In Vermont, you can glance at a map while driving. If it's paper. Or if it's your phone in a holder. But it's $150 to glance at the map on your phone if you pick up the phone with your hand.
Increasing your speed from 30 to 35 mph seems like no big deal, but actually doubles the risk that, if hit, someone walking will be killed or severely injured as opposed to walking away. The difference in survival rates getting hit at 20 mph vs 40 mph is close to a complete inversion from 10% chance of death to 90% chance of death.
Please don't apply the "add 10 mph" rule when driving on streets where people are walking.
“The only way to make urban areas safe for pedestrians is to force drivers to drive at speeds that strike them as un-intuitively slow, and the only way to do that is with rigorous speeding enforcement. And cameras are a much better way of accomplishing that than flooding these zones with cops doing traffic stops.”
I agree, Matt, that the only way to make urban areas safe for pedestrians is to force drivers to drive at speeds that strike them as un-intuitively slow.
And I agree that cameras are a much better way of rigorously enforcing speed limits than flooding these zones with police officers doing traffic stops.
However, I disagree that the only way to force drivers to drive at speeds that strike them as un-intuitively slow is rigorous speed limit enforcement:
I have mixed feelings about more automatic traffic enforcement. Since everyone knows that a lot of camera enforcement is about revenue, set the cameras at 6 over. Have a base fine, and then an increase of $10 for each MPH over 6 over. OK, it's revenue. Now how about safety? There are a lot of places where the speed limit should be reduced. A lot of the residential neighborhoods in DC come to mind. They should have a 15 mph limit, and all-way stops at most residential intersections. Now add some speed bumps. The corner near my house could use a 4-way stop, rather than 2-way. The speed limit is 25, and I think 40 is about average.
The one drawback that I have with automatic enforcement, is there are no points attached to the tickets. Bad drivers need to accumulate points, so that they can lose their licenses for a period of time, and pay more for insurance.
I agree that traffic enforcement should be automated and the police should not be involved. In the same way the police do not generally do parking tickets, why should they do speeding tickets?
However there’s one big mistake in this article:
> The only way to make urban areas safe for pedestrians is to force drivers to drive at speeds that strike them as un-intuitively slow, and the only way to do that is with rigorous speeding enforcement.
This is false in two dimensions:
1. Intuition about what speed to drive is informed by the built environment, and it is very well understood how to make a road that forces cars to drive more slowly. Narrow lanes, chicanes, bulb outs, street trees, on street parking, grade changes, surface changes… there are many “ingredients” that work and many ways of combining those to fit any location or budget. So it is not true that drivers must drive “un-intuitively slow,” rather it is true that the roads are designed for higher speed than is actually safe for the surrounding pedestrians, and the drivers intuition is obviously to drive at the design speed of the road, not the lower speed that would be much safer.
2. Thus the second mistake, heavy ticketing of offenders is not the only way to fix this problem. Road design change is a better fix. The crudest example, just put speed bumps and stop signs everywhere and drivers will have no choice but to slow way down.
When a local street was designed as a highway it’s called a Stroad. The Stroad is both extremely expensive and extremely unsafe. And it’s a problem because it’s so strongly the default way of building roads that even very thoughtful folks like MY have the blind spot he demonstrated in the article, thinking that our roads cannot help but entice drivers to reckless speed, and that solutions can only come in the form of punishing drivers, when we should be disciplining the engineers and city planners instead.
This is something the UK gets right (much to the annoyance of drivers). We have a huge amount of automated traffic enforcement. I consider myself a very careful driver but got done for my first traffic offence in July. £216 for running a red light, caught by an automatic enforcement camera. I was pissed, but I sure as hell pay attention when I drive through that intersection now.
Yes, and when a traffic stop makes sense, the police should stay in their car and dispatch a little wheeled robot over to the stopped car. The robot will have a camera, mic, speaker, and screen on an adjustable-height pod -- all remote-controlled by the police.
The drivers can show their license and registration to the robot's camera and talk with the police. Much safer. And police will no longer be run over by passing traffic -- although robots may be, but they can have lots of flashing lights on them.
Matt Yglesias with the off-the-wall contrarian take yet again. "We should obey the law and enforce it fairly". Hoe does he come up with this crazy stuff?!
I think the problem with the highways (and which I believe is being copied on smaller roads) is not necessarily the speeding, but reckless driving, including "following too closely" "failure to signal a lane change" and not leaving enough distance between a passing car and the car which ends up behind it when the passer cuts in.
I agree that more tickets for these actions are necessary, but camera technology has a hard time with these particular items.
Remember self-driving cars? I feel like if we were having this conversation 5 years ago it would have been all about how it didn't matter because human drivers were going to be banned by 2030. Guess nobody thinks that anymore! Or at any rate it hasn't come up.
I mean -- who thought that 5 years ago? There are 275M non-self-driving cars in the US. If tomorrow 100% of new vehicles sold were self-driving it'd take ~15 years to turn the vehicle population over. Maybe at some near saturation point you could mandate or ban total adoption but this is a slow turning ship. Same holds for EVs.
I first encountered photo enforcement of traffic laws 50 years ago in Germany. Here in the MD burbs of DC we have both automatic speed and traffic signal enforcement. I also drive frequently in France where speed cameras are marked on maps. I love it! Here, we can go 10 mph over the limit before the cameras click and no lee way at signals. In France, the lee way for speeding is 5 KMH (you all do the math). France used to be notorious for high speed dubious driving; no more. Everyone's slowed down on the autoroutes, even though everyone knows where the cameras are. Here in MD, folks drive slower where they know there are cameras and behave a lot better at intersections with signals. My only concern is that there aren't enough speed cameras.
I don't drive often enough in DC anymore to know what's going on there, but on the one trip I make occasionally, the limit has dropped from 25 mph to 20 and I gather there's enough automatic enforcement to convince folks to obey it.
If a self-driving car gets caught by one of these automated cameras, where does the ticket get sent? If the former protests the ticket, I'd like to see the two fight it out in court.
My understanding is the current generation of such cars are aware of speed limits and can be set to conform to them. Think of it like a smarter version of cruise control.
It seems to me that if self-driving cars are set to drive no higher than the speed limit, that will greatly limit their penetration of the national fleet.
And, though I speak from total ignorance, I find it hard to believe that Elon Musk is big on making it hard for his cars to exceed the speed limit. Doesn't strike me as the type.
Great article. Real-world example of this. My wife is from Montgomery County, MD, one of the wealthiest counties in the country, and she loves telling the story of how they got a lot of automated speed traps. There was apparently a push to get them by residents "to catch all the out-of-towners that are speeding around here." Take what you will "out-of-towners" to mean. Once they implemented the automated speed traps, the vast, vast majority of tickets were from the wealthy residents! Luckily the speed traps are still there...
This is what I love about the cameras. Half of the people saying "but this will penalize the poor" argue that in bad faith when they damn well know that being white and driving a nice car is the best way to not be pulled over by the cops... and that usually the drivers getting away with really bad driving are rich dudes who think rules of normal society just don't apply to them.
The problem with this regime is that it doesn't recognize the benefit the present system: realtime traffic enforcement. Sure, some jerk doing 70 in a 55 through an industrial area with no foot traffic is probably best handled by getting a ticket in the mail. But someone doing 40 in a school zone at 8:00 in the morning isn't just breaking the law, he's a present danger. Cops should be stopping him in real time to alleviate that danger. Same goes for careless/reckless drivers, obstructed view drivers, cars that are physically falling apart, wrong way drivers, etc. It's not enough to just send a ticket to their last known address, because the offense they're committing endangers others, and they need to be actually stopped.
The real question is, why are cops in charge of that? Just set up a secondary system of unarmed policing for petty/traffic offenses. Have unarmed traffic cops pull over speeders, DUIs, etc. They can arrest people if absolutely necessary. Unarmed police in the UK and Iceland seem to manage to do that without carrying a sidearm.
You could resolve this with dynamic speed limits, although that means you need highly-reliable, well-maintained signs that can flip to the new speed limit maybe 5-10 minutes before a lowered limit starts to be enforced. Alternately if we get to a point where it's affordable for EVERY car to have an onboard computer that can report the speed limit based on its GPS location, and that has WiFi/WiMax and cellular capability, then you could use broadcasters along the road to update the speed limit to the computer and alert the driver if they're going to fast.
Though really, thinking about this, with the number of man-hours you'd save from police ceasing to do traffic stops, and sit around in speed trap locations, you might well be able to fund an army of dynamic speed limit sign technicians (who would be decently paid, but wouldn't need the kind of six-figure salary that suburban cops often make these days -- if you look up the highest paid public workers in my city, the top few are executive roles like the City Manager, City Attorney, and head of the Planning Department; but below that, it's basically a list of the 40 highest-paid cops, all of whom are making like $200k or more, after hazard pay, OT, etc).
In Vermont, you can glance at a map while driving. If it's paper. Or if it's your phone in a holder. But it's $150 to glance at the map on your phone if you pick up the phone with your hand.
Increasing your speed from 30 to 35 mph seems like no big deal, but actually doubles the risk that, if hit, someone walking will be killed or severely injured as opposed to walking away. The difference in survival rates getting hit at 20 mph vs 40 mph is close to a complete inversion from 10% chance of death to 90% chance of death.
Please don't apply the "add 10 mph" rule when driving on streets where people are walking.
On the highway is a different story...
“The only way to make urban areas safe for pedestrians is to force drivers to drive at speeds that strike them as un-intuitively slow, and the only way to do that is with rigorous speeding enforcement. And cameras are a much better way of accomplishing that than flooding these zones with cops doing traffic stops.”
I agree, Matt, that the only way to make urban areas safe for pedestrians is to force drivers to drive at speeds that strike them as un-intuitively slow.
And I agree that cameras are a much better way of rigorously enforcing speed limits than flooding these zones with police officers doing traffic stops.
However, I disagree that the only way to force drivers to drive at speeds that strike them as un-intuitively slow is rigorous speed limit enforcement:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_calming
I do favor rigorous speed limit enforcement. But I do not believe that rigorous speed limit enforcement is the only arrow in our quiver.
Thanks for your consideration. <3
I have mixed feelings about more automatic traffic enforcement. Since everyone knows that a lot of camera enforcement is about revenue, set the cameras at 6 over. Have a base fine, and then an increase of $10 for each MPH over 6 over. OK, it's revenue. Now how about safety? There are a lot of places where the speed limit should be reduced. A lot of the residential neighborhoods in DC come to mind. They should have a 15 mph limit, and all-way stops at most residential intersections. Now add some speed bumps. The corner near my house could use a 4-way stop, rather than 2-way. The speed limit is 25, and I think 40 is about average.
The one drawback that I have with automatic enforcement, is there are no points attached to the tickets. Bad drivers need to accumulate points, so that they can lose their licenses for a period of time, and pay more for insurance.
I agree that traffic enforcement should be automated and the police should not be involved. In the same way the police do not generally do parking tickets, why should they do speeding tickets?
However there’s one big mistake in this article:
> The only way to make urban areas safe for pedestrians is to force drivers to drive at speeds that strike them as un-intuitively slow, and the only way to do that is with rigorous speeding enforcement.
This is false in two dimensions:
1. Intuition about what speed to drive is informed by the built environment, and it is very well understood how to make a road that forces cars to drive more slowly. Narrow lanes, chicanes, bulb outs, street trees, on street parking, grade changes, surface changes… there are many “ingredients” that work and many ways of combining those to fit any location or budget. So it is not true that drivers must drive “un-intuitively slow,” rather it is true that the roads are designed for higher speed than is actually safe for the surrounding pedestrians, and the drivers intuition is obviously to drive at the design speed of the road, not the lower speed that would be much safer.
2. Thus the second mistake, heavy ticketing of offenders is not the only way to fix this problem. Road design change is a better fix. The crudest example, just put speed bumps and stop signs everywhere and drivers will have no choice but to slow way down.
When a local street was designed as a highway it’s called a Stroad. The Stroad is both extremely expensive and extremely unsafe. And it’s a problem because it’s so strongly the default way of building roads that even very thoughtful folks like MY have the blind spot he demonstrated in the article, thinking that our roads cannot help but entice drivers to reckless speed, and that solutions can only come in the form of punishing drivers, when we should be disciplining the engineers and city planners instead.
If you want to go deeper on this stuff, Strong Towns is a great resource: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/4/26/not-just-bikes-the-stroads-to-hell-are-paved-with-good-intentions
This is something the UK gets right (much to the annoyance of drivers). We have a huge amount of automated traffic enforcement. I consider myself a very careful driver but got done for my first traffic offence in July. £216 for running a red light, caught by an automatic enforcement camera. I was pissed, but I sure as hell pay attention when I drive through that intersection now.
Yes, and when a traffic stop makes sense, the police should stay in their car and dispatch a little wheeled robot over to the stopped car. The robot will have a camera, mic, speaker, and screen on an adjustable-height pod -- all remote-controlled by the police.
The drivers can show their license and registration to the robot's camera and talk with the police. Much safer. And police will no longer be run over by passing traffic -- although robots may be, but they can have lots of flashing lights on them.
Matt Yglesias with the off-the-wall contrarian take yet again. "We should obey the law and enforce it fairly". Hoe does he come up with this crazy stuff?!
Totally agree, we’re a violent, gun-toting sick society with a swollen head about being humanity’s last best hope. There’s no cure. We’re toast.
I'm a little nervous about cameras on every street corner.
What about speed bumps?
I think the problem with the highways (and which I believe is being copied on smaller roads) is not necessarily the speeding, but reckless driving, including "following too closely" "failure to signal a lane change" and not leaving enough distance between a passing car and the car which ends up behind it when the passer cuts in.
I agree that more tickets for these actions are necessary, but camera technology has a hard time with these particular items.
Remember self-driving cars? I feel like if we were having this conversation 5 years ago it would have been all about how it didn't matter because human drivers were going to be banned by 2030. Guess nobody thinks that anymore! Or at any rate it hasn't come up.
I mean -- who thought that 5 years ago? There are 275M non-self-driving cars in the US. If tomorrow 100% of new vehicles sold were self-driving it'd take ~15 years to turn the vehicle population over. Maybe at some near saturation point you could mandate or ban total adoption but this is a slow turning ship. Same holds for EVs.
I first encountered photo enforcement of traffic laws 50 years ago in Germany. Here in the MD burbs of DC we have both automatic speed and traffic signal enforcement. I also drive frequently in France where speed cameras are marked on maps. I love it! Here, we can go 10 mph over the limit before the cameras click and no lee way at signals. In France, the lee way for speeding is 5 KMH (you all do the math). France used to be notorious for high speed dubious driving; no more. Everyone's slowed down on the autoroutes, even though everyone knows where the cameras are. Here in MD, folks drive slower where they know there are cameras and behave a lot better at intersections with signals. My only concern is that there aren't enough speed cameras.
I don't drive often enough in DC anymore to know what's going on there, but on the one trip I make occasionally, the limit has dropped from 25 mph to 20 and I gather there's enough automatic enforcement to convince folks to obey it.
If a self-driving car gets caught by one of these automated cameras, where does the ticket get sent? If the former protests the ticket, I'd like to see the two fight it out in court.
To the owner of the car, just like non-self driving cars. If you own a fleet of speeding cars, things might get really expensive for you.
Honest question: how are speed parameters set with self-driving cars? As they currently exist, would owners know how to adjust them?
My understanding is the current generation of such cars are aware of speed limits and can be set to conform to them. Think of it like a smarter version of cruise control.
It seems to me that if self-driving cars are set to drive no higher than the speed limit, that will greatly limit their penetration of the national fleet.
And, though I speak from total ignorance, I find it hard to believe that Elon Musk is big on making it hard for his cars to exceed the speed limit. Doesn't strike me as the type.
Great article. Real-world example of this. My wife is from Montgomery County, MD, one of the wealthiest counties in the country, and she loves telling the story of how they got a lot of automated speed traps. There was apparently a push to get them by residents "to catch all the out-of-towners that are speeding around here." Take what you will "out-of-towners" to mean. Once they implemented the automated speed traps, the vast, vast majority of tickets were from the wealthy residents! Luckily the speed traps are still there...
This is what I love about the cameras. Half of the people saying "but this will penalize the poor" argue that in bad faith when they damn well know that being white and driving a nice car is the best way to not be pulled over by the cops... and that usually the drivers getting away with really bad driving are rich dudes who think rules of normal society just don't apply to them.
The problem with this regime is that it doesn't recognize the benefit the present system: realtime traffic enforcement. Sure, some jerk doing 70 in a 55 through an industrial area with no foot traffic is probably best handled by getting a ticket in the mail. But someone doing 40 in a school zone at 8:00 in the morning isn't just breaking the law, he's a present danger. Cops should be stopping him in real time to alleviate that danger. Same goes for careless/reckless drivers, obstructed view drivers, cars that are physically falling apart, wrong way drivers, etc. It's not enough to just send a ticket to their last known address, because the offense they're committing endangers others, and they need to be actually stopped.
The real question is, why are cops in charge of that? Just set up a secondary system of unarmed policing for petty/traffic offenses. Have unarmed traffic cops pull over speeders, DUIs, etc. They can arrest people if absolutely necessary. Unarmed police in the UK and Iceland seem to manage to do that without carrying a sidearm.
You could resolve this with dynamic speed limits, although that means you need highly-reliable, well-maintained signs that can flip to the new speed limit maybe 5-10 minutes before a lowered limit starts to be enforced. Alternately if we get to a point where it's affordable for EVERY car to have an onboard computer that can report the speed limit based on its GPS location, and that has WiFi/WiMax and cellular capability, then you could use broadcasters along the road to update the speed limit to the computer and alert the driver if they're going to fast.
Though really, thinking about this, with the number of man-hours you'd save from police ceasing to do traffic stops, and sit around in speed trap locations, you might well be able to fund an army of dynamic speed limit sign technicians (who would be decently paid, but wouldn't need the kind of six-figure salary that suburban cops often make these days -- if you look up the highest paid public workers in my city, the top few are executive roles like the City Manager, City Attorney, and head of the Planning Department; but below that, it's basically a list of the 40 highest-paid cops, all of whom are making like $200k or more, after hazard pay, OT, etc).