EDIT: since apparently a bunch of people woke up with the wrong foot this morning or forgot to check the group they’re in:
This is a joke. Do not steal or vandalize speed enforcement cameras (or anything else for that matter). That’s against the law and you will likely get arrested.
If you’re addicted to crack or any other drugs, please seek professional help.
It does amaze me how many people I've met who have a vicious hatred towards speed cameras. Especially interesting e: in a country where people have so much respect for the police.
We don't like the idea a private company is enforcing laws not for safety but for profit. Especially when things like shortening of yellow light time and cameras that don't properly report speed. It's horseshit.
But that doesn't mean that you'd get the full $20 if you take it to a scrapyard. Still pretty good though. A relative of mine searches dumpsters for metal stuff and gets good money selling it to scrapyards. They have a job and good money. I think they just do it as a sidehustle and for fun
And these things don't shoot you if you look at them wrong – or are black.
Edit: "No, you can't just stick a camera worth a couple of thousand [local currency] next to the road, that takes photographic evidence of infractions. You gotta rip out the entire surface, redesign the sides and introduce a few sharp curves by demolishing a few blocks of buildings here and there. In the mean time speed is only enforced by violent cops who feel like you were speeding.
I can't believe that people don't want to see them installed in every school zones at least, if there's one place where you don't want people speeding it's there!
"It's a road design issue!" Yeah? What's cheaper and can be done quicker, changing the road design or installing speed cameras?
Where I live they are mostly used in school zones and residential areas, and they only trigger when going 12+ miles over the limit. Seems pretty reasonable.
Yeah people not respecting speed zones around schools is a real problem. I can't believe how people drive, and I've always got some Dodge Ram or Ford F150 riding my ass because I'm driving the proper speed.
Even if there was no posted speed limit, there are children everywhere and children are unpredictable.
I mean, I agree people hating speed cameras is nonsense, just drive the speed limit! However, traffic calming is legit and makes the road a much safer place for pedestrians, and usually it's by narrowing the road, not widening it.
They also can't testify in court, depriving accused speeders of their constitutional right to due process.
But back to your first claim: "gotta enforce speed limits:" No, we do not. Speeding is a symptom of a street that was designed wrong to begin with. The correct solution is to fix the design, not install a speed camera as some sort of big brother band-aid.
Edit: why do y'all apparently hate the idea of improving street design? As a former traffic engineer, I'm telling you that that's the only way to truly fix the problem of speeding. I don't get why that's controversial.
Sorry, but that is a gross misinterpretation. Drivers are not victims of an intrinsic speed devil that they cannot escape. They still choose to violate the speed limit in most cases.
What was done in these countries is to acknowledge, that physical design is more effective as enforcement, than the cop with a speed-meter.
Still the explicit intent is to enforce speed-limits, knowing that people would violate them if they could, but they can't because they would wreck their car. Still those people choose to violate and are responsible for their actions.
Sorry but it's a black and white thing in this case, r either you're under the speed limit and not breaking the law or you're over the speed limit and breaking the law.
Also, tons of people object to speed camera tickets and win, the only difference is that there's no officer there when the event happened to tell them "Say that to the judge if you're not happy.", the end result is the same.
Where I live they install speed cameras in residential areas, school zones, and bus routes. They also only trigger when you are going 12 or more over the limit, and the highest speed limit I've seen with one these was 45mph, 35mph during school times. They also have an officer review and sign the citation, it is a flat fee, and no points. If needed, the officer who reviews will testify in court.
If someone is going 12+ over on school zones, school bus routes, and residential neighborhoods, then they deserve their fine.
I'm a big fan of NJB (shout out to [email protected]), but I'm not going to argue against speed cameras. That's ridiculous. Yes, if I have to choose one or the other I'll take the better road design. But even with good road design, some people will choose to be dicks because they can, or they see it as a challenge or some shit. And speed cameras can be implemented right now, whereas better road design waits (even in the Netherlands!) until that street is next due for repaving.
I don't find improving road safety through intelligent engineering controversial, I think blaming the street design instead of the idiot deciding to speed through it is controversial. In the end it is the driver who accelerated, not the road engineer.
In fact I actually like how much attention has been brought over the past years to road design. I've always been scared of cars.
why do y'all apparently hate the idea of improving street design? As a former traffic engineer,
I think people are intuitively understanding that it's not really a possibility in a country as large as America. There are only 139,000 km of public roads in the Netherlands, compared to 6,743,151 km of roads in America. We also have different types of traffic compared to the Netherlands, more large vehicles and people without access to public transportation for daily commutes. Compounding all this with the fact that the federal government has no control of how most of these roads are built....... It's understandable why people don't see this as realistic option.
I'm not a fan of them because they have been known to cause accidents in the past from people trying to slow down and not get ticketed.TIL this is bupkiss. I've read it so many times I took it for granted. That and it only slows people down in that specific area. You slow down, drive past it, then just speed back up.
I think Europe uses a better system, where you post two cameras on either end of the road you want to regulate the speed of. You take pictures of the license plates and time how long they were in the road for, then divide the distance by time to determine average speed. If that speed is above the legal limit, you look up the plate and they get a ticket in the mail. It's lower tech because it doesn't need LiDar, it's harder to 'cheat', and it can be pretty cheap for regulating long stretches of road without exits.
While the system you describe does exist a lot in Europe the single cameras are much lower tech. They don't have to read the license plate (twice!) correctly – they just take a picture. And while the mobile ones (non-descript grey van with blacked out rear windows parked at the side of the road) do use LIDAR, the static ones use just induction coils that are put into the road surface about 2m apart, rivht where the camera is looking. In Germany they'll often put these coils in both directions of the road and just randomly turn the camera around, though newer ones just work in both directions all the time.
No source of that (obviously because it's bullshit), but there's sources that show they reduce the number of people speeding this making the roads safer for non driver users by reducing the number of accidents.
Someone actually stole a bunch of cameras but couldn't offload it and ended up getting caught when he tried to sell it on craigslist. Lol. Apparently the camera units are proprietary in the office shelf.
Guys, guys. Hear me out. What if (tokes) yeah...what if like if we like yeah. Oh? Sorry. What if we train pigeons to shit on traffic camera lens. It could be done. The military had trained pigeons to guide bombs against warships. Let's train and breed pigeons to do this and release them in the wild.
Semi-related: Only small amounts of copper are typically stored in the human body, and the average adult has a total body content of 50–120 mg copper. Most copper is excreted in bile, and a small amount is excreted in urine.
Water: 35 liters, Carbon: 20 kg, Ammonia: 4 liters, Lime:1.5 kg, Phosphrus: 800 g, salt: 250g, saltpeter:100g, Sulfer: 80g, Fluorine: 7.5 g, iron: 5.6 g, Silicon: 3g, and 15 other elements in small quantities.... thats the total chemical makeup of the average adult body. Modern science knows all of this, but there has never been a single example of succesful human trasmutation.
These are the Things that Make a Man
Iron enough to make a nail,
Lime enough to paint a wall,
Water enough to drown a dog,
Sulphur enough to stop the fleas,
Potash enough to wash a shirt,
Gold enough to buy a bean,
Silver enough to coat a pin,
Lead enough to ballast a bird,
Phosphor enough to light the town,
Poison enough to kill a cow,
Strength enough to build a home,
Time enough to hold a child,
Love enough to break a heart.
I don't think dubious scrappers taking obviously stolen copper are paying fair market value. You'd have to throw in a vcr or two amd haggle a bit to get enough for a dub.
I know. I never traded scrap, but I guess many or most won't trade in so low numbers, I'd assume professional scrap traders have a minimum amount to not waste their time.
They take your picture and then you get a mostly automated letter with the picture saying you have to pay a fine, but mostly you can ignore them. I lived near an intersection with one, every time the left turn light turned red (which happened way faster than normal) the picture flash went off for the last three or so people going through the intersection, presumably all of them getting tickets. I assume they are also recording the license plate numbers of everyone going through the intersection regardless of perceived violations.
Why do you think those letters in the mail can be ignored? They are tied to your license plate and that is serious business. If you don't pay traffic fines, the fines go up and up and Then they involve the criminal justice system and you have to show up in court and it's all just very ugly. Oh yeah they can suspend your driver's license over it too, There's no way to get out of paying traffic citations.
This one is in a school zone. People really shouldn't be speeding through them unless they're a "fuck them kids" kinda person, and if you are you're a piece of shit.
Even better solution though: (re-) build the street at a school zone so that no driver more sane than the most insane Florida Man would not fathom driving any faster than 20 km/h, no speed cameras required.
Even better solution though: the street at a school zone that no driver more sane than the most insane Florida Man would not fathom driving any faster than 20 km/h, no speed cameras required.
"Take this road that's in good condition and spend public money rebuilding it over months instead of installing a camera today to push drivers to be responsible."
No it's not. Speed is a very significant element of road safety. At lower speeds, you can stop in a much shorter distance, and if you hit someone their chance of death or serious injury goes way down. Braking distance is proportional to the square of velocity, and reaction distance is directly proportional. If hit at 50 km/h, a pedestrian has a 90% chance of death. At 30 km/h, they have a 90% chance of survival.
At lower speeds, you're also far more likely to notice something that might require you to stop or slow. Your cone of vision at 60 km/h is 40°. At 80 it's 30°, and at 100 km/h it's 20°. A different source I found says under 50 km/h it's 104° and at 65 it's 70°. Whatever the specifics, lower speeds are much safer.
This isn't to say that speed cameras are the best or should be the only method used to ensure road safety. Narrowing roads, adding furniture by the roadside, and increasing the complexity of the route, are all good ways to reinforce a lower speed limit by reducing how safe drivers feel driving at high speed. But speed cameras are a useful supplement to that, for those drivers determined to be irresponsible.
Why is high speed highway driving safer per km if vehicle velocity is a 'very significant element of road safety'?
The problem, as ever, is retards driving fast on slow roads and slow on fast roads. The camera doesn't discriminate, it triggers no matter the context. It will trigger the same way for a racing driver with lightening fast reflexes in perfect conditions as it will for tired grandma with cold treacle reaction time driving on snow.
Both risk of collision as well as risk of injury / death if a collision occurs correlate heavily with speed, there's literally no better factor than speed to consider. Of course, it's not the only factor, that's why we have safety and license requirements for vehicles and drivers as well.
I'm sure that the US navy seals has already infiltrated OP's house and neutralized the threat. Merely joking about destroying traffic cams definitely warrants this type of action. /s
Normally I'd be on board with this, but the picture is literally in front of an elementary school! If there's any place that I'm ok having speed cameras, it's in a school zone.
But yeah, if it's a speed camera on a major highway raking in cash for everyone going 10 over? Fuuuuuuuck that.
Speeding cameras are revenue generating equipment, not safety equipment.
Roads are engineered to be comfortably driven at a certain speed. When legislators put a lower speed limit on these roads it creates a safety hazard and a moral hazard. If you want people to drive slower, you have to modify the road to lower it's design speed. These modifications (lane narrowing, for example) are a safety tool, not the speeding camera.
I've never met anyone who thought these cameras were safety equipment!
If these things were actually used to increase public safety I'd be all for them. Unfortunately our current system rewards corruption, so that's not the case. Speed and red light cams are never actually used for safety, they're used to extract money from the populace.
This article is about red light cameras rather than speed cameras, but corporations and municipalities (corrupt or just naive) can be trusted to find ways to fuck over the public for profit using the speed cameras too.
I would be more inclined to trust this stuff if local governments weren't able to make money off of it. If all traffic court fines went to say the state level government then the only motivation for enforcing the law was because the law was good. We don't expect homicide units to be a revenue stream because we have collectively decided that murder is not a good thing to have around.
Can't speak for most places, but in mine, that's exactly the way it works. You can only make a certain percentage of your budget from tickets (and it's not a large amount) before it all goes to the level double above yours.
photo enforcement sucks and doesn't really work and is just used as tax revenue for cities
meanwhile speeding continues as normal with all the casualties that come with it
Cities, however, do need this revenue to not go bankrupt because they're all designed wrong and can barely get any tax revenued while still affording details like infrastructure maintenance
Cities should redesign their rod infrastructure instead. Where you still need car roads, design the roads for the speed you want. If you put a highway in front of a school, people will drive a 100 miles per hour because that is what the road was dest for.
Cities should start changing laws to push for livable designs focused on humans beings instead of cars everywhere. You'll need less cars, have less accidents, get more tax revenue from more local businesses