“Nowhere was it more apparent than on Geneva Avenue between Prague Street and Brookdale Avenue, where one camera averaged 1,779 violations a day, according to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. Another camera on Bryant Street, between Second and Third streets, zapped 944 speeding drivers a day.”
Nearly TWO THOUSAND speeding violations in one day, in the heart of a major city. These people drive like morons.
If your speed cameras catch 100k violators a month, you’ve built the streets wrong.
Either build high speed roads with few intersections, limited access, and generous amounts of clearance to allow for high speed cars with less danger. Or build low speed narrow streets to keep traffic moving slowly.
The us builds high speed roads with frequent intersections with pedestrians a few inches away. This is a fundamentally dangerous design. It can’t be fixed with ticketing and cameras. Tear out the roads.
People don’t take the danger of driving seriously enough. I hope we come to view this as a lack of empathy.
I hope we come to view this as a lack of empathy.
It’s not that at all, look at the road where it’s happening… It’s fucking 22 god damn meters(72 feet) wide from kerb to kerb, and the speed limit is 35mph(56kph)…
The main issue is the road is very poorly designed.
I’ve seen this type of comment quite a lot here, and regardless of if you meant it that way I think it needs to be said for the benefit of all:
Bad road design does not excuse speeding.
Yes, changing the design is the more effective way to reduce the speed of traffic to a safe level. But just because the design was bad does not mean drivers can drive whatever feels right to them. The drivers still have a personal responsibility to drive safely, which in most cases means the same speed as the other vehicles, which means the speed limit bc that’s the only one everyone can agree on.
If the road design tempts you to sin, cut off your engine.
It seems to me like you’re struggling to empathise with people that speed 😂( which if you don’t drive is completely fair 😂)
But yeah I agree it’s not a good excuse for speeding, just trying to say that putting a sign up is not very effective. It’s better than nothing though and a good first step.
But adding speed cameras, while it might help a bit to reduce speeds, it’s not very effective, and a much better solution would be removing the root cause of the problem: car centric infrastructure.
Speed cameras don’t prevent people from speeding, they just punish people after the fact, whereas better designed roads prevent it from even happening in the first place.
Will be interesting to see once the fines start. Might just be an inconvenience to the ultra wealthy who might carry on but on the other hand people don’t like losing money, and it just takes a few cars to slow down to force everyone else to. Do you have ant points system or mechanism that will take away your licence for multiple tickets?
I much prefer speed traps to red light cameras that are often predatory and don’t make intersections safer.
None of that nonsense. Implementing actual, physical traffic-calming infrastructure is where it’s at. And bollards. Lots of bollards.
We just need walkable cities and to gradually increase to acreage of car-free zones.
💯 A better solution through design instead of applying a technological Band-Aid.
I think both can be useful.
The most effective speed management I’ve seen are the average speed camera zones. There’s a 50+ mile stretch with a 70mph limit near me, and very few (if any) folk ignore them and exceed the limit - as opposed to static cameras which involve someone doing excess speed; slamming on the anchors on approach to the camera; before hooning it back up to whatever speed they were doing before.
The downside to avg speed zones is that it encourages drivers to pop on a cruise control technology and zone out, but then I would imagine that people in that category would tune out on cruise control whether they were in a speed zone or not.
FYI, these are speed cameras, not red light cameras. They’re set such that you’d need to be doing 36+ mph in a 25 mph zone.
Nothinh predatory about rule enforcement! Hell yeah SF
In my town, the red light cameras tend to cause drivers to slam on the brakes when the light changes. The equipment is often owned by a third-party that loans it to the city and places stipulations like very short light times to produce more profit.
It does look like there’s significant evidence that speed traps do improve safety.
stipulations like very short light times
This probably invalidates the tickets under the definition of a “crime” in basically every common law system. Crimes has to be willful.
If only it worked like that in practice everywhere. It’s a pretty addictive revenue stream, and the district is incentivized to bend the rules to collect their money.
Of course, I write this from the US, which is currently at critical levels of internal corruption, so this could be a factor.
Yes, yet another way even the requirement to show up in court is used to suppress regular people.
