Comment on Get to work, crackheads
grue@lemmy.world 9 months agoThey also can’t testify in court, depriving accused speeders of their constitutional right to due process.
But back to your first claim: “gotta enforce speed limits.”
No, we do not. Speeding is a symptom of a street that was designed wrong to begin with. The correct solution is to fix the design, not install a speed camera as some sort of big brother band-aid.
Sorry but it’s a black and white thing in this case, r either you’re under the speed limit and not breaking the law or you’re over the speed limit and breaking the law.
Also, tons of people object to speed camera tickets and win, the only difference is that there’s no officer there when the event happened to tell them “Say that to the judge if you’re not happy.”, the end result is the same.
Sorry but it’s a black and white thing in this case, r either you’re under the speed limit and not breaking the law or you’re over the speed limit and breaking the law.
This isn’t actually true. It’s entirely possible to be breaking the law while driving under the speed limit: “driving too fast for conditions” is very much a thing.
But that’s beside my point, which really was just that changing the design of the street to make people not want to speed in the first place is way more effective (and frankly, way less totalitarian) than punishing them after-the-fact for doing so.
“Driving too fast for conditions” won’t be enforced by cameras, will still exist if the road is modified and is 100% subjective which is a problem speed cameras don’t have so you should be happy about that.
It might be easy more effective, it’s still not possible to change all roads as quickly as speed cameras can be deployed.
What would you prefer? That some people drive slightly over the speed limit? Or a spot where people suddenly slam on the brakes to avoid getting a ticket, endangering those who might be behind them with their sudden change of speed?
Because the latter is what these devices tend to do.
Show me evidences that they increase accidents please, I’ve provided two sources showing they work, surely you can provide one that they cause accidents.
What if the speed limit is unreasonably high or low?
“unreasonably low”
Eh… What? Car drivers can get fucked in this case, they don’t have a right to travel quickly, it’s a privilege.
“Unreasonably high”
Then a police officer there won’t change a thing and the road design won’t change.
if it’s too low, good, drivers shouldn’t go fast. If it’s too high, fine, drivers can go fast.
Eh … What?
tryptaminev@feddit.de 9 months ago
Sorry, but that is a gross misinterpretation. Drivers are not victims of an intrinsic speed devil that they cannot escape. They still choose to violate the speed limit in most cases.
What was done in these countries is to acknowledge, that physical design is more effective as enforcement, than the cop with a speed-meter.
Still the explicit intent is to enforce speed-limits, knowing that people would violate them if they could, but they can’t because they would wreck their car. Still those people choose to violate and are responsible for their actions.
grue@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I gotta be honest; I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make. First you tell me I’m wrong that it’s essential to fix the design of the street to facilitate the correct speed, then you agree with me that “physical design is more effective as enforcement,” then you say that the risk of people wrecking their car effectively deters them from speeding, then you say they choose to speed anyway.
tryptaminev@feddit.de 9 months ago
You say that speed limits shouldnt be enforced as they would be a “symptom” of poor road design. This abolishes the speeding drivers from their own responsibility for violating the traffic rules.
You misinterpret the design choice as the opposite of bad road design, therefore goad road design, which implies a generality. However these design choices are made solely and explicitly to enforce speed limits. They have disadvantages in other ways e.g. if you make spots where only one car can pass at a time, it makes traffic less efficient. These disadvantages wouldn’t be needed if people would take their responsibility not to speed seriously.
Good design or bad design, many people will speed if they can get away with it. With a proper enforcement through speed cameras, and proper penalties for speeding, e.g. losing your licences for repeated offenses or having your vehicle impounded, could equally serve for enforcement. They are just more expensive, so making design choices is prefered by some countries.
But still people who speed chose to speed. They chose to violate the traffic rules and they chose to endanger other people and themselves. So speeding is never a “symptom” of road design. It is always a “symptom” of selfish assholes that should not be given the right to operate dangerous vehicles.
grue@lemmy.world 9 months ago
No, they’re designed to discourage people from exceeding the design speed, which is different.
Jeez, it’s not as if the vast majority of speeders are mustache-twirling villains doing it for the evulz who are incorrigible short of being punished by the law! They just think it’s safe to be driving that speed because the overly-generous street design misleads them.
Look, here’s the bottom line: the whole concept of a “speed limit” only exists in the first place because of a mismatch between the design speed and the speed people want to drive, which makes it unsafe. If you fix the geometry of the street to eliminate the mismatch such that the speed people want to drive at is safe, you don’t need the limit anymore and can just fall back on “reasonable and prudent.”
Y’all are acting like we need speed limits for their own sake, just to have something to enforce.