Speed cameras (and by extension red light cameras) are generally nothing more than a money grab by a municipality.
this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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Speed cameras need to be accompanied by roads that are designed to physically calm traffic.
I used to drive a lot in London, and there are speed cameras all over the place there, and it certainly helps when they are ubiquitous, but what really makes people slow down are the narrow, curved and winding roads.
Fuck, surveillance capitalism with my golden fucking dick, fuck this, design better roads, not better cameras
I find these threads entertaining because it pits Lemmys hatred of cars against its hatred of police departments
This. I’m quickly learning Lemmy is populated with an interesting group of folks.
Yeah it leans very hard leftist. I hope as the platform grows it will get a little more diversity of opinion but I love the concept of open-source social media (if you can even call it that). For now I just block all the news and political communities; occasionally something gets through but that's fine.
Speed cameras were introduced in my area. It caused accidents to go up, not down. Ex: Person A sees the camera and slows down, but person B doesn’t and now swerves to avoid them while maintaining speed. Or doesn’t and just rear ends them. The cameras got deactivated. Speed traps aren’t a good answer.
FYI, it's "eg:", not Ex.
As described, the cause of the accident is driving too fast for the conditions, inattentive driving and possibly following too close. Every US jurisdiction I have driven in requires a driver to maintain speed and spacing that allows them to stop safely if the vehicle in front of them comes to a sudden stop. If a driver needs to take evasive action to avoid a vehicle that is not stopped, but just slowing, that is one shitty driver. We are all better off if individuals like that are ticketed and get points on their license.
This is one of the reasons places have taken out red light cameras, as well. It was causing people to slam on the brakes.
It was causing people to stop at red lights? Can't have that can we.
It causes people to stop at the first sign of a yellow light, whether or not it was actually safe to or not.
Many cities who implemented red light cameras also deliberately decreased the length of yellow lights in order to boost tickets.
Rear-end collisions are significantly safer than T-bone collisions though.
Sucks for those affected but reduces deaths nonetheless. A fivefold increase in rear-end collisions doesn't offset the benefit from even just a 10% reduction in T-bones. Put them up everywhere and people will necessarily get used to them. These cameras exist everywhere around here in Germany and no one really slams on their breaks.
Besides, why haven't you created norms for the duration of the yellow light based on the speed limit of a road? I feel like that's something every country should have.
@half_fiction @fuckwit_mcbumcrumble A greater raw number of crashes is sometimes observed when a new red light camera is introduced, but severe injuries and fatalities go down. The crashes prevented are of more severe types, like t-bone crashes or hitting people, while any extra crashes are the rear end variety which produces few major injuries. Plus, rear end crashes are 100% the fault of the trailing driver following too closely. After an introductory period, more people learn not to tailgate.
@half_fiction @fuckwit_mcbumcrumble Tailgating is a ridiculously stupid behavior that far too many US drivers routinely engage in. It's like nobody had physics or driver's ed in high school. On any given day, 1/4 of the drivers are following the vehicle in front of them at a speed and distance that would not allow them to stop if the car in front encountered an obstacle and had to stop or slow suddenly. It's completely preventable and cars can and should be designed to prevent it.
This assumes you can see and recognize the camera. Driving in sf there's so many other things you're watching out for, and the streets/sidewalks have so much other shit going on that you'd be hard pressed to spot the camera.
Also like someone else mentioned it could increase overall incidents but if those are minor, like getting rear ended, it's well worth reducing pedestrian fatalities.
Im Brazil all speed cameras have signs before them, so drivers can know the camera is in front and slow down. They are installed strategically, to slow down drivers before conflict points or pedestrian crossings.
...because adding cameras to watch the public for 'safety' has never been horribly abused.
Additionally, any driver traveling more than 100 mph on city streets can expect a $500 ticket from the cameras.
What sort of lunatic is going that fast on dense city roads, and why is it not escalating straight to an arrest warrant and a revocation of their driver's license?
People race through GG park at night. They used to race on great highway too, but I guess they don't anymore since it's closed to car traffic now. Of course that never stopped biker gangs so I guess they still do crazy stunt shit.
It might be the night time street races that can hit 100 between lights when commuter traffic is next to none.
In Toronto you got most people driving 20 above the posted limit like it's nothing mostly during the day, but come night when the roadways are clear and empty some are going 30 over.
Lol right. I haven't been to the part of San Francisco where 100 mph driving wouldn't be insane. Maybe on some kind of super street bike but even then...
I thought the cab I was in that was hitting 60 mph on those hills was insane, 100 seems terminal.
That sounds terrifying.
It was like a roller coaster with no tracks! So yes, absolutely. I just grabbed my husband’s hand for moral support and hoped the driver was driving like this because he knew what he was doing, haha.
Fuck this shit, fuck how they target minority communities with it, fuck how every technology is eventually used against you by the state
Speed cameras are very common in the UK and while they don't eliminate speeding altogether, they are effective.
Apart from the risk of either a fine, doing a 'speed awareness' course or losing your license, it also means that people who are driving too fast regardless are more likely to simply get stuck behind other drivers who are observing the speed limit.
Maybe if they're truly ubiquitous on all roads everywhere, then maybe. But if they're just scattered around here and there then i doubt they achieve much beyond fattening they city's ticket income
The trick is to mix fixed speed cameras with mobile speed cameras that move around regularly—police sit in the back of a van parked next to the road with a big camera pointed out the rear window. Because these move around, they could be anywhere. And because they could be anywhere most drivers will act as though they are.
No, the trick is section control.
Mobile speed cameras don't work due to e.g. Google Maps having speed camera warnings integrated. People slow down when the sat nav warns them and speed up later as well.
Section control is a system where license plates are photographed when a car enters a section and again when it leaves. The time stamps and the known distance are used to calculate an average speed. That means, accelerating and slowing down doesn't help, and it's the only way to force people to drive the speed limit over a longer distance.
Edit: We had fixed speed cameras and mobile ones for at least 50 years where I live. It's funny to see people theorizing about them as if they were some entirely new concept.
Average speed cameras only work on motorways. In the stop-start traffic of a city they're completely irrelevant.
Edit: We had fixed speed cameras and mobile ones for at least 50 years where I live. It’s funny to see people theorizing about them as if they were some entirely new concept.
Not sure why you think I'm theorising as though it's a new concept. I was speaking as to what clearly works based on the fact that it's what we do here in Australia and have done as long as I can remember, and that our death rates are so much lower than in America, on both a per capita and per vehicle-km basis.
I mean, it's easy to have lower death rates than a country where you can do your driver's license without ever leaving the parking lot.
In stop-start traffic all sorts of speed cameras are mostly irrelevant.
Average speed cameras work on any stretch of road where people actually exceed the speed limit. The cool thing about average speed cameras is that the technology is so incredibly simple and cheap that you can just place them on every junction on a road.
In stop-start traffic all sorts of speed cameras are mostly irrelevant.
What I meant with that previous comment was not bumper-to-bumper traffic, but "regularly stopped by traffic lights" driving. Where some people absolutely will speed if they think they can get away with it, so maximising the fear of getting caught is a great way to reduce speeding.
In that case, average speed cameras still work, and they still work better than single-spot speed cameras.
But an average speed camera doesn't really work if they only get a few hundred metres, maybe a couple of kilometres at best, before they have to stop, and if during those couple of kilometres there's a mixture of times when they're speeding and times when they have to slow down because of other cars who aren't speeding.
They really can only work on motorways, with many kilometres between cameras and on- and off-ramps.
Is there data showing speed cameras reduce anything other than people's wallets? I know that slower speeds reduce fatalities, but I'm unconvinced that speed cameras do
Personally, it helps reduce noise pollution in my residential street at all hours. We get a lot of hoons otherwise.
I work in government in a city where cameras designed to detect license plates for active warrants, stolen vehicles, and vehicles from Amber/Silver alerts have been deployed. It was crystal-clear from Council that those were the only authorized uses as a condition of their installation.
Within a week, the police were using them to identify cars for other purposes.
The article says that even with just warnings speeding reduced by 31% on the monitored areas in general, and 64% on a specific stretch. So yeah they do reduce speeding, and like you said reducing speeding reduces accidents and fatalities.
This paper seems to suggest so, but also mentions "Previous empirical work on this topic, which shows a diverse range of estimated effects [...]" - so it seems like other factors will play a role. (Disclaimer: I read only the abstract)
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My prognostication:
if it reduces the number of speeders then the system won't pay for itself, and SF will remove the cameras.
You can reduce the number of speeders AND issue more tickets, which I'd say is the most likely outcome.
This is interesting. I'm curious to see how it goes, though I generally refuse to drive in SF.
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