Roads/Bridges projects/issues

[phil235]

Originally Posted by caveat.doctor

It's actually fairly simple policy - it sets up a direct consistent relationship between speeding and getting fined. Other policies like requiring a live enforcer to catch a speeder complicates the situation, by adding irregularity and inconsistency, chance, discretion, judgment, possibility of bias, etc.

The evidence of effectiveness is well established - here's the bottom line from a US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention review, for example:



In Ontario, the use of speed cameras requires not only warning signs around the cameras, but signs warning they are "coming soon" for at least 90 days before they are implemented. So there really is no excuse about not knowing that one would get fined there if speeding. (Of course, getting a fine for speeding anywhere should never be a surprise, really.)



We want people to follow the speed limit* everywhere of course. In Ottawa the cameras are specifically "in certain community safety zones near schools where speeding is a risk to our most vulnerable road users, our children". i.e., where it's believed that additional, reliable, consistent enforcement is needed to achieve that.

* My beef with equating the speed limit with "safety" is that roads are often designed to safely handle driving at speeds much higher than the posted speed limit. On the one hand this makes sense because, well, we know people speed, so there should be a "buffer" between the posted limit and actual unsafe speeds.

On the other hand, if the road is designed to be safe at higher speeds - e.g. it's too wide, too regular, too monotonous etc. and induces speeding, rather than being narrow, irregular and varied to induce slowing down - then it's actually encouraging violation of the speed limit. Which is a form of entrapment, I think.

Ultimately, bottom line, speed limits are clearly posted, easy enough to just follow them. But there should be more attention to using design to achieve safety than just regulation and enforcement. The City knows all this, of course; hopefully that fine revenue will go towards making these sorts of actual fixes.

No doubt road design is the proper approach. It’s just a very long and expensive process to get there, and speed cameras are a good interim solution which have a pretty well established track record in improving safety. Given that they are only in community safety zones that are well-marked, I don’t really see the need for specific camera signage.