03-20-2017, 09:29 AM
(03-20-2017, 09:21 AM)SammyOES2 Wrote: For example, I don't really understood the opposition to photo radar - ESPECIALLY in pedestrian heavy areas, school zones, and other low speed areas. It seems like that would be pretty effective in controller drivers (or giving us enough information to remove the bad drivers from the road) w/o a lot of the downsides of things like speed bumps / super narrow roads / etc.
Photo radar (as previously implemented here) doesn't really do much more than a conventional police speed trap, other than generate more revenue: it's in one spot on the side of the highway, and catches people speeding in that spot.
Now, if we're talking about speed cameras (as implemented in many countries in Europe), it's a different thing. There will be camera boxes liberally scattered over the larger highways, and drivers don't know which ones are active so they tend to drive slow for all of them. It provides much more of a slowing down effect than the former method, but it does have an infrastructure cost of installing camera boxes.
The camera boxes could be implemented in cities (such as school zones, as you suggest), but cost is likely prohibitive to have them in all the city neighbourhoods. And I don't know how well they cope with urban traffic in dense downtown areas.
My fearless prediction is that speeding will start to become much less of an issue in the 2020s with the advent of autonomous vehicles.