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Traffic cameras voted down From Instapundit, the excellent news that traffic cameras have been voted down in Virginia, New Hampshire, and Indiana.
A number of jurisdictions still have such cameras in place (or at least a place for them has been reserved, legal authority-wise), but fortunately there is a solution.
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Too bad the good folks in Great Britain aren’t allowed to actually vote on such issues. For me, here in Washington state, the best part of each election is voting on the numerous initiatives and referendums on the ballot. Democracy at its purest, and finest.
I just rely on this rather useful, and free addon for TomTom Navigator to tell me where traffic cameras are in the UK – lets you know up to 30 seconds before what mph the camera is set to record at so you can reduce speed accordingly.
David Crawford writes:
“Too bad the good folks in Great Britain aren’t allowed to actually vote on such issues.”
Aside from the fact that we weren’t given a choice over the introduction of speed cameras (almost) nationally, it is often at the local level where the gaping chasms in what our politicians pretend is a democracy are exposed.
Where speed cameras are sited, how they are set and maintained, who runs them and on what basis, are all jealously guarded functions which are almost completely impervious to local political influence.
Mr. Crawford has put his finger on one of the saddest facts of life in the UK – we have precious little control over what is done in our name.
If the problem with red-light cameras is the accidents caused by those who spot them and try to stop, why not just make them hidden? You can make their locations known publicly, but not necessarily at the intersections where they are used. [disclaimer: I work in computer vision, a growing industry that hopes to put some more brains behind the exponentially increasing number of cameras]
If the problem is the speeding, why not push to get speed laws changed?
There are some who would argue that you shouldn’t be punished for taking a risk, as some cars and drivers can clearly handle higher speeds (an maybe a bit of alcohol?) more than others. Do you all agree? What about the people that would choose to avoid risk and drive more slowly, but might be killed by a semi-drink speeder?
I’m trying to avoid a “what about the children?!” argument here. Where should you draw the line?
The list of variables that lead to an accident is so vast ( surface, vehicle characteristics, driver state, visibility, etc) and the speed limits so arbitrary in relation to the topography of any section of road (60 round a blind bend, 30 on a wide open space) that speed enforcement is obviously a revenue rather than a safety issue.
Take avay the speed gun and supply the officer with a camcorder instead. Show that a dangerous action is being performed and prosecute for dangerous driving if that is what you are supposed to be cracking down on.
zmollusc,
would you oppose cameras in public spaces that could detect bad driving given local conditions?
Ivan;
The problem with speed cameras is that they target the wrong thing, just as laws limiting speed, dangerous driving laws and drink driving laws. The right target is the motorist who damages persons or property and that motorist should be caught, prosecuted and, if found guilty, given the kind of sentance such a destructive act deserves. The speed he was doing at the time is entirely irrelevant to the fact of having damaged property or persons. It is only relevant to the driver himself and his level of competence as a driver at the time.
I might add that none of this is likely to get past the fact you see yourself as working to increase the abilities of the state to stamp on it’s subjects.
Actually, the biggest safety hazard of red light cameras is the local jurisdictions that deliberately mess with the traffic-light timings after the cameras are installed. They do this to purposefully cause more people to run the red light (usually by shortening yellow light times), so the cameras can ticket them. These local governments view the cameras as a revenue collection device (effectively an extorsion machine), rather than a safety device. They will gladly sacrifice safety to enhance revenue-collection if that’s what it takes to get more money, and qute a number of local govenments have been caught doing this.
The one advantage that speeding laws and cameras have over arbitrary “unsafe driving” rules is their lack of arbitrariness. Certainly that is an advantage; too much power in the hands of an individual constable is a problem for any libertarian.
However, I believe that they sufficient target the wrong offense (speeding rather than unsafe driving, for example) and lead to strong misuse (such as for revenue), and this overwhelms their advantages.
“The speed he was doing at the time is entirely irrelevant to the fact of having damaged property or persons. It is only relevant to the driver himself and his level of competence as a driver at the time.”
This doesn’t make any sense at all. How can speeding or running red lights be irrelevant to accidents? The fact is that drivers who drive at very high speeds or run red lights are more likely to get into accidents. Whether they are driving extremely fast to arrive in time for a concert or to go to hospital is immaterial to the fact that the high speed and red light running are major factors in any given traffic accident.
I for one support this camera and I think it’s a shame that they are being removed.
I for one support this camera and I think it’s a shame that they are being removed.
From what I can tell, they’re being removed because they’ve increased the number of accidents.
I was actually in favor of the idea of red-light cameras. Red-light running is a very dangerous thing and a camera, in theory, should be able to relatively effectively catch someone in the act.
Then I started reading the statistics. They just don’t work. I don’t know or care why they don’t work. The fact is that jurisdictions with red-light cameras are no safer and often more dangerous than those without.
In addition, there are other ways to effectively reduce red-light accidents without cameras, such as additional overlap on the red lights. I would like to be able to hold local jurisdictions accountable for any increase in accidents due to red-light cameras. Unfortunately, there is no theory of negligence in local government…
I’m opposed to speed cameras because speeding is not a cause of accidents, per se. The cause of accidents is driving at a different speed then the average or driving faster than the conditions call for. A camera won’t spot this. I would be more willing to accept cameras that ticketed people speeding through school zones, but I’m sure that would be abused somehow.
Here’s a thought: if a road were privatised and turned into a toll road, as libertarians like David Friedman advocate, then some owners of such roads might install cameras to reassure their customers that drivers kept to speed limits. Other private road owners, meanwhile, might allow folk to drive their Ferraris, Porsches and Minis as fast as they wanted. I could live with that. The problem is not the traffic rules, but rather assuming that we know what the ideal system is. Let it evolve piecemeal.
I think there was an experiment in Holland not long ago involving removal of lots of traffic signals. Result: people became so wary of driving that the number of accidents fell. Not sure this approach works everywhere, mind you.
Anyone who has had the dubious pleasure of driving along the promenade in Brighton recently will have seen the extent to which local authorities are now assailing motorists – traffic camera posted every few hundred yards with the intention of catching anyone crossing the 30mph threshold.
It comes as no surprise then to read in The Standard (a paper I have never paid much attention to until that foul ponddweller Livingstone started to attack it) of plans by Thames Valley
ImbecilesPolice to use motorists in some weird form of offset point scoring – presumably to excuse their lamentable incompetence as officers – note their excuse in that link that they blame their failings on ‘a largely inexperienced force’.They have also announced today a camera system which would totally defeat my earlier comment, in that it would use a time lapse over several hundred yards of road. Two cameras would compare the speed you covered the intervening distance at and would promptly issue a speeding ticket, thus rendering camera-spotting software obsolete.
Ivan asks ‘would you oppose cameras in public spaces that could detect bad driving given local conditions?’ I would contend that such a camera would be very difficult to design. The ‘bad driving’ detector would have to recognise so many parameters. For instance, on an otherwise straight open section it would have to differentiate between a car doing 50, a car doing 50 with the driver looking in the passenger footwell for his map, a car doing 50 with the driver wearing his reading glasses instead of his driving glasses, a car doing 50 with a soft tyre……………
The speed limits, if we are going to have them and enforce them (think of the children!) should at least vary as the conditions vary, 30mph outside a school WHEN THERE ARE CHILDREN AROUND is fine, 30mph outside a school at 2am or at weekends is not.
Justine
Here it is more simply put. If a car is travelling at 100 mph over a distance of 10 miles and does not damage any property or persons then no police action is necessary. If another driver travels at 20 mph over a distance of 2 miles and kills a child then he should have the full force of the law brought down upon him. The fact he was only doing 20 mph is entirely irrelevant just as the speed of the faster driver is irrelevant. The only thing that should bring about a police action is damage to property or persons.
I’m not sure if the conditions to detect bad driving are that hard to perceive. Note that “bad driving” here means driving that will cause an accident with > N probability.
A learning algorithm could adapt to “safe” driving patterns by looking at the paths cars took, logging the context (as many variables as you like: make, model, color, weather, traffic, time), and most importantly having access to police reports from actual accidents.
This could eventually serve as a learning tool, where new drivers who are more likely to commit accidents are notified (not necessarily ticketed) for bad but not necessarily dangerous driving, like breaking convention and passing on the right.
Of course, the big problem is that I’m thinking about this as a scientist. Yes the problem can be solved and optimized, but that doesn’t mean the state would do it right and not abuse it.
Note that I left some technical details out, but you can learn all you want about machine learning from a site like this one.
In fact, there are many solutions
Rich
Bernie writes:
So, attempted murder (I try to shoot someone but I miss) is not a cause for a police action?
Your argument is embarassingly poor and if you’re older than 12 you should be ashamed of stating it publically. Everyone who uses the roads should be entitled to use them relatively safely. Speed cameras are a bad idea because they have no discretion, are easy to avoid, and because they are far too often used primarily to collect revenue in coordination with ‘tricks’ such as lowering the speed limit arbitrarily and installing a camera.
Saying that ‘you can drive like as much of a madman as you want and there should be no action taken as long as you don’t crash’ is ridiculous from any standpoint, including a libertarian standpoint becuase you are unnecessarily restricting the freedoms of others (to use a shared resource) by making the use of that resource dangerous (danger being the key point) to the point where it would disincline people to use it.
If you still believe your viewpoint has some validity, post your address and we can arrange to have landmines laid outside your property – presumably you wouldn’t object as we’re not ‘actually blowing your legs off’ we’re just ‘making it highly likely you’ll get your legs blown off.’
If a car is travelling at 100 mph over a distance of 10 miles and does not damage any property or persons then no police action is necessary. If another driver travels at 20 mph over a distance of 2 miles and kills a child then he should have the full force of the law brought down upon him.
We can call this nonsensical consequentialism. Suppose the first person is a maniac who drives the wrong way up a motorway and is lucky enough to dodge everyone else coming in the opposite direction, despite placing them all in extreme and unnecessary danger. Suppose the second (bearing in mind Bernie’s happiness with drunk driving) is sober, competent and alert, yet hits a child that runs out suddenly from the side of the road.
Most people would agree that there is something more blameworthy about the first driver than the second. And there are no lessons for future conduct when consequences are not forseeable. So punishment in the second case has no social or moral purpose,
The problem is not cameras but the rationality of speed limits. I have no problem with enforcing a limit by camera if the limit is reasonable. What worries me is (an immediate example of a common problem) that the arbitrary speed limit rules have undergone in the hands of safety campaigners and other lobbyists a sort of moral reification. In their view the speed limits are identified with safety and safety with virtue, so the breach of the speed limit itself becomes a wrong to be punished with utmost severity, and limits of toleration may only be reviewed downwards.
Guy hits on exactly the right point, and I’ll repeat my question:
If the problem is the speeding, why not push to get speed laws changed?
But using an example of driving on the wrong side of the road is a bit unfair. Road conventions are different than limits for safety.
The problem with speed limits is that they no longer exist for reasons of safety. They exist to raise revenue for the state or to otherwise socially engineer the populace.
Many speed limits are set below a level that would protect a reasonable level of safety, and are zealously enforced by the police in jurisdictions that have high levels of violent crime. This is consistent with revenue generation, not public safety.
Justifications for speed cameras based on public safety will have to wait on (a) speed limits based on public safety and (b) evidence that accident rates/severity are actually decreased by speed cameras.
In case anyone’s interested, I wrote a piece on speed cameras for Transport Blog some time ago.
Click here (Link) to read it.
To all those who had the audacity to criticise my pontifications on speeding laws:-)
I said that if a driver killed a child not if a child killed himself by darting out in front of a car. I would expect a court to take into account the circumstances of the death and that would include how the driver was driving and whether other road users would be likely to have seen him.
The evidence of the streets in Holland where all traffic signs have been removed making for safer areas makes a lot of sense to me and I’m extending the idea to include any roads in any conditions and laws too. I think the Highway Code is something that would gain a lot more respect in such conditions rather than being thrown out entirely. Most of the code isn’t law, at least it wasn’t the last time I looked.
In much the same way I think we would have a politer and more civilised society without gun laws and other PC laws. I would also not expect poor people to die of starvation if the welfare state was dismantled.
In a way isn’t the whole “control every aspect of the road” via law/signs/cameras etc… at its base, representative of the heart of the problem the nanny state creates? People drive around assuming that with all the rules put into place to, allegedly, “make it safer”, they basically adopt a habit of not paying attention to what’s going on around them, assuming everyone else is following them (the rules)… as opposed to a system where people need to take responsibility for themselves and actively make the effort to see what’s going on around them, and constantly assess the situation.
Ok, poorly written… but you get the idea.
Duncan
Actually I think that was very well written. It is the same point I was trying to make.
Ivan: “Road conventions are different than limits for safety.”
Not that different. Conventions have some other functions, but they are primarily, and the primary, road-safety device. Just like the parallel seaborne and airborne rules.
One of the reasons Northern Europe–and Britain in particular has the safest roads in the world (and did so before the last decade’s obsessive pursuit of speed limit “safety”–is because we have highly developed conventions and we largely stick to them.