Speed Cameras and the City
project.wnyc.org
project.wnyc.org
35 is way too fast for city driving, so even if there are concerns that this is just a money grab (only for the city; no private companies get a percentage of the tickets), it's still worth doing.
If all cars were going 25mph at all times, there would be a lot less people dying in traffic. Cycling would also be a lot more pleasant.
Then we get into the argument of what constitutes city driving and that gets fun. What's a city. Is a road connecting two roads a city road? What if it has side-walks or a bike lane? What about the small town that has a bike lane, too?
We'd have to see a case-by-case basis of the speed limit in a given location to give an appropriate speed limit for an area.
.. I wrote that, but now I'm thinking that if we had a reasonable, almost static speed limit for driving inside a city, then that would be one less thing the driver has to think about while driving in the city, so that would be good. Some sort of testing would be needed to decide on an appropriate speed, but I imagine somewhere between 25 and 35 would prove to be a good speed.
Doesn't matter. Just have a speed limit and make people obey it, and then let the traffic engineers run simulations and adjust those limits to maximize flow and minimize accident rates. But when people have a habitual disregard of speed limits[0], determining the optimal value of those limits is nigh impossible.
[0] - I don't know what's the driving culture in the US, but in Poland - where I live - most drivers show total disregard for speed limits and driving rules. They think they're the smartest, and that no accident can happen to them.
Wasn't there a discussion about how it's hard to raise a speed limit in an area? If the safe / max flow speed turns out to be higher than it currently is, I suspect it would be hard to get it raised. I am in great support of this idea, though..
I'd also like more aggressive variable speed limits instead of "60 all the time, between bone-dry land and torrential rain"
Of course, that excludes freak accidents -- you could fall onto a spike or something. But freak accidents are possible whether the car is going 5mph or 15.
Who says? You?
What's the percentage of drivers violating the speed limit? Maybe that limit IS too low.
A speed limit is supposed to be set such that 85-90% of the drivers obey it naturally.
While the taxis are a separate kettle of fish, the existence of off-hours speeding by local traffic f'n tells me that your own f'n neighbors do not agree with you. I suggest you f'n take it up with them.
In spite of what you think, speed cameras will only be a temporary solution if people do not think the speed limit is fair. This happened in California with red light cameras. Once enough people knew someone who got busted and thought it was unfair, there was enough political will to scrap them altogether even though there really were intersections that desperately needed them.
This also happened in Pittsburgh with parking boots. Once the city got the biggest scofflaws, they didn't have the usage they expected. So, they started using them for even first time offenders. Well, people didn't find that very fair, so cottage businesses to acetylene torch the boot off sprung up and cost the city a lot since they now had to buy a new boot every time one got torched. Very quickly, the city figured out that over-use of that enforcement tool cost more than it helped.
Enforcement does not create compliance. Enforcement is simply an adjunct to something that most people are complying with already.
If you want people to slow down, you have to engineer the road so that they want to slow down. Speed humps, roundabouts, curb extensions, etc. are all tools to make that work.
Of course, most of the time, there is nothing out of the ordinary happening, and so people happily drive 45 in residential zones. The one time something out of the ordinary happens, you have dead pedestrians. Hundreds of them a year in NYC alone.
Everything has a cost, and it's very easy to blow that off if you don't have to pay it.
And, before you suggest that no one would ever put up a fence like that, California actually does occasionally. Generally where pedestrians try to cross a 12-freakin'-lane-superhighway on foot.
New York City is nothing like California.
Exactly. There is a cost, and you're not willing to pay it. Fair enough.
However, that also holds for speed limits. There are costs. In this instance the costs probably appear as clogged courts. If you make traffic regulations too stringent or too punitive, everybody starts to fight them in court.
If it's about public safety, you WANT people to know that the cameras are there.
Ideally, for public safety, you'd want people to always think "there might a camera here".
How could enforcing the law be a kickback scheme? Don't want a ticket? Don't speed!
As a pedestrian I would personally prefer that drivers always feel they are in danger of getting a ticket, so drivers always have an incentive to follow the law.
It could lead to, for instance, inappropriately low speed limits and an inordinate amount of police work on traffic violations instead of things that are more dangerous but make less money.
> inappropriately low speed limits
It's hard to imagine speed limits too low for a pedestrian intensive area like lower Manhattan. According to this fact sheet [1], "In the City of London, the rate of crash-related deaths and serious injuries within 20-mph residential zones dropped by 42 percent." ... probably worth it in an area where pedestrians greatly outnumber drivers.
> inordinate amount of police work on traffic violations instead of things that are more dangerous
I'm not sure there's anything in the city right now more dangerous to the average citizen than unsafe driving, given that there are on average 4,250 permanently-debilitating injuries from traffic injuries due to traffic injuries each year in the city. [1]
If I'm reading this correctly, homicide still kills more people than traffic accidents. So while the injury rate may be higher for traffic, death rate still seems to be biased toward homicide.
As for how to make the traffic better, your source indicates 1/4 of fatalities are from drivers failing to yield right of way. One idea is that if intersections in cities had turn arrows and different parts of the cycle for turning cars and pedestrians, that could reduce that significantly. Doing an analysis of why people get hit even though they're in the crosswalk or whatever might be informative here rather than just going straight for speed limit or installing airbags on the fronts of cars.
Of course, I think the real solution is not better traffic laws, but self-driving cars. People are fundamentally poorly suited to driving cars and only a machine can do a consistent job without getting bored or impatient. Once we have a decent number of self driving cars, any ways to improve pedestrian safety will probably look totally different.
It might save a lot of lives to focus less on new traffic laws and more on making autonomous cars a reality (the legal side of that seems to be progressing very slowly).
Seriously, the more drivers I know, the more I want linear speed tracking and ALPRs to be deployed everywhere, on every single damn road.
* always use blinker when turning / change lanes cameras
* turn your lights on:
* 30 minutes from dusk / dawn
* when it's raining
cameras
* bikers without safety lights cameras
* runners without reflective gear yet running in the
road at night cameras
* hand-held cellphone while driving and not stopped
cameras
* tailgating cameras
The reality is: a runner hits someone, two people are annoyed. A car hits someone, one person is dead. Cyclists are somewhere in the middle.
That said, most of the things I was suggesting had more to do with highway situations, where I imagine most of the speed cameras would be situated. I was mainly ranting about things that I see almost every single time that I go driving, if not every single time I go driving, that erks me as a safety hazard that seems more dangerous than speeding (where speeding is defined as above the posted limit, but within a modest delta of other adjacent cars on the highway)
[1, random thought footnote] Unless we had some sort of ironic situation where since cars are going slower, pedestrians become more presumptuous about their powers and the car's stopping abilities / driver's attentiveness and it'd result in more accidents. Who knows
Some of these roads are called highways ("The West Side Highway" is a surface street), some feel like highways (Queens Boulevard) but they differ from highways in that people cross them to get to school.
For highways, drive 90, I don't care.
Then you need to set sane limits. A speed limit that 80+% of the people violate isn't a sane limit.
Or, you need to reengineer the road so that you basically can't speed. However, you have to accept that you are going to lose a lot of traffic and, with that, a lot of business.
Creating a 6 lane wide street and then slapping a 20 mph limit on it doesn't make sense.
And then you still need to force drivers to obey, because as far as I know, most of them are not able to comprehend that they're not the smartest people around. Just because a limit doesn't make sense to you, desn't mean it's not right and optimal in the overall context of traffic flow in the city.
EDIT: Another thing. Have you ever seen a driver maintaining safe distance? Me neither. It's impossible, because even if you try, you quickly get overtaken by an asshole who knows better. And then we have accidents like the one near me two days ago, when a girl started braking because there was a cat on the road, and she got a whole bunch of people behind her to rear-end one another...
> You can't have sane limits because people don't give a damn about them out of habit
Look, there is science behind this--people drive the speed they feel is safe--they basically don't listen to speed signs. If you want them to drive slower, you have to engineer the road so that they don't feel safe at 45 but do at 35.
> Another thing. Have you ever seen a driver maintaining safe distance? Me neither.
In San Diego? Never. In Pittsburgh? All the time. Guess which one gets frequent enough bad weather to clean the idiots that don't leave following distance off the road?
I've heard that idea before somewhere, and I quite like it. Making the environment seem unsafe on purpose so that people adjust their behaviour. I'm interested if anyone tried that on larger scale somewhere, and what were the results.
A poor-middle class guy gets a ticket, and it can affect their ability to pay rent.
A rich guy get's a ticket and he tells his wife over dinner.
How about tying your first ticket(reasonable mistake--like a California stop, etc.) to income, but only every 5 years. If poor person get's another ticket in five years all fees go back to normal levels?
There would be upper limits on ticket price, so millionaires wouldn't be gouged too much. I think they tried this in Switzerland, but the law didn't have upper limits for the wealthy? Some guy got a $100,000 ticket--which is crazy!
A $500 ticket can really cause pain for students and the poor? I have thought about this since I was sixteen?
When I lived in Boulder, we had a 3-4 month period in the winter where water usage was the "base usage" for the rest of the year and if you went over that, i.e. in the summer, you got nailed a higher rate for water consumption. So it was a got scaled system, whether you were a single person or a family, you were paying an affordable base rate always and including in the summer, but if you watered your lawn, you paid a much higher rate for the overage above base.
So what you'd need to avoid having to invent a new layer of bureaucracy to NYC is something like that. "Zones" based on your NYC income tax for example (yes NYC has city income tax) to base your traffic fines on. So, it'd be a course granularity, not exactly fair within each zone, but overall it'd make everyone "wince" and change their stupid behavior that risks others' lives unfairly. The speeding thing gets my goat, but running red lights is like - you should lose all your registered cars, your license, and get massively fined. You run red lights you should stop driving. Idiots.
http://dmv.ny.gov/tickets/about-nys-driver-point-system
Though I expect the speed cameras are not actually giving out points. They don't for the red light cameras. You need a "real" ticket from a cop to get points for that.
Also, depending on the part of the state if you hire an attorney, then there is a good chance you'll get any points reduced. You might even get a parking violation instead and just pay a fine. In NYC, being able to plead and get a reduced point sentence is less likely than in other jurisdictions.
Correct! At least where I live, since points are tied to your license and the cameras can't accurately identify who is actually _driving_, this is the result.
The ticket is delivered to the owner of the vehicle, but they can't prove it was you driving the car at that time so there is no point penalty.
[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_system_%28driving%29#Nort...
Working class people in NYC can't afford cars whether they violate the law and pay fines or not. I don't know how it works in places that require everyone to own a car because there are no alternatives, but NYC has good walking and transit.
Vehicle crashes near cameras declined 3.9%
Crashes with injuries near cameras declined 13.4%
Another interesting piece:
Referring to 'The Busy Crossing', "This is the kind of location one might expect for a speed camera. They target busy crossings near some of the city's most dangerous boulevards. These cameras are more common than the "speed traps" but they issue far fewer tickets."
I imagine knowing that there is a speed camera near a given light reduces the amount of people willing to test that. When it comes to traffic lights and busy crossings, I think this is a good thing; and not having very many tickets there should by no means be indicative of the systems failing. In fact, I would argue they might be working. You'd have to do a blind test of some sort with unmarked cameras (that don't give out tickets either) at other locations; but ... that's most likely illegal. (IANAL)
And then regarding this:
"Almost half of the city's speed cameras are mobile — mounted on NYPD vehicles, they watch different spots for a day or two. Officials won't say how those spots are picked, though school principals and community groups can make requests. The mobile cameras each issue just a few tickets a day; as a group they issue only 11.5% of all tickets."
That's to be expected. It's a camera mounted to a police vehicle. People tend to act more civil on the road and more accurate to the rules when there's a police officer around.
Personally, I'd love to find out the statistics around red-light cameras, as well. I imagine they might be even more useful in quelling negative activity (though they probably won't bring in as much money as speeding cameras)
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/watchdog/redlight/ct-red-...
Veritasium explains it better than me. Please watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tSqSMOyNFE
http://www.streetsblog.org/2015/02/25/nyc-speed-cameras-are-...
Why do bars have parking lots? Why doesn't first-offense drunk driving destroy your life like drug possession? Why does it remain socially acceptable to text and drive? Why do photos clearly taken while driving on the freeway gather tens of thousands of upvotes on Reddit and not criminal prosecution?
> If you are going for full enforcement of traffic laws, distraction/intoxication would seem many times more important than speed.
Can't provide a citation right now, but I recall that apparently most accidents are caused by distraction and/or speeding, often during the day, and not by drunk-driving.
> Why do bars have parking lots?
Because it's apparently not banned, and even if it was, someone would stand to make money by providing said lot next to a bar.
> Why doesn't first-offense drunk driving destroy your life like drug possession?
I don't know, but I very much feel this should be reversed.
> Why does it remain socially acceptable to text and drive?
People don't expect to get in an accident + well, no offense, but most of the drivers I know behave like entitled assholes when it comes to driving-related things. "Speed limits are stupid, and no accident could ever happen to me.".
> Why do photos clearly taken while driving on the freeway gather tens of thousands of upvotes on Reddit and not criminal prosecution?
I guess it has to do with the fact that it's hard to take a picture posted on the Internet and turn it into a lawsuit.
And to clarify - you're right asking those questions. IMO traffic laws should be enforced much, much more decisively.
There are better ways to improve safety - we've already come a long way.
Fortunately, it seems that the whole discussion will soon become moot thanks to self-driving cars.
>Because it's apparently not banned, and even if it was, someone would stand to make money by providing said lot next to a bar.
Not only isn't it banned, it's required. American cities require enough parking for all commercial uses to match the absolute largest amount of car drivers that might want to visit simultaneously on the busiest day of the year if parking is assumed to be absolutely free. [0] The Institute for Transportation Engineers publishes a manual of uses with maximum imaginable parking 'generation' and most cities follow it closely.
Since parking is a pure private good, it's an obvious thing to leave to free markets to decide how much to provide, but the Soviet mentality of city planners is firm. Of all the bad rules and plans Americans impose on their cities, minimum parking requirements are the single most destructive. Parking socialism is the biggest reason among many why American cities are the ugliest with the worst quality of life among all first world cities.
Bizarrely even bars are required to make driving alone the best way to access their establishments. And that requirement is firm in the law.