4 ms·

Be careful what you wish for. Red-light cameras in the US opened up all sorts of issues nobody thought about when they were just "totally for" ticketing people

Be careful what you wish for. Red-light cameras in the US opened up all sorts of issues nobody thought about when they were just "totally for" ticketing people who ran red lights. We got issues like local governments tinkering with timing of traffic lights in order to increase the number of violations, because violations are lucrative and who wants to defend red-light runners? People who run red lights are bad people who do dangerous things, and they should be punished! There are also the ongoing studies into whether red-light cameras actually increase collisions, by incentivizing people to stop unsafely. And that's without getting into the due-process issues, or the way offenses start creeping into more expensive categories (see California cities which have been "upcoding" various other offenses, like rolling turns, into full-on red-light violations in order to collect larger fines). Speed limits have a number of notorious issues; they tend to be set for political, rather than safety, reasons, and very few US jurisdictions actually follow the general best practice of setting limits based on 85th-percentile speeds. Some smaller towns infamously derive almost all of their municipal budget from running speed traps (i.e., a 55mph highway passes by, the town annexes a tiny strip of it and sets a far lower temporary limit, then tickets as many unsuspecting drivers as possible). What you're asking for is to industrialize all of those issues.

mehrdadn 8y ago
Links would be great here, but thank you for the eye-opening comment.
- HarryHirsch 8y ago
  The town of Waldo, FL made the headlines a few years back: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/florida-town-infamous-for-speed-traps-disbanding-police-force/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/florida-town-infamous-for-speed... You'd like to invoke Florida Man, but plenty of small jurisdictions rely on the income stream from fines. Ferguson, MO comes to mind. The police fleecing blacks and out-of-towners, it does wonders for the perception of the law.
LitFan 8y ago
Some anecdata for this: There is one intersection on my drive into work with a red light camera. There is also one on the way home. Without fail, whenever I approach one of those intersections on a green light where the pedestrian signal has changed to a flashing hand, at least one car slows down. I have seen people stop at a green light where the pedestrian signal is a solid hand (meaning the light will change to yellow soon). Acting in an unexpected way is a recipe for an accident.
btrettel 8y ago
How common are the issues you mention? I hear a lot more complaints from drivers having to pay legitimate sounding speeding tickets than I do bogus tickets. In fact, I can't think of a single instance of anyone I know who got a speeding ticket that wasn't legitimate. Corruption in the process of enforcing the law is not inevitable too. I also am not comfortable calling the "85th percentile" rule a best practice. Seems like a moving target that has more to do with perceived safety than actual safety. Here's someone else's take: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/1/25/speed-kills-so-why-do-we-keep-designing-for-it https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/1/25/speed-kills-so...
- ubernostrum 8y ago
  First of all, it's useful to distinguish two types of roads: those which are controlled-access exclusively for motorized vehicles, and those which are not. Much of what you're trying to do is impose one-size-fits-all enforcement on both types. Controlled-access roads forbid pedestrians and bicycles, so arguments about protecting pedestrians and bicyclists on those roads fall flat. They should be using 85th-percentile metrics, in combination with the known design speed of the road, to set limits. But because controlled-access roads tend to have higher speeds, they're also the most tempting targets on which to run speed traps (i.e., if you can set a stretch of road to 25mph when the rest of it is 55mph, and park a hidden camera or cop right at the boundary, you can make a lot of money for your municipal budget, and precisely zero dollars of it will have been justified by increased "safety"). For the non-controlled-access roads, most of the real solutions the strongtowns/walkable/bikable/etc. movements want are going to come down to radically different infrastructure which have nothing whatsoever to do with speed limits. Speed limits are at best a non sequitur there.
  - btrettel 8y ago
    I don't think you are responding to what I wrote. I never suggested a one-size-fits-all approach. I don't think the 85th percentile rule is entirely bad, just not a "best practice", which sounds to me like "one-size-fits-all". The Strong Towns post I linked to said it makes sense for highways as I recall, which seems perfectly consistent with what you wrote. Anyway, to reiterate, I am still interested in knowing how frequently speed cameras and the like are used poorly. The only uses of speed cameras that come to mind in my experience were not on "controlled-access" roads and seem justified to me. In fact, I rode my bike several times on one road with a speed camera that many drivers whined about back when I lived on the east coast. It was not uncommon for people to drive 15 mph or more over the speed limit there, despite the pedestrians. If I recall correctly the speed camera was added before a pedestrian crossing. Edit: What I am recalling was actually multiple cameras on multiple roads. http://www.gazette.net/stories/12092010/laurnew185647_32536.php http://www.gazette.net/stories/12092010/laurnew185647_32536....

mehrdadn 8y ago

Links would be great here, but thank you for the eye-opening comment.

HarryHirsch 8y ago
The town of Waldo, FL made the headlines a few years back: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/florida-town-infamous-for-speed-traps-disbanding-police-force/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/florida-town-infamous-for-speed... You'd like to invoke Florida Man, but plenty of small jurisdictions rely on the income stream from fines. Ferguson, MO comes to mind. The police fleecing blacks and out-of-towners, it does wonders for the perception of the law.

LitFan 8y ago

Some anecdata for this: There is one intersection on my drive into work with a red light camera. There is also one on the way home. Without fail, whenever I approach one of those intersections on a green light where the pedestrian signal has changed to a flashing hand, at least one car slows down. I have seen people stop at a green light where the pedestrian signal is a solid hand (meaning the light will change to yellow soon). Acting in an unexpected way is a recipe for an accident.

btrettel 8y ago

How common are the issues you mention? I hear a lot more complaints from drivers having to pay legitimate sounding speeding tickets than I do bogus tickets. In fact, I can't think of a single instance of anyone I know who got a speeding ticket that wasn't legitimate. Corruption in the process of enforcing the law is not inevitable too. I also am not comfortable calling the "85th percentile" rule a best practice. Seems like a moving target that has more to do with perceived safety than actual safety. Here's someone else's take: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/1/25/speed-kills-so-why-do-we-keep-designing-for-it https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/1/25/speed-kills-so...

ubernostrum 8y ago
First of all, it's useful to distinguish two types of roads: those which are controlled-access exclusively for motorized vehicles, and those which are not. Much of what you're trying to do is impose one-size-fits-all enforcement on both types. Controlled-access roads forbid pedestrians and bicycles, so arguments about protecting pedestrians and bicyclists on those roads fall flat. They should be using 85th-percentile metrics, in combination with the known design speed of the road, to set limits. But because controlled-access roads tend to have higher speeds, they're also the most tempting targets on which to run speed traps (i.e., if you can set a stretch of road to 25mph when the rest of it is 55mph, and park a hidden camera or cop right at the boundary, you can make a lot of money for your municipal budget, and precisely zero dollars of it will have been justified by increased "safety"). For the non-controlled-access roads, most of the real solutions the strongtowns/walkable/bikable/etc. movements want are going to come down to radically different infrastructure which have nothing whatsoever to do with speed limits. Speed limits are at best a non sequitur there.
- btrettel 8y ago
  I don't think you are responding to what I wrote. I never suggested a one-size-fits-all approach. I don't think the 85th percentile rule is entirely bad, just not a "best practice", which sounds to me like "one-size-fits-all". The Strong Towns post I linked to said it makes sense for highways as I recall, which seems perfectly consistent with what you wrote. Anyway, to reiterate, I am still interested in knowing how frequently speed cameras and the like are used poorly. The only uses of speed cameras that come to mind in my experience were not on "controlled-access" roads and seem justified to me. In fact, I rode my bike several times on one road with a speed camera that many drivers whined about back when I lived on the east coast. It was not uncommon for people to drive 15 mph or more over the speed limit there, despite the pedestrians. If I recall correctly the speed camera was added before a pedestrian crossing. Edit: What I am recalling was actually multiple cameras on multiple roads. http://www.gazette.net/stories/12092010/laurnew185647_32536.php http://www.gazette.net/stories/12092010/laurnew185647_32536....