your proof that cameras don't slow down traffic? Just talking about me it make me more conscious of my speed in the city to avoid getting fined. So I guess I'm the kind of people it is directed at.
Where I am in Southern California the freeway speed limit in most places is 65 MPH. EVERYONE drives over 65 MPH on the freeways. I think you are more likely to get pulled over on the freeway if you are in the left lane actually going 65 than if you are going 75-80 in one of the middle lanes (the speed everyone else is going so it looks normal).
This just creates a situation where basically everyone is "breaking the law" and gives cops a reason to arbitrarily pull anyone over that they want.
I fully agree with you that speed limits are not about safety they are about instilling fear in citizens that at any moment you could be pulled over and harassed (even worse for colored people) and about being a source of revenue to find this tyranny
Obviously these are optional extras on most cars, but the self braking and auto-distance-keeping could be made a legal requirement well before we see self-driving cars. I’d be all for that.
My car will comfortably sit at 110mph all day long, if I'm alone on a motorway in the early hours who am i hurting or endangering? It certainly isn't about safety because that same car will stop from 100mph in less distance than the highway code requires for 70.
- your loved ones
- the emergency services that have to clean your body off the road
- subsequent road users -- when the road is closed -- to clean your body off the road
>that same car will stop from 100mph in less distance than the highway code requires for 70.
What car is it and with what tires? I'll be happy to look up the facts.
http://mpgforspeed.com/
And so is its "carbon footprint" 3x greater.
To answer your question: You're hurting everything that's alive on the planet.
Someone not as perfect as you won't know to back off in wet conditions.
Someone not as perfect as you won't anticipate when to brake early to accommodate the extra stopping time.
Someone not as perfect as you won't be as meticulous about vehicle maintenance.
Someone not as perfect as you doesn't have your quick reflexes.
Someone not as perfect as you doesn't apply 100% of his attention to driving, never looking at a cell phone or radio.
> read the license plates of speeding cars almost half a mile (750 m) away. In actuality, the TruCam II itself is technically capable of clocking plates up to almost a full mile (1.5 km)
But the actual product spec of the device [2] says:
> Quickly view license plate details and collect crystal-clear images up to +/- 150 meters away!
I don't see anywhere it can actually read a license plate half a mile away. It only says in the specsheet it can do a speed measurement about a mile away:
> Maximum Measurement: 1,200 meters/1,500 meters; extended range can be modified by request
[1] https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/news/353821/new-police-speed-c...
[2] https://www.lasertech.com/TruCAM-II-Speed-Enforcement-Laser....
I don't think any speed operation would work unless the car has been sighted, number plate read and speed detected simultaneously.
I'm what the Brits might call a "keen motorist", but as someone who considers speed enforcement a necessary evil, there's a world of difference between paying a bit more for much better tech, versus way more. If this costs 4x what a normal radar gun costs, one must ask "what is the problem we're solving", and is it worth the money? Are there renegades out there going double the speed limit, then magically slowing to below the limit 1/2mi from a radar gun, somehow?
I'm certainly happier with the idea of an officer-operated speed camera than one parked by the side of the road with no discretion whatsoever.
Of course, there are plenty of people who rightfully point out that discretion can mean discrimination.
Most of the drivers that drive at extreme speeds are usually very rich (they are always driving Mercs, Range Rovers, Audis and BMWs) and don't typically give a toss about the fine or the points.
Also there are many people (usually immigrants) who drive without a valid license and insurance.
There's a so-called "superradar" at one of the most busy intersections in Warsaw. It cost ~$65k and brought ~$200k in revenue in three weeks.
It's much safer now there, but the radar is still raking in considerable revenue.
> primarily partake in their favorite illegal motorsport
> after hours, the TruCam II also features night mode
> whereas the first TruCam, which has already reportedly
> been in use for the past six years, only worked during the
> daytime.
I think this really comes down to the letter of the law vs the spirit of it. To the spirit of the law, i.e. saving third-party lives, on a non-busy road doing 35 mph in a 30 mph really going to kill anybody? Is doing excessive speed on an empty well-lit motorway going to kill anybody?
Ultimately if you're only a danger to yourself then personally I think the responsibility is on the individual. For example, as I understand it, persons living in Scotland can drive back home drunk in rural areas as the only person they are ever likely to hurt its themselves.
As a free person I think you need to have the right to make bad decisions and accept their consequences, as long as those do not impact others. For a long time there has been an unwritten rule (at least where I live) where greater speed is generally more acceptable at night with fewer road users. It's not uncommon for the local police to overtake you at 90 mph for example.
The spirit of the law is not just to save third party lives.
When you cause an accident, you drain society’s emergency response resources (and increase the premiums of those in your insurance pool).
35mph vs 30mph is a terrible example - this is the scenario where pedestrians and cyclists are most likely to be around. 75mph vs 70mph would have been a better example.
Driving at night is more dangerous than at day because of the reduced visibility.
Driving when fewer other road users are around is safer than when it’s busy, but you don’t have perfect knowledge and there may be road users you haven’t seen, especially at night.
There’s no objective moral cliff edge between 70mph and 70mph+ε, but there is one between complying with the law and breaking it. Society collectively draws the line somewhere and you don’t get to unilaterally decide everybody else is wrong. I’ve heard people saying “I was only going a little over 30!” called speedo pedos, because it’s exactly like saying “she was only a little underage!”.
Check out the sibling comments for examples of people who thought they knew better but didn’t.
The thing about Scotland is completely wrong, I have no idea why you would think that.
If this is true, then you need to point the finger at so many things. Rock-climbing. Mountain biking. And it progresses, to "anything even remotely risky", where "risky is now the absolute lowest common denominator".
And of course, so many sports? Banned.
This sort of "walking on eggshells" view of life is quite disturbing to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_the_United_Sta...
So what might be unacceptable "speedo pedo"ism where you live might be completely normal going 5 miles over the posted speed limit elsewhere. My personal experience is that people tend to drive at a speed they feel safe at, and don't pay that much attention to the signs.
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So some politicians and engineers draw a line so that 15% of the population is in violation and will change the speed limit at any point that this isn’t true (if nobody is in violation, they lower the speed limit). You can’t then cast moral judgment on that 15%. It’s intentional criminalization of the citizenry, even though it’s generally with the intent of saving lives.
I laughed at "speedo pedos", but is it though?
One of these crimes is clearly considerably more serious than the other, and legislators agree with me. That's why in UK law minor speeding offences attract a fine and points on your license[0], but no criminal record, whereas offences of pedophilia result in prison time, a criminal record, and addition on the sexual offenders register.
The line of thinking is superficially similar, the weight of the offence isn't, and we shouldn't trivialise serious offences by drawing false equivalences with those that are considerably less serious.
[0] This is generally the case, but if you accrue too many points you can of course lose your license. Similarly, more serious speeding offences attract more serious penalties, and may even result in jail time. There are plenty of other examples but, see, e.g., https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-34744.... The level of stupidity on display here is truly monumental.
As a person who grew up in the Scottish countryside I can assure you that is absolutely not the case, and drunk driving is _extremely_ frowned upon. In fact Scotland has generally had tougher drink driving regulations than England. (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-30329743).
This kind of comment could be interpreted as casual racism (casting Scots as child-like alcoholics living in a semi-regulated playground), but I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt, since its a Sunday morning and nearly Christmas.
Really?
In fact, even ambulances crash into each other every now and then at night, because they usually drive without their horns (technically then they aren't allowed to run red lights, only if it's been sounding for at least 15 seconds, but people want to sleep).
It's not just boy racers, but plenty of older men and women who are reckless and inpatient in their usual driving. There are people who think that their luxury cars are an excuse to break the road rules as well as the rules of common courtesy.
Despite the UK having one of the safest road networks in the world, still around 75 people die or are seriously injured per week in car accidents. For a preventable injury that is still far too high.
You're not responding to the point. The parent was talking about solitary drivers, and used remote parts of scotland as an example.
Quick check says yes: https://www.tac.vic.gov.au/road-safety/statistics/summaries/...
Or specifically, not "speeding will kill someone" because we'll always have some level of accidents. But increased speed translates to increased accidents and increased accidents translate to more deaths.
According to: https://ec.europa.eu/transport/road_safety/specialist/knowle...
That’s 48->56kmh which takes 38% to 66% chance of fatality for pedestrians (eyeballing the graph).
This driver was probably only doing a few MPH over the 40MPH limit which is quite fast enough for a rural road. There is an A-road alternative for those 'in a hurry' but such carnage is a regular occurance.
* @7pm in the morning in the winter the whole area can be fogged up and it was dark. I've driven down and cycled down there when it wouldn't have been safe doing 15mph.
* Animals can be hard to see, even in good conditions. Especially the donkeys, they are grey, on a black road and the sky is normally grey in England. Many of the animals there have high-vis collars to make them more visible at night.
* It depends what section of the road. In one section of that road the visibility is excellent (when there isn't fog). In another stretch even in the summer, the visibility is weird due to much of the road being in partial shade due to the trees.
* Drivers go much faster than the 40mph limit in that area almost all the time, especially on the high visibility parts. It doesn't help that if you come off the M25/A31 you would have been going about 70mph and so doing 40mph makes it feels so slow that you can step out of the car.
* The three A-roads near are either blocked due to heavy traffic especially in the summer (infrastructure in general is a joke in Hampshire and Dorset) or they don't go where you want.
That might have been true 40 or 50 years ago - but drinking and driving is how regarded very harshly in Scotland both legally and socially.
Yes, the stats show quite clearly that 30mph is the point where pedestrian fatality rates really start climbing. [1]
At 30mph, if you have a collision with a pedestrian there’s a 20% chance the pedestrian dies.
At 35mph it’s 50%
At 40mph it’s 90%
The article mentioned the car was doing over 35mph. Additionally in the U.K. 30mph zones are normally residential areas and city centres, places where pedestrians are very common.
[1] https://www.roadwise.co.uk/using-the-road/speeding/the-chanc...
If we're talking about safety, then the speed limits should be to reflect conditions, but instead what happens is we cap the limit at the lowest value considering worst conditions.
Realistically the way we deal with this is through selective enforcement, the police probably aren't going to give you a ticket for 35 in a 30 at 2am on a monday morning, but it's silly to pretend that conditions don't matter.
There’s a number of police Twitter accounts that you can follow in this theme to learn more.
Speed enforcement seems to be the low hanging fruit. There’s (generally) no judgment call, readily accepted evidence, it’s politically palatable, and it’s like shooting fish in a barrel: there’s always someone you can tag.
It’s a lot harder to tag someone for driving onto the freeway at 30 mph and failing to merge properly. There’s no “merge trap” to witness it so the cop has to basically happen upon it. There’s not always clear evidence, there’s probably some judgment required too. People don’t like the idea of tickets for going “too slow”; everyone acts like it is absurd. You can’t even blame the LEO because he probably knows the ticket won’t stick. Yet this behavior is extremely dangerous and happens all the time.
It makes a lot of sense in terms of road safety as well as noise, and makes little to no difference to journey times.
They go down that road at 70 mph. They also tend to be very young and incredibly stupid, and incredibly poor at judging risk.
What an absurd comment. Scotland has stricter drink-driving laws than England.
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Peak Libertarian fantasy to think this should apply here. Unfortunately, the real world is never so ordered and predictable that you can know for certain whether the country road you're about to speed on is completely empty. Just like you, the rest of us have the right to use that road as well whenever we please.
Even if you were the sole victim in such an accident, you're ignoring all the second order societal costs. Who will pay for the police time spent investigating the accident, delivering the news to your loved ones, and the cost of bereavement leave on their employers? Who's going to pay for removing the wreck and fixing whatever infrastructure (e.g. the road surface) you might have damaged? What about the mental health effects on the unfortunate neighbour who discovers your mangled corpse? And if you're only injured, how about the costs of an ambulance and medical treatment? We don't all live in the USA where that is (supposedly) borne by the individual.
Whether you like them or not, speed limits exist for good reasons.
> doing 35 mph in a 30 mph really going to kill anybody?
Demonstrably yes. Check out this study by the UK's Transport Research Laboratory. The chances of killing a pedestrian rise dramatically from around 10% at 30mph. The likelihood roughly doubles at 35mph. Remember that kinetic energy increases with the square of velocity, not linearly, so even small increases in speed can have dramatic effects on accident outcomes: https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_...
You can’t easily measure inattention but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.
The solution doesn’t only have to be in penalties, it could be in making it harder to be inattentive to begin with.
That said, this is all low priority stuff in the UK. In the UK today there are basically zero road traffic police, you are exceedingly unlikely to come across any. Their numbers have been cut relentlessly as miles driven have increased. And yet... road deaths are down over the same 20 years and mobility is up.
Road traffic enforcement isn’t even in the top 1000 issues facing the UK today.
The energy of vehicle (thus, the energy absorbed during impact by every object contained or hit) is proportinal with the square of the speed. Meanwhile, the reaction time available to avoid the collision drops linearly with speed, while the braking or turn distance increases more than linearly.
So the overall probability of accidents and their severity increases exponentially with speed.
For example, the default speed limit in the UK on most residential roads is 30mph, but if you drive past a school at 30mph at the end of the afternoon when the kids are coming out and there are lots parked cars obscuring your view, that is still inappropriately fast for the conditions.
However, slower isn't always safer. On a motorway, the speed limit is usually 70mph, but in poor weather conditions and heavy traffic, everyone travelling at lower and similar speeds may be the safest choice. If you're the one driver insisting on unnecessarily doing 20mph when everyone else is doing a steady 40mph, you're also increasing the danger to yourself and others.
Another example is that the speed limit for heavy goods vehicles on many of our major roads was increased by 10mph in 2015, having previously been 20mph below what cars were allowed to do on the same roads. The results were notable for several reasons, among them that the actual average speed of those heavy vehicles only increased a little but the safety of the roads appears to have increased. This was attributed primarily to closing the gap in speeds between different types of vehicle and thus, among other things, reducing instances of queues behind and overtaking of the slower vehicles, both of which increase the risk of an accident.
Finally, we have the classic motorway speeding situation, where on an open road in good conditions, a competent driver with a suitable vehicle could do far more than the legal limit of 70mph with negligible increase in risk. Moreover, statistically our motorways are both our fastest roads and yet also among our safest. You could certainly print money by setting up a covert speed camera watching some stretches of motorway, but whether it is a good use of police resources if your objective is to increase road safety is a different question.
Sure but there's no free lunch here. If you trade off speed in the non-accident cases, which is by far the majority of all miles driven, then there's a cost to that.
It happens to be a really hard to measure cost so it's always completely ignored. How would you even begin to measure the cost to the nation of traffic arriving 5 minutes later? Not all 5 minute delays are equal, e.g the cost of delay to an ambulance rushing to hospital is different to the increased cost of delivering packages.
>> the reaction time available
In fairness, you could make the reaction time measurable in hours and it'd be insufficient to prevent some inattention caused road incidents.
Another problem with only looking at speed is the unintended consequence of drivers de-rating the risks. E.g. if a vehicle was limited to 5mph, this as you know is slow enough to be fairly unlikely to cause a pedestrian death even if there is an impact, it would have the un-wanted effect that some drivers would view the risks as lower and would be inclined to engage in more risky behaviours, e.g. taking their eyes off the road to turn around and argue with a child in the back seat where in 20mph traffic they might choose instead to just speak to the child.
>> So the overall probability of accidents
No that doesn't hold. We don't have more accidents on the fastest roads in the UK.
With my Tesla I am able to have it chime if I exceed the speed limit by a set amount and even if a light turns green.
however the big danger is still cell phone usage and no one wants to take the step of disabling them while moving and the technology is there.
There’s more than just cell phone usage. Inattention comes in many forms and none of them is better or worse than the others.
Drivers paying more attention to the radio show they’re listening to while gently zoning out to the traffic conditions around them - this is really common on long motorway journeys.
Drivers fizzing with rage at the argument they just had before getting in the car.
Etc etc
> Road traffic enforcement isn’t even in the top 1000 issues facing the UK today.
Road collisions are one of the biggest killers of young people in the UK. It's absolutely a big issue.
Road traffic enforcement or reducing infant asthma in cities by moving tailpipe emissions away from populated areas?
Road traffic enforcement or ... you get the point.
A guy's car had issues and pulled over on a high way, police remotely helped him dialing the tow truck company, via speed cameras and a loud speaker.
The best part? The police was able to look at his phone screen clearly and yield over the speaker "no dude you got the third digit wrong with the phone number!!!"
https://m.weibo.cn/detail/4558925167075110