Traffic Cameras Suck - or do they?

God, they tilt me so much.

Y’all might be discussing two different things. The cameras in USA#1 I think are exclusively red light cameras, not speeding cameras.

Red light cameras suck. They suck for drivers, and they suck for the municipalities that put them in… The camera and fine companies sell the municipalities on a bunch of money that they’ll get by installing the cameras, but it’s always way less, or none, when it’s all said and done.

I appreciate you clarifying, yeah, I was thinking about the red light cameras.

Oh yeah. I got hit with a speeding camera in Canada in a rental car. That sucked.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2018&hl=en&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&cites=4463116413137853252&scipsc=&authuser=1#d=gs_qabs&u=%23p%3DZL5ABjFsi4UJ

Slightly tangential, but this article was super interesting.


So you dont have speed cameras in the US? Why?

Edit. I see you have them in some places, but man… 13 states have laws banning them?

Y’all are weird.

Speed cameras are a different story, but red light cameras that are uber sensitive down to thousandths of a second cause people who get stuck in a close decision to stop or go through to speed up when they decide to go through. Once you get one ticket because the ass end of your car failed to clear an intersection by like 0.003 seconds, you speed up at yellow lights when you aren’t stopping.

I’m guessing the average speed limits in Australia are higher than in the US. Lots of speed limits are set up lower than any reasonable person would drive on the given road, and then everyone speeds, and then the cops get to decide who to harass. If they made everyone drive the actual speed limit or get an automated ticket, they’d have to increase the speed limits significantly. If they did that, they’d have to admit why they are arbitrarily low in the first place.

It’s kind of adorable the way foreigners can never seem to grasp that the US truly is a fundamentally broken society on every possible level.

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DC has quite a few speed cameras. One is particularly dastardly. It’s in an underpass that is fairly steep so if like a normal person you just allow your car to speed up on the downslope and then slow down when you hit the upslope, you’re going to get ticketed. It does nothing for safety, but is the most profitable speeding camera in DC. I got a ticket there my first week in DC of course.

There is also another pretty controversial one that is in a “work zone” where there is almost never any actual work being done.

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On red light cameras

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Thanks. Haven’t seen a speeding camera in my travels.

Oh. I get that for sure.

I also think theres a bit of confirmation bias going on itt.

The evidence seems pretty clear. Yet the consensus here is very different.

I wonder how much of this is “I’m a driver and I’m safe and I dont like traffic cameras” leading to bias to accept and recall evidence that they dont work.

Add in the dysfunctional political environment and the influence of driver and car lobbying groups and you are also probably being fed a bunch of poor info as well.

I.e. your are all smokers who enjoy smoking and disbelieve the science circa 1960.

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yep cars in general have gotten a lot safer over the past decades.

That’s a no from me, dawg.

Cameras aren’t gonna shoot you at a traffic stop because they “feared for their life” for some idiotic reason.

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What were you doing in a rental car? I thought the suzzermobile went with you everywhere.

Are they? Our average suburban speed limit is 60kmh (38mph), fastest highway in my state at least is 110km (69mph). I support most speed cameras but there are some here that are just there for revenue raising and serve no safety purpose. Fuck those ones. I’ve got hit twice by one set up on a highway that drops from 50mph to 27mph arbitrarily for 300m then returns to 50 lol

Edit: glad to have you back cuse

Long drive to Banff for a photo trip vacation.

I got caught in the most BS speed trap ever on Highway 93 in Nevada. You have to slow down to 25 mph to go through the town. Then on a straightaway coming out of town you can see signs that say 35, 45 and 55 like 100’ yards apart from each other if that. Naturally the mind sees 55 and starts speeding up.

I got busted for 49 in a 35 or something - because I was in the tiny stretch where it was 35 mph between the two signs. Literally leaving town on a straightaway where you could throw a rock and hit the 55 mph sign.

Cop tried to act like he was giving me a break by knocking the speed down some. FU asshole.

State highways in Nevada are one giant speed trap. Especially 50 - the “loneliest highway in the world”, which isn’t even that lonely.

Maybe they’re not that different. Suburban neighborhoods are 15-25 mph, suburban roads between neighborhoods are 25-45mph mostly.

Maybe I’m just a reckless idiot but I don’t think I’ve ever been on a road with a 30-45mph speed limit that I didn’t think would be just as safe 10mph higher, and on which I think most people would be furious at having to drive the actual limit.

Generally I’d say the same for most 25mph streets that aren’t in cities or inside suburban neighborhoods.

Our highways range from 55mph to 85mph, but the high end is mostly in sparsely populated areas between the coasts.

There’s a town near my parents that’s an infamous speed trap and they do the same thing. You’re never going to see that formation of signs anywhere but a speed trap, so anyone who ever sees this should drive slowly.

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