Speed traps have no long-term effect on speeding: study
strongtowns.org
strongtowns.org
(These are usually deployed near roadworks)
So in addition to the reduction in speed, you’ve got smaller speed differences between vehicles and also a much more even and steady traffic flow which can help prevent that traffic jam inducing stop/start behaviour.
I reluctantly think they should be used more widely. (And I say that as a U.K. driver who is not unfamiliar with receiving the odd speeding ticket in the past).
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.x....
Something similar with "speed patrolled by aircraft" warnings.
License plates could be stored to track you
This feels like doubling down on something that's not super effective.
The way to make traffic slower, is to make road lanes narrower. You can also add curves/trees or overhangs to add shadows to the road, which breaks up the roadway and makes it harder to reason about from a distance.
Around me people speed, but you know what’s more dangerous? People who go 55 on the left lane. And trucks that don’t move to the right lane. They are not breaking the law in regards of speed, but everyone that’s going at the normalized pace has to avoid an obstacle.
I say leave the speed limit at 75, put everyone through a more difficult test, enforce lane hierarchy and enforce tickets above 90-95. This equals on a traffic speed of 80-85 that’s safer than adding trees and making narrow lanes
Edit: after posting this comment I come to realize what living in the US has done to me. I immediately assumed that a road with a speed trap is a highway. Which is all I see every time I get on the car anyway. The American dream.
Highways probably shouldn't have speed limits. Honestly, close to nothing should have a speed limit. How fast you can go on a highway should be entirely decided by how good your visibility is. So adding things on the sides of the road could help lower visibility by decreasing the amount of sunlight on roads.
We overestimate ourselves.
What is relevant is that people have a perceived safe speed, and that this perceived safe speed is able to be influenced. Change the environment and you will change the driver.
People like to drive fast, no matter the environment.
The main thing that changed the death rates was progress in car safety.
Just look at the begin of car history. Bad roads, unsafe vehicles, lots of deaths.
Even people who drive small cars do so in a way that they believe to be safe. Even people who drove before "modern SUVs" existed did so in a way they believed to be safe. Drivers of SUVs are not the ones risking the lives of others, while the "rest of us" are being safe and responsible.
When car accidents are as common and tragic as they are, the fault isn't with individual drivers. Drivers try to drive safely, and generally do their best under the circumstances. They're just regular people, like all of us. The fault is with the system: road design, vehicle design, incentives (city design, etc), and education.
The behaviour of SUV drivers and non-SUV drivers can be exactly the same, but because of the sizes and masses involved with SUVs, the same event can cause much more damage when an SUV is involved.
* https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/new-study-suggests-todays-s...
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00224...
> When car accidents […]
The word "accident" has the connotation that the event(s) couldn't be helped but ((almost) had to) happen. There is growing evidence that this is false:
* https://www.vox.com/23016529/there-are-no-accidents-jessie-s...
Do a search on the phrase "crash not accident" for more on this.
If anything, accidents are not intended though, even if avoidable in hindsight, and if it was, it's not an accident, but definitely a crime.
About 30 minutes ago I watched a car make a left turn at a pedestrian in a high-vis vest.
Either nobody is paying attention, not looking around enough, or the safety features (that A pillar) blocks too much of the view for our own good.
Speed traps don't actually enforce/fix this. They just make people unhappy.
If you want a street to feel "safe" for pedestrians, you have to make it feel "unsafe" for drivers, and make them think consciously about how they're driving.
So they changed the speed limit from 35 to 25mph.
Now, people routinely speed on these roads, going... 45-55 miles an hour in a 25 zone.
Why don't we just make the speed limit zero? That oughta fix it. What's the alternative?
I guess we could develop roads that are actually sized for the speed you want people to travel at, and thereby not make residential areas 100% road-centric, but I'm told by every civil engineer in America that that's crazy talk for some reason.
Making a 1mi visibility 2-lane each direction road with a 25mph is stupid, as it just won't be followed or if it is enforced - lead to endless frustration. Just use natural features to cause people to behave the way you want.
1mi+ visibility ins't so much anything with road design...it's just geometry.
Stop building double-wide roads in areas where speed control is desirable.
Start prioritizing humans over cars.
Locally, they've put several such roads on "diets" with good success (usually cutting lane count in half, using the space for bike lanes). Accident rates are down, speeding is down, and throughput only marginally impacted.
I guess we could develop roads that are actually sized for the speed you want people to travel... I'm told by every civil engineer in America that that's crazy talk for some reason.
It's only crazy if rule #1 is maximizing auto throughput, which has historically been true in the US. And it's hard to do retroactively, because other transit options usually aren't sufficient (and cost a fortune to retrofit). But, designing such places from scratch shouldn't be too difficult.
Windy roads. Double wide gives you optionality here: convert them into single lane each way and wind through the double wide, turning the remainder into parks or returning it to the adjacent plot.
As you can imagine, people speed. A lot.
So towns started adding a gratuitous sharp turn at the entrance into town. You fly in doing 90kph, slow down for the turn, and are greeted by a 50kph speed limit. You won't speed back up because why would you.
Portuguese rural towns, I've seen, have a similarly brilliant solution – a stoplight outside town. If you approach at speeds above the speed limit, the red light comes on. Forcing you to keep stopping outside very tiny little town. You quickly learn it's faster to just go the speed limit.
Another good solution I've seen from little alleys in San Francisco. The speed limit is whatever, but you really shouldn't drive more than 10mph there. Such nice straight road though ... so they stopped being straight. The 1 lane of driving and 1 lane of parking switch sides every quarter block. Forcing you to slow down.
“Change the speed limit” by changing a sign and “reengineer the road” are just different propositions entirely.
Not sure how accurate this random link about it is, though.
https://www.motor1.com/products-services/driver-safety/point...
If you remove the option to opt for a fine instead of demerit points, then people won't be able to get out of the consequences of getting demerit points and there would be no income based discrimination. For example, someone who makes a decent living would have no problem paying an increased fine compared to someone who is living paycheck to paycheck.
For example, where I am, there's a hill with a road that winds around it with a 50 MPH speed limit, except right before the bottom and around the turn, suddenly it's 35 MPH before becoming 45 MPH highway. A cop hides around the turn and pulls over people who don't know that their 50 MPH road will suddenly become 35 MPH before they've cleared the hill. Locals know to go slow enough down the hill, as in less than 50 MPH, in order to not get pulled over.
I know that areas in my town that are well known for speed traps definitely have a lower occurrence of people speeding. On a neighborhood road near my house we had a really bad problem with speeders. Over the course of several months, there were numerous speed traps. Today, there are less speeders than before.
Anyone who thinks speed traps, or limits, were put in place for safety, is forever hopeful.
The function very well for the purpose for which they were implemented, to raise revenue for the local administration.
It's like thinking a company's product price, or change in product price, has anything to do with costs. The price is what they can get people to pay.
I don't get this. Isn't this doing the opposite of reflecting reality and ignoring the 85th percentile speed by modifying the street design to add danger?
>The 85th percentile speed is the speed at or below which 85 percent of the drivers will operate with open roads and favorable conditions. The assumption underlying the 85th percentile speed is that most drivers will operate their vehicle at speeds they perceive to be safe.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/7/24/understanding-...
According to these studies, section speed cameras can reduce the number of accidents by 30% on average, compared to 20% for conventional speed cameras. Even better: section speed cameras reduce the number of serious accidents by 56%!
Better, the study highlighted a "contagion" effect: the average speed also dropped in the areas located before and after the controlled section.
Finally, the speed seems to have become more homogeneous, and the band changes less frequent in the studied area.
Many drivers would defeat the average by blasting along at their regular 180kmh, stopping for a thimble-full of coffee that somehow takes an hour to prepare and two hours to stir three grains of sugar into and then off again to the next toll booth flashing lights at anyone in their way doing less than 200kmh - to make up for lost time.
Come on Meloni - legalise cannabis and average speed cams...all bills paid and no tax hikes.
The obvious solution is just to put the cameras on the non-toll exits as well. They tend to be spaced generously on US interstates, so it probably wouldn't be a significant expense relative to the overall cost.
Arterial routes are necessary; designate them, build them accordingly. Add a small buffer between them and residential areas.
Time the dang lights on an arterial to encourage the most common flow to drive at the posted speed limits to continue hitting green lights.
Avoid red lights to 'calm' traffic patterns, that just encourages bypasses through whatever alternatives exist, which will be neighborhood streets.
A city designed for humans would need to be far closer to Azimov's Caves of Steel world, where everything is closer together, beltways and moving sidewalks replace in city bus transit. You'd still need the vehicle layer for emergency services, construction, and bulk product delivery; those vehicles will probably be electric though, or possibly transported by in city dedicated vehicles.
Walt Disney World comes to mind as a larger area intended to have several hubs of primarily human scale transport. EPCOT has the well earned acronym 'Every Person Comes Out Tired' for good reasons; it's too far of a dang walk and the humidity around that lake is murder on a hot day. The inner facade stages are roughly at the sensible limits of human scale, but they're connected either by utility corridors or paths or direct abutment to roadways behind the parks. Even in these _designed_ areas, economics dictates both vehicle and human existence mostly at the same or similar levels and very few over or under passes; where there are it's often exactly two effective layers. Some might have multiple modes of transit. E.G. between EPCOT and Hollywood there's a boat and pedestrian system, which has bridges for the pedestrians, and is crossed in one location by a major road bridge.
It has three or so basic precepts
- car centric as opposed to people centric is not building economic or pleasent places to be
- denser living is more efficient - even if it's hard to rub shoulders with, you know, other smelly people. You need more apartments / condos and less gardens.
- if you live dense enough to have viable public transport, then you live dense enough to share other public amenities like libraries, schools, hospitals, streets, toilets cafes. getting along with people you don't like is a social necessity.
It turns out not many people like these implications.
The turning down the dial on car-first urban design has lots of implications - some of it looks like enforcing speed limits (yes this whole article is about enforcing - speed cameras can happily work along vast swathes of modern roads.
Imagine speed cameras on every motorway or highway that automatically pumped out fines as you went over the limits. yes annoying and expensive but also suddenly that 45 minutes commute takes 1.5 hours and the train looks a good option. As does the coach.
Just enforcing the current rules will probably have 50% of the effect desired.
I think that speeding is bad, but cheap shots by law enforcement drive a deep us vs them mentality that makes people resent road law.
Surely ‘little Timmy died because someone was speeding, don’t kill little Timmy’ appeals to peoples emotions would work better, if law enforcement actually wanted to make a difference..
A counter example is my kids school. Their was a real problem with people speeding through the school zone. School district police started showing up at least one a week for about 6 months and occasionally after that.
I don’t have quantitative results, but qualitatively speeds have remained down for years afterwards, especially because they still park a police car there every month or two.
I’m not saying speed enforcement is the right solution generally, but done correctly in the right circumstances it does seem like it can lead to persistent change.
They came so close to the solution without saying it. The point of the 85% rule is that's what the speed limit is supposed to be. The reason so many people are speeding is that the speed limit is too low, and the right answer is to raise it.
Speed-triggered red lights. Sure, people are more than willing to drive a speed they consider "safe" even if it's above the limit. But most aren't willing to run a red light.
So in many parts of Portugal, that's how they slow you down. If you go above the limit, it triggers a red light. Then you can sit at the red light as other motorists (and even nearby pedestrians) give you a death stare. Thanks for slowing everybody down, dumbass!
Never underestimate the power of an old Portuguese woman (usually dressed in black) staring at you in disgust!
lol!
Until the moment when you need to speed away from the danger or you need the extra power to escape the skid. But yeah, let’s just put enforced speed limiters on cars. What could go wrong.
How exactly do you do this?
If your answer is GPS, this means that highways will either become very dangerous, or will need to reduce speeds to ~15 mph in many places, because there's tiny access roads parallel to them with low speed limits. GPS is so horribly inaccurate that Google Maps frequently thinks you're driving on a parallel road, so to avoid some people's cars suddenly slamming the brakes on (because their GPS thinks they're on the access road), you'll need to just limit the total speed limit to the lowest speed limit of all roads in the vicinity.
In other words, your suggestion is technically infeasible.
They also do this thing where there are two sets of cameras, and if your average speed is above the limit between two points your in trouble. At the moment they target heavy vehicles, but my guess its only a matter of time before they target all vehicles.
I see more and more in residential areas at 25mph where they install digital signs indicating current speed through highly traveled streets to hopefully slow down drivers but idea if that theory works. I'm assuming it doesn't hurt given how drivers are easily distracted but I'm curious if these sign log any data.
It seems to have solved the problem. Most people will slow down.
They still do photo radar speed traps on the highway, but it's not really a deterrent or safety thing. More like an automated toll booth for people who insist on speeding.
Add a whole bunch more of them and it would help. They need one by every single intersection - otherwise people entering the road could travel for quite a distance before realizing there's a low limit on that road.
>Deciding to conduct a speed study, Staggs placed himself in an inconspicuous spot away from school zones or intersections that may have influenced the results. He spent two hours tracking oncoming traffic speed from both directions to collect the study data.
"Critical Reasons for Crashes Investigated in the National Motor Vehicle Crash Causation Survey"
https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
If we jump to table #2 we can learn about driver-related causes for accidents:
Recognition Error 41%
inattention
internal and external distractions
inadequate surveillance
Decision Error 33%
Driving too fast for conditions
Too fast for the curve
False assumption of others’ actions
Illegal maneuver
Misjudgment of gap or others’ speed
Performance Error 11%
Overcompensation, poor directional control, etc.
Non-Performance Error 7%
Sleep was the most critical reason
Other 8%
Even worse, the 33% group in "Decision Error" does not include speed as an absolute isolated critical reason. Speed always requires context. In this case, the definition only lists road conditions, turns or the proverbial freeway stops and a car plows into the car in front of them.
BTW, not sure where blood alcohol level might be on this table. My guess is that it is a factor in all categories. Again, absolute speed, in isolation, isn't a root cause.
People have been killed by someone driving the posted speed limit while intoxicated.
The point isn't to dismiss speed as a contributor but rather to make an attempt to use facts rather than incorrectly focusing on speed as a the most important contributor or a root cause.
Speed is, by far, not the most serious issue on the road. This is empirically evident to almost anyone with reasonable driving experience and the ability to think critically. If that fails, watch a few of these videos:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=idiots+driving+...
From my perspective, driver training and horribly bad/lowest-common-denominator licensing requirements are a huge part of the root cause.
For those outside the US who might not be familiar with this, here's the basics:
In California a 16 year old kid can drive after completing six hours of training with a licensed instructor plus six months and at least fifty hours of practice with any licensed adult (older brother, grandpa, parent, the neighbor, anyone). After this they can take a very simple driving test and obtain a license.
What do I mean by "very simple"?
It does not include any accident avoidance or car control tests at all. Something as simple as driving towards a cone and quickly changing lanes when commanded tells you a lot about the degree of control someone might have. Hard braking and hard acceleration. Driving figure-8's around a set of cones. Driving figure-8's in reverse. Braking and lane changing on wet pavement. Etc.
Not one of these skill tests is included at all. And yet, some of these are absolutely critical for accident avoidance. My family and I almost had a horrific accident on the highway about a year ago. A pickup truck engaged in highway maintenance suddenly drove into the fast lane --where I was driving-- from the construction zone to the left (between the north and south-bound lanes). Where it not for my performance driving training and vehicle control skills this would have been a horrific t-bone accident with our SUV plowing into a pickup truck entering the highway at almost a 90 degree angle and zero speed. An SUV hitting a wall at full speed. Thanks to may awareness, constant strategic positioning in traffic and ability to execute a rapid lane change at speed while maintaining control this became a "holy shit! what was that idiot thinking!" event rather than a trip to the hospital.
As a side note, that's when my wife made the most interesting comment: Now I understand why you insist on taking the kids to race driving school at the track.
This license, after 50 house of substandard training, allows a 16 year old to get on the road, by themselves, driving anything from a 76 HP Mitsubishi Mirage to a 500 HP 200 MPH Corvette and even a 1000+ HP monster if mommy and daddy can afford it.
What could go wrong? Useless training and a 500 HP monster? Heck, even a 150 HP car is dangerous given that starting point. Regulating speed isn't going to do a damn thing to mitigate what could (and usually does) happen with such inadequate training and licensing thresholds. Seriously, why do we allow any driver to get into a 500 HP monster without requiring serious training? The cars are not cheap, which means that requiring they spend $3000 in training and certification should not be an issue.
In terms of skills, licensed instructors are pretty bad. They are the result of the same substandard training. What they teach does not help make better drivers. It's just enough to pass the test, and nothing more.
I can get into how I teach kids to drive during those 50 hours after the certified instructor. It's a bit long, so I'll leave it for a follow-up comment if anyone is interested.