General Road and Highway Discussion

[SammyOES2]

Demerit points are a challenge with photo radar -- same as red-light cameras -- as the driver cannot be reliably identified (sometimes yes, sometimes no) so the fines are levied against the owner of the car.

One camera may not be expensive once the infrastructure is in place, but blanketing a neighbourhood (say, Mount Hope, for example) would be fairly costly.

For the first part, that's fine with me.  It's not ideal, but it has the desired effect in the end.  Don't let bad drivers drive your car.

As for the second part, I don't think you can have it both ways.  What's the break even point on one of these cameras?  I found one thing saying a red light camera costs $100,000.  Let's assume the photo radar costs are the same.  Let's give it a life of 5 years.  And say half the tickets it generates goes towards other costs (processing, judicial system, maintenance, etc.).  That means we'd need to generate ~$100 in tickets/day.  If you can't do that, you don't have a speeding problem.

And like you said, there are really simple tricks to make this even cheaper to implement.  Build a bunch of places to put the camera but only actually have a camera in a small number of them that changes somewhat-regularly.  Blammo, better coverage for not much extra money.

And on top of all of this, it still seems a lot cheaper and more efficient than the other measures we use to calm traffic.


Edit: And let's not kid ourselves.  The reason we don't have photo radar has nothing to do with cost/implementation details.