Washington State Patrol to Find Speeding Hot Spots Using Harvested Phone Data
roadandtrack.com
roadandtrack.com
The thing that bugs me more is the obsession with finding and punishing speeders. The average driver is simply responding to their environment, and areas of chronic speeding is symptom of an engineering mistake, not a crime spree.
A lot of speed limits are arbitrary and not evidence-based. And the finances of ticketing give State Troopers perverse incentives to pursue regressive policing.
It isn't less problematic. It's as problematic as any type of plugging into these datasets. It's essentially statistical drag netting.
The way they analyze it is: "Here are the zones where people feel comfortable driving faster — so let's go there and write more tickets!"
The right way to analyze it is: "Here are the zones where people feel comfortable driving faster — do those zones have any more than the background rate of accidents, or less? If more, then how do we redesign the road for better safety and so people tend to drive less fast, or if less or same accidents, we should raise the speed limit"