Re: OT: Texas Speed Cameras

Dnia 2008-02-18 Tom Anderson napisał(a):
On Mon, 18 Feb 2008, Andrzej Rosa wrote:

It would be the same, if there was an industry worth billions based on
taxing people for assault.

I don't see how that's got anything to do with it.

Look, it's really simple. Speeding is illegal. There is a legal punishment
for doing it, and that's a fine. There is a mechanism in place for
detecting those crimes, and enforcing that punishment. No taxes involved.

Sig heil Big Brother.

http://www.speedcameras.org/speed-camera-news-article.php?id=113
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/09/29/nspeed29.xml
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=406769&in_page_id=1770

That's just several links, one after the other form the very first page
spat by google.

From a driver's pressure group and two right-wing newspapers - no, sorry,
one right-wing newspaper, and the Daily Mail! Hardly reliable sources!

Good enough to show, that I'm not the only one highly doubtful about
the whole business.

True. Presumably, you're now going to post some links to creationist
websites as evidence that evolution isn't true? And maybe some links to
gun nut

Two out of three links above are mainstream press. Not some wacko
sites.

and climate change denier sites too?

Now I could easily find some. Ten years ago it wouldn't be so simple.
Make off it what you want, but for me it looks like the climate around
climate change is changing, at least faster than the climate itself. ;-)

Actually your view seems to be shared by a minority.

Citation? The government surveys say a majority of people support speed
cameras.

It's possible, that they are simply wrong.

How about a couple of reports from the government:

http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roadsafety/speedmanagement/nscp/nscp/thenationalsafetycameraprogr4597

Good one! They claim, that 30% less vehicles were breaking the speed
limit at the site (possible, though I imagine that it would be hard to
prove).

Uh? How is it hard to prove? You do a survey of vehicle speeds, you put in
a camera, you do another survey, you compare the results.

That's "hard to prove" part.

[...]
Only about 10% of accidents are associated with excessive speed, out of
which only 30% involves speeding, out of which only unidentified
minority is caused by speed. What a job! It should show something like
0.000001 decrease in the number of accidents!

Well, it shown much more. Miracle, or regression toward the mean?

Or is the 'only 10% of accidents are associated with excessive speed etc'
statistic bull***?

Most are associated with inattention, distraction, wrong judgement and
so on. Speed cameras contribute positively to all of them, and they do
it everywhere, not on the sites where they are installed.

I speak from experience. If you have a traffic officers hiding behind
the bush somewhere in the distance there is no problem, for the most
part. You just tune yourself to the traffic and it will tell you what's
ahead. The problem is with people who think they have seen something
where there was nothing. Their reaction surprises everybody, which is
actually dangerous.

Your call.

I'll take my suggestion.

They control for regression to the mean in the study. It's a small effect.
The 42% reduction in people killed or seriously injured at camera sites is
not.

http://www.safespeed.org.uk/
In December 2005 they [DfT] discovered that neglect of a statistical bias
had exaggerated the main benefit of speed cameras by 400%. The claimed '100
lives per year saved at speed camera sites' is downgraded to 25 lives
saved.

http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roadsafety/research/rsrc/roadsafetyresearchcompendium4724

Of course, you could dismiss those as being whitewashes by a pro-camera
organisation.

DfT themselves seemed to do much better job than I could by actually
admitting to whitewashing data. Mainly the amount of heavy injuries
which supposedly went down, while hospitalization period, overall number
of injuries, number of fatalities and probably something else didn't
show any similar trend.

It's your country. Go check them.

No need, you've done a fine job - fewer people were injured, and none of
the other indicators got worse. What with all the people stamping on their
brakes all the time, that's pretty amazing!

The same number of people were injured (and killed), but fewer were classified
as heavy injuries. That's what DfT admitted to and what is confirmed by
traffic officers. How does it feel now?

No, it doesn't. In the UK, at least, cameras are signed well in advance,
so there's no stamping on the brake.

Like these ones?
http://www.speedcam.co.uk/gatso.htm

...

Is that page a piss-take?

Maybe you'll like this collection better?
http://www.abd.org.uk/pr/269.htm

"All the cameras on this page are solely for raising revenue as I can't
see any other reason for their presence. Most of them are on rural roads
with a low speed limit."

Rural roads with a low speed limit - so the ones where people are most
likely to speed,

Quite probable.

and where the road is most likely to be dangerous at
speed, with poor sight-lines and so on, then?

People don't speed in difficult conditions. Get a car and you'll know
things like that. That's why only 3-4% of accidents involve speeding (but
only a portion of them are caused by speeding, of course).

Anyway, what i said is that the cameras are *signed* well in advance -
there's a sign that tells you there's going to be a camera. That the
camera itself isn't very visible is *completely* irrelevant, since you can
slow down when you see the sign. If you wait to see the camera itself
before you slow down, you're frankly insane.

So you are a nation of insane people? Because majority of drivers paid
their camera tax at least once.

The pictures on that page are mostly shot in such a way that you mostly
can't evaluate the signage - they're taken from too close, past the sign,
or from behind the camera, where you wouldn't be able to see it anyway. In
the second picture, the author blathers on about a speed sign hiding the
camera from one of the lanes, despite the fact that there's a bloody
obvious camera sign on the right of the photo!

Is camera hidden or it isn't? Because you made the law, that it
must be clearly visible, so it either complies with the aforementioned
requirement or it brakes the law. Braking the law is bad, isn't it? ;-)

Anyway, it's hard to argue that cameras on this site are either placed
in wrong spots, or are hidden, or both. And this when you have the law
which makes it clear, that cameras must be visible.

[...]

Anyway, didn't you say Poland had next to no speed cameras? How come you
know so much about the evils of them, eh?

We have traffic wardens hiding in the bushes and earning a second
salary this way. No speed cameras, but the same principle.

Actually last year I left a several meter long front wheel skid mark due
to an attempt to catch me speeding. Clever, but not exactly safe for
anyone.

No, agreed. This is a pretty bad idea.

Oh, you don't know the full story yet. I followed the flow of traffic
riding in a train of cars, exactly at the end of it. Traffic wardens
hid behind the van, and once all the train passed one of them jumped
from behind the van to stop me. I did, breaking hard because he simply
scared me.

You see, he knew that he needed to stop the last one in the train,
because otherwise there would be an accident *for sure*. It was still
possible that he would cause an accident, but less likely if he stopped
me instead of someone in the front. He was human, though, so he could
think and predict what is going to happen when someone brakes hard in
front of a train.

If it works in any positive ways is debatable. ("Speed kills" kind of
argument will not cut it.)

Why not?

It's at best simplistic, at worst simply wrong. You guys have 8000
of speeding cameras in the UK (which cost you literally billions).

Billions for 8000 cameras? So they cost hundreds of thousands of pounds
each?

They supposedly costed 750 thousands pounds and generated revenue of
well above a billion several years ago. Now it must be more.

Funny, i could swear this says 20 to 40 thousand:

http://www.speedcamerasuk.com/Gatso.htm

But hey, what's an order of magnitude between friends?

You don't count the tickets.

Can you show a decrease in fatalities associated with that?

Yes.

The fatality rate stopped decreasing since the introduction of speed
cameras. Widely know and misinterpreted data, so link is probably not
necessary, but I'll find it if you ask. It's based on data collected by
government.

Can you show that an average speed of vehicles is decreased overall?

Yes.

Well, you can't. Neither is true for UK.

Wrong.

The average recorded vehicle speed hardly changed from those observed in
previous years. The average seed of cars on motorways (71mph) has
remained the same since 1998.

File "vsgb 2003 dft_transstats_028864.pdf" from
http://www.safespeed.org.uk/vsgb.zip.

So why pay all those billions?

Hundreds of millions. One or two hundreds of millions. And the fines
raised more than covered it.

And who paid all the tickets? Martians?

Simply increase taxes, if you want to pay more. It will be more
efficient and nobody will get hurt by erratic driving.

Funny, looks to me like the cameras mean *fewer* people get hurt by
erratic driving.

Show it. Because aside from reclassifying serious injuries as
non-serious there is no effect whatsoever.

--
Andrzej Rosa 1127R
.

Loading