288
this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2026
288 points (98.0% liked)
Fuck Cars
15890 readers
581 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
To be fair, there are problems with speed cameras that we've seen in the US, so probably similar problems exist in Canada. For example, they're often outsourced to private companies, and there are privacy and accuracy concerns. Local governments with access to speed cameras can make a lot of money from speed traps, and so they have a financial incentive to make the road harder to drive on, when they should be making roads easier to drive on. People sometimes see speed cameras and slam their brakes, which can cause all sorts of problems.
Usually, the better way to control speed is to design your roads to naturally be a certain speed. Some ways you can do this is by controlling the width of the lanes, the length of the lines in the lane dividers, and the curve of the road.
Speed cameras also unfairly penalize gig workers who are driving all day and driving on unfamiliar streets all the time. The fines imposed for speeding are flat, not based on income, so they disproportionately affect lower income people of all sorts.
OH WELL.
This is a life-saving intervention that is empirically proven to save lives. The lives of pedestrians are more important than the income of gig workers. Pedestrians are an even more disadvantaged and vulnerable class than gig drivers.
It's a tiny problem, we can accept that it is a bit regressive and adjust taxes elsewhere to compensate. For this, I should die? Sort it out, bud.
What the actual fuck. Lower income people can't read a speedometer? This is such a Lemmy man bun and Birkenstock comment.
If the punishment is a static fine it's only illegal for the poor.
The point isn't to punish people, it's to keep people un-killed. If speed cameras don't work on 2% because they are wealthy sociopaths, that's not a reason to abandon the intervention that has been clearly proven to work at the intended purpose of keeping people from getting killed. This is such a bizarre objection. Perhaps it is a reflex earned from decades of looking for how the poor get screwed and that's admirable but it kind of looks like looking for any excuse not to have to slow down.
Do you have evidence that speed cameras with fines are clearly proven to "keep people from getting killed" because I'm pretty sure their primary purpose is revenue generation.
Edit: looking into it, it seems the majority of the available data generally indicates a reduction in collisions and fatalities but apparently the methodology across the various studies has been pretty inconsistent so there's no hard numbers. But apparently they range from no reduction at all to 70 percent from my glancing at the data, apparently how many cameras how far apart and how far from the high traffic incident area are the main determining factors in reducing accidents. I may have overlooked it but I didn't actually see anywhere that shows the speed reduction after camera introduction though.
What are you even doing in this community? Go watch Not Just Bikes for a few hours before you post here again.
When speed cameras were first introduced they led to an uptick in accidents because people would brake suddenly when they saw the camera and get rear ended. This still happens but thought out implementation seems to result in a net reduction in collisions but more data is needed. All this is to say the primary purpose of speed cameras is still revenue generation.
It’s not the speedometer that you need to watch for, it’s the speed limit signs by the street. Many of them are blocked by trees or around corners, and they change the speed limit suddenly and without warning.
This is what it means to be a speed trap. Locals know about it because they live there. Gig workers do not.