It’s insane the lengths that some people will go to save a few seconds on their commute, while also endangering others.
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Lmao cutting down speed cameras is praxis. Jog on. These things are just there to make local councils money.
When they actually want a slower road they put speed bumps or traffic islands on it.
Yes, let’s stick speedbumps on the M4 clean air zone outside Newport, that’ll solve things.
Eh? This is nowhere near Newport and it’s not a motorway either.
There are speed cameras all over the country, including on non-residential roads where traffic calming measures are not appropiate interventions.
They wouldn’t make money if people managed to, you know, just follow the speed limit. If you can’t follow a basic rule of the road you shouldn’t be driving.
We live in material reality, not a fantasy in your head. Justifying bullshit that specifically fucks over the poor while not really affecting the rich (because fines are just fees you pay to break the law when you’re rich enough for them to be minor inconveniences) with what amounts to Cartman screaming RESPECT MAH AUTHORITAH is bullshit. You want people to actually slow down? Redesign the road.
This praxis does two things, it prevents the poor being fucked over if these are just there to make council money, or it causes them to give up on the camera and properly redesign the road when it’s actually about real safety concerns.
Given this has happened before and they only replaced the camera I’m siding with “it’s for council income not actual safety”. If they do it again I feel doubley vindicated in that opinion. If it’s actually about real safety concerns they’ll give up on the camera and add in pedestrian refuge islands to slow traffic instead. Love these badboys
You want people to actually slow down? Redesign the road.
I’ve posed this question elsewhere in this thread and: what until then? Like what do you do until a good, what, 50 - 90% of road depending on criteria, is redesigned?
The process and length of time it takes for either option are practically the same. It’s irrelevant. Not to mention a traffic island costs like £3k while a camera costs £85k (guess why they pick the camera despite the price).
The process and length of time it takes for either option are practically the same.
Sure, but you’re arguing for like instant speed camera abolishment or destruction here, aye?
Not to mention a traffic island costs like £3k while a camera costs £85k (guess why they pick the camera despite the price).
Dunno if you got to that one already but I’ve did a reply pointing out where you’re a bit off there
Sure, but you’re arguing for like instant speed camera abolishment or destruction here, aye?
As a means of discouraging their construction in the first place and the harm they do to the poor I am defending the person who did this.
I am not advocating anyone do anything illegal.
You can just say yes, you don’t have to couch this shit in a good WKUK skit.
Do they do harm to the poor that are on bicycles, or walking, then?
Upvoted for an early reference of South Park
The local community campaigned to get these speed cameras because people were speeding. Redesigning the road would be great, if the council had money to, but I doubt they do.
Poor people aren’t getting screwed over by this because poor people can’t afford to drive, they’re the ones that have to deal with the unsafe driving of the middle class dada on their German coupes that can’t bare to drive at less that 50mph.
It literally says in this article that one of the cameras mentioned has clocked 17,000 people. Of course they have money to do it. Croydon council responded to FOI request stating it costs £2.5-£3.5k to install traffic islands. The cost of a speed camera installation on the other hand is £85,000 according to Bedford Council, with a £5000 annual upkeep cost.
The cost of physical redesign traffic calming measures is significantly cheaper to install than the cameras, whose cost is justified by councils because of the income they bring in thereafter.
The insistence on replacing it instead of doing something else is being justified internally because even with these attacks they consider it to be making more than it’s costing them.
Poor people aren’t getting screwed over by this because poor people can’t afford to drive,
Mate fuck right off. This statement just screams that you’ve never actually done any organising or volunteering with the poor in the UK. Please volunteer at a food bank for once in your fucking life and learn what kinds of people the 3million people in this country attending them are like. It will surprise you, expand your view of society a bit, and you’ll be doing an actually-good useful thing.
Croydon council responded to FOI request stating it costs £2.5-£3.5k to install traffic islands. The cost of a speed camera installation on the other hand is £85,000 according to Bedford Council, with a £5000 annual upkeep cost.
Croydon cites average cost for roughly such an action at 2,5k - 3,5k in a denial of the FOI request which means there’s pretty much no way to know how much it actually costs depending on what they calculate the average on and if you have any idea about the cost of public works that number should strike you as very, very oddly low.
Wiltshire government here cites about 45.000k for a traffic island narrowing a road to one lane, all in all.
The source you cite for the cameras, however, puts those costs for 2 cameras, so 42,500 a pop / 2500 upkeep annual, albeit with returns via fines obviously.
The poorest people own the fewest cars, and are the most affected by things like air pollution, and if they do have to own cars they’re the ones most at hurt by car dependency (which is perpetuated by road violence caused by things like speeding).
And please don’t pretend like you know my life.
If you say utterly stupid ass things like poor people don’t own cars I will absolutely assume you don’t interact with the people struggling to survive in this country in any capacity. It’s a bloody stupid thing to say mate.
I mean what I said, go and volunteer and see for yourself.
I’m sorry I didn’t think I needed to spell it out that much to you. Obviously I don’t think all poor people don’t drive. But the poorest don’t, and statistically poorer people drive a lot less and are more impacted by things like this.
Couldn’t they just plant some of these bad boys along the road? Like, put two in the center, and you have a pedestrian refuge island.
Governments are clamping down on protests against climate change: * silence *
Some idiots cut down speed cameras the people living there specifically asked for: YEAH! Fuck the police!!!1! Rage against the machine!!!1! Fuck mass surveillance!!!1!
Priorities , I guess.
Its easy to cut down a camera… How the fuck would you even go about trying to fix the first one a petition or someshit? Booooring fires up chainsaw
Not that I would ever seriously suggest this, but we could start crowdfunding the sabotage of polluting factories. Payout goes to whichever anonymous person correctly “guesses” the downtime. Just joking of course.
Power poles seem pretty vulnerable.
I don’t understand why these people can’t see the cameras are there to protect everyone - including drivers.
Maybe because cameras can’t protect anyone. They gather evidence for incrimination, not prevention.
From 1992 to 2016, speed cameras reduced accidents by between 17 to 39 per cent and fatalities by between 58 to 68 per cent within 500 metres of the cameras.
That’s a report on a single study in the UK. We cannot necessarily assume that the outcome will be the same or even similar in all jurisdictions and social driving norms. The US, for instance, doesn’t have speed cameras, but the use of red light cameras has no effect in the rate of accidents at best and an increase in the rate of accidents at worse and it’s not clear what impact the introduction of such cameras to the US would have. Meanwhile the UAE does have speed cameras, but they do nothing to limit the speed of the Emirate citizens and only the threat of harsh fines, punishment, or deportation keeps the immigrant and working population in line.
While this camera was in a location which already has cameras, the claim quoted was not that “UK cameras protect UK drivers,” but one of “Cameras [in general] protect everyone” which is simply not true. Cameras have only the mechanisms necessary to record and report, they have no mechanism by which they can divert, slow, or stop a car or pedestrian and no mechanism they can use to stop an accident.
The cameras in question are on the UK, and cameras change behaviour because they enforce rules, as the study shows.
The US, for instance, doesn’t have speed cameras
That’s just straight up wrong.
Speed cameras do prevent speeding, they are used to trap in some cases, but almost always they are sign posted, which causes people to slow down.
That sounds like the signs have a correlated impact more than the cameras having a causal relationship.
The signs work because people are scared of speeding cameras.
If you put up signs everywhere without backing them up with cameras people will obviously ignore them.
The cameras are doing the real work, the signs are just for people new to the area.
There’s not much point arguing with these people my guy. There’s no rational thinking.
How so? Isn’t knowing the consequence a form of prevention?
Not really. Awareness of punishment does little to abate crime in general and while increasing the chances of getting caught (say by automatic cameras) does discourage crime in a meaningful way it does not prevent it.
Even so, the camera itself is not offering protection. It has no mechanism to control traffic or stop an accident.
I see this language far too often around cameras, but the fact remains they serve only to incriminate after the fact, not to prevent before the fact.
If you want protection, reduce lane sizes, make drives less straight, install speed tables, incentive alternate arterial routes, make sure alternate forms of transportation are effective and available. Hell, install the cameras even, but don’t be dissolutioned that they are what is actually doing anything.
Speed cameras do work though. Here they are often used in specific places where people are driving too fast, especially if near schools and other places where it’s extra dangerous.
For example close to where I live there is a steep hill with a road that goes straight down and after there is a completely straight road and then a really small bridge with a bump.
Some people like to speed down the hill and basically “jump” the bridge bump. Fortunately a speed camera was installed at the bridge and they warn about it well in advance.
While you could technically redesign the road, it would be very costly compared to a camera and that road is a very small road with low traffic and private farmland (or grazing land, I don’t remember) on both sides.
Here the cameras aren’t even activated all the time just enough to achieve their goal of reducing traffic.
That is a bad take.
TL;DR: If you do incriminating stuff, you should be incriminated.
There are rules that every driver has to adhere to. The rules are there for protection of the drivers and the people that rely on the drivers driving safely. But the thing is: without consequences, some people show bad behaviour, one being ignoring the rules which are made to keep people safe. In order to suppress such behaviour, fines and punishment are used.
I have been driving cars for around 10 years and have gotten a fine three times. The amount I paid for it in total was roughly 10 Euros per year, which is less than 1 Euro per month. And I could have avoided having to pay this by just being mindful and acting according to the rules, which I did not.
If people feel like they should drive 120 kmh in a 50 kmh zone or even worse, without any proper justification, they do not belong behind the wheel of a car.
People would be less upset about the cameras if a) we weren’t already the most surveilled western country already. B) the fine for minor speeding was minor. as you mentioned you paid 100 euros for 3 fines. In the uk you can be fined for doing 33 in a 30, and the fine will be 100 euros per time, plus points that makes your insurance go up as well. And c) there weren’t so god slam many of them. I live in Europe now, but went back to the uk to visit friends and family and honestly there have to be about 40-50 times many cameras in the uk than in Germany!
Just drive the speed limit and there’s no problem. Driving massive multiple ton killing machines is already a massive privilege, if you can’t adhere to simple rules of the road, you shouldnt be driving at all.
Self righteous much? You talk like it’s not possible to stray a bit over the speed limit and still be safe. Honestly imo, anyone timid enough to feel like 35mph in a 30 is genuine,seriously dangerous should not be allowed to drive. You should be confident and commanding of said multiple ton machine.
If that is your mindset, then just pretend every speed limit is 5mph lower than it is, so when you are going 5mph faster, you are still driving within the limit. It’s a matter of moving your own personal goalposts if you can’t follow a very simple limit. Not wanting to follow such a basic rule as stay within the speed limit tells me you shouldn’t be allowed to drive and if you cannot understand what a limit is, you should be retaking your test.
You are saying it should be fine to drive 5mph over the limit, okay so let’s say we make that legal. Now you are caught doing 37, that’s only 2mph over the 5mph extra we allow, so should you be punished? All you have effectively done is increase the speed limit by 5mph. The 30 on the sign, that’s all it is, a speed limit. It’s not saying “drive around this number”, it’s saying: do not drive above this number, that’s what a limit is. There’s already a 10% leniency on speed limits to account for things like instrumental errors and minor mishaps, but that doesn’t mean you should be knowingly driving 10% faster than the limit.
I am going to take my own advice and not engage with this any further as it’s a very simple subject of just following the rules of the road and arguing/encouraging otherwise is just illegal and dangerous advice. If you have a problem with a speed limit on a road, you should take that up with your local government and not drive over the limit.
TL;DR: If you do incriminating stuff, you should be incriminated.
Boot tasty.
Oh, yeah… so if you do incriminating stuff, say… acting in a way that directly leads to people being hurt, maimed and / or traumatized, you should just get a pat on the back. I will just have to presume that this is what you are saying.
acting in a way that directly leads to people being hurt, maimed and / or traumatized
If that’s your benchmark then 90% of people should be considered criminal.
Out of interest do you support Israel and/or the continuation of the war in Ukraine or do you support ceasefires?
It’s a bad TL;DR but they do lay out why it’s illegal
I couldn’t care less. These cameras exist entirely to make councils money. When they actually want traffic slowed they redesign the road properly with traffic islands.
Destroying these cameras is a good thing. It either fucks over council revenue sources that mainly fuck the poor while affecting the rich not one bit, or it results in getting actual redesigns of the roads properly because they do actually want that road to be safer.
This method is a little extreme though tbh we usually just chuck paint on them. This one is tall in order to make that less viable it seems.
What’s your usual transportation method?
Bus, train or taxi.
Do you not feel discouraged from speeding or running red lights when there are traffic enforcement cameras watching?
If people are driving too fast on a road then the road is badly designed. Speed cameras are a bandage covering up the problem of shit infrastructure.
Better infrastructure would be great, but there will always be places where you will need to drive slower than the designed speed, and drivers should be able to follow that if they’re going to be allowed to pilot a large and dangerous vehicle.
I mean so what’s to be done then. I agree on “redesign pretty much every street or road” but like, until then, it’s just a great big free for all?
If the road is dangerously designed, close the road.
I’m not sure if you’re being serious here
Why not? It’s obviously a huge hazard and people can’t be trusted to use it safely. So for the public health and safety this road should be closed. This also means the poor council doesn’t need to maintain this road anymore saving money in the long run. Maybe a train could even replace where the road was increases throughput and safety for everyone.
Why not?
Because that’s hardly what can be considered a realistic solution. Again, not against it, but what, are you gonna close down like 90% of roads? Only some of them, if so, which ones, and how is stuff handled on the ones that remain open?
Not all roads, just roads that “require” speed cameras.
just roads that “require” speed cameras.
So when’s that the case or not
Traffic calming and speed cameras are carrot and stick in lowering the speed of roads. Lowering the design speed of roads alone is never going to stop drivers in a hurry from driving dangerously fast. People aren’t deterred from commiting crimes by heavy penalties, they are deterred by the chance of getting caught. Automatic traffic enforcement raises that chance to 100%.
Lowering the design speed of roads alone is never going to stop drivers in a hurry from driving dangerously fast
Why wouldn’t it? If drivers feel unsafe speeding down a road then they simply won’t speed, rendering speed cameras unnecessary. If you see a speed bump ahead of you aren’t you going slow down?
Speed cameras are applicable to all roads, from the 30 km/h residential street to the 140 km/h highway. Speed cameras are also self-funding and thus have a negative cost. Fines collected by speed cameras can be used to finance road redesign and traffic calming measures.
They can also be used to kickback to the politician and the lobbyist who work for the company that profits from them.
Please explain to me where the money to redesign and rebuild like half the city’s roads is going to come from if not from a transitional period of speed cameras.
Say, why are you such a virulent opponent of speed cameras? Do you find yourself to be a chronic speeder?
I don’t drive. But when when did you stop beating your wife?
Lol the absolute state of speed camera opposers
If you don’t drive, you have literally no reason to oppose speed cameras. Speed cameras reduce the negative externalities of cars at literally no cost to you. If you don’t drive, you cannot get a speed ticket.
Also, for the China fans out there, consider how the widespread implementation of automatic traffic enforcement cameras in China that do things from watching if you’re speeding, to watching if you’re driving in multiple lanes at once, to watching if you’re wearing a seatbelt have massively improved driving conditions and reduced road chaos in China. Automatic traffic enforcement makes driving better.
We could expropriate the expropriators. 😉
They should put up a new one for each one vandalised
Lol when I read the title I was happy for them
I’m a car driver and enthusiast and I’ll be the first one to ask… Why the fuck can my car reach 250kph if the highest speed limit in my country is 110kph???
Edit: If you think I’m complaining that I can’t go faster then you understood the message wrong
Maybe… because it is dangerous to drive that fast when other people are around? Why don’t you just buy a car that can only go as fast as the highest speed limit?
Huh? What part of my message made you think I drive over the speed limit? I’m clearly saying that it’s ridiculous that cars are sold without speed limiters!
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I guess reading comprehension isn’t people’s forte.
The problem here is not a lack of reading comprehension but rather a lack of you explaining yourself. You see, I could not really see the motivation behind your post because it was so ambiguous. So I think it is not really fair to blame anyone reading your text for not correctly interpreting it they way you wanted it.
“Speed trap” cameras are an entirely apt name. The solution to speeding isn’t cameras, or patrols, or administrative controls, it’s traffic calming, and that reduces capacity, so it’s not considered. The trap is driving on the road at speeds they seem to be designed for, with speed limits significantly lower.
Fuck cars, but fuck cops more. We don’t need to live in a panopticon. These cameras are a step in the wrong direction, and while I don’t think the person who cut them down is doing the right thing for the right reasons, they are doing the right thing.
Cameras are enforcement without the discrimination and potential for violence that cops bring.
Traffic calming is great but it’s also more expensive. Maybe drivers should just try driving below the speed limit.
However it throws hundreds of people through the equally discriminatory criminal justice system, and allows car insurance companies to jack up rates. Functioning even more effectively as a tax on being different than regular cops do. It also creates a financial incentive for the government not to fix the underlying cause of the problem of speeding.
Wishing and hoping for people to be better than they are isn’t a solution. Just because traffic calming is more expensive, that’s not a reason to not do it. It is something that needs to be done if you want to break car dependency.
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Theres an interesting argument by Chuck Mahron against speed cameras: https://podcast.strongtowns.org/e/the-arguments-for-speed-cameras…and-why-they-don-t-hold-up/
The core of his argument is that it’s bad to punish normal behavior, instead you should just do traffic calming, even cheap traffic calming
Incorrect; they discriminate disproportionately on poor people
Unless the fines are proportional to wealth, I don’t see how you can argue that they’re not disproportionally punishing the poorest who are caught.
I agree the fines should be proportionate, but a police officer doing the enforcement can stop whoever they don’t like the look of whether or not they are actually speeding whereas a camera will only target those who are actually, you know, speeding.
Good. Speed cameras are an abominable hypocrisy. The claim that they’re there because safety is important is undermined by the total lack of action Devon and Cornwall police take against actual unsafe drivers.
I drove past a police officer standing with a speed camera recently at 20mph with another car driving less than two feet from my bumper.
Had I been speeding I’d have gotten a ticket, meanwhile the police watch this actually dangerous driver sail past them without taking any action.
Half a mile later I have to drive onto the wrong side of the road around a lorry parked on a corner, with almost no visibility of oncoming traffic.
Their moral authority is destroyed and their pretence shattered by their own inaction and ineffectiveness.
So tear down the speed cameras if it highlights their fiction. Devon and Cornwall police are great at many things. Traffic is not one of them.
I don’t really get your argument.
Speed cameras are designed to do one thing – issue citations for speeding.
The job of the police officer is to identify a wide array of crimes and issue citations for them, when they observe them.
The incident where a car was tailgating you and the incident where a lorry was creating an unsafe driving situation have absolutely nothing to do with the speeding camera. Both of those situations are the responsibility of a policy officer, if they are alerted to the crime or observe it themselves. You have a valid complaint about the complacency of your local law enforcement, but what does your argument have to do with the speed camera?
The basis for the rationale for putting up speed cameras depends on the police to act with an unquestionable moral authority.
By acting with inconsistent moral principles they demonstrate their stated and genuine motives differ which undermines the moral authority they need to police by consent.
The basis for the rationale for putting up speed cameras depends on the police to act with an unquestionable moral authority.
No, it doesn’t?
Yes it does
It explicitly takes control away from the police and moves it to simple sensors and circuits, as well as simple bureaucratic mailing lists. If it screws up, you can either request a manual review of the footage or spend an afternoon to bring your own evidence it in front of a judge. The police have nothing to do with it.
Except when the camera is in the policeman’s hand and when they run the training courses you mean?
Well, we are talking about a pole mounted camera, and if it was misscalibrated is would be very easy to prove, so yes?
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Alright, I gotta ask. What’s the speed limit, and what’s the threshold that you get mailed a ticket?
I’m asking because in the state where I live in the US, speed cameras were outlawed unless a police officer was stationed to sit there and watch it all day. The reason being is that people were getting mailed $200 tickets for going 1 mph over the speed limit. This was problematic because no car’s speedometer is perfectly calibrated, and people who tried to do the right thing were getting a dozen tickets in the mail before they even realized they’d done something wrong.
Also, cameras were disproportionately being installed in poor neighborhoods, punishing more people without the means to pay the tickets. Which is obviously not a safety measure, but a punitive measure.
The tolerance is usually 10% + 2 mph in the UK.
So going 39mph in a 35mph zone gets you a ticket? I’d probably cut down the camera too, in that case. You’d spend more time watching the speedo than the road, which would make the road less safe.
Um, you do know that being able to acutely control your speed is a critical prerequisite for being able to operate a motor vehicle, right? Being unable to keep it within a 2-3 mph range is not normal, and may indicate a minor neurological condition or lack of patrice and training. You should not be getting task saturated monitoring your speed, as beyond watching for people entering the road before you, monitoing for lights and signs, and monitoring the space between the vehicle in front of you, speed control is the fourth most important thing to keep an eye on while using our shared pubic road infrastructure.
Cruise control exists, and is an very useful way to reduce task saturation if you need to, but if you don’t have that in your vehicle may I suggest the radical idea of aiming for a speed slow enough you won’t unknowingly cross the limit by that much. The speed limit is the upper bound, not lower. Like just do try and do 30 or 25 if you can’t tell the difference. Thanks to how travel times work, it won’t even have that much impact on your arrival time at ranges short enough to be done on 35mph streets.
You are operating an device that can kill innocent unrelated strangers in an instant, it is YOUR job to do so safely within the bounds of the road networks design. If you are unable to do so, then you are unable to do so. There is no shame in that, much like there is no shame in needing glasses, but please, adjust your life so that you don’t risk killing innocent people at risk for your own convenience.
Being too attentative (distracted) to the speedometer is far more dangerous than the harm of going 5-9 mph over in many cases. And like mentioned earlier in tbe thread, many cars have a spedometer only accurate within 2-4 mph.
Being able to tell how fast your vehicle is moving to within a 2 to 4 mph range, what the law in question id designed to accommodate for, is not being too attentive to the speedometer. It is part of the very basic foundation of being able to control a motor vehicle. Again, I’m sorry you are only leaning this now, but being unable to do so is not normal for a driver.
Our common roads, vehicles, insurance, and laws are all designed under the assumption that going five over is an intentional act because for nearly all drivers it very much is.
I worry that like much like it might be hard for a child to realize they need glasses becuse they assume their normal and everyone else’s vision is as bad as their’s, you are assuming that everyone struggles with monitoing their speed to within five to ten miles an hour, they don’t. That’s one of the things that a drivers test is soposed to test for in the first place.
A speedometer that is only accurate to within 2 to 4 mph is still only off by 2 mph at most on average, given that the center of that range is going to be on the vehicle’s real speed.
At the speeds we’re talking about, being nine over is equivalent to an extra half a vehicle’s worth of kinetic energy on top of what the road was designed for, which has a very big impact on whether or not your vehicle’s breaks can act to dissipate that energy in the time the civil engineers who designed the road system assume it will.
Please provide a source that going 44 in a 35 is far less dangerous than what should be a subconscious part of driving. All I could find was this study, which shows that if you don’t see them come out from behind a parked car on the side of the road in time, and if you are struggling to monitor the speedometer that is likely, going from an impact speed of 32mph to 42 mph, doubles the odds of killing the person you just hit.
There are no 35mph zones in the UK. They’re all multiples of 10. The limits are well known and we’re taught how to follow them, it’s not the problem you’re making it out to be.
Speed cameras are known to decrease safety. There have been many studies on this.
I had a look earlier and only saw the opposite (see https://www.lse.ac.uk/News/Latest-news-from-LSE/2017/10-October-2017/Speed-cameras-reduce-road-accidents-and-traffic-deaths-according-to-new-study), do you have any links?
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