Radarkameras sind in Kanada umstritten. Warum liebt Europa sie?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/speed-cameras-ontario-europe-9.6955200
Radarkameras sind in Kanada umstritten. Warum liebt Europa sie?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/speed-cameras-ontario-europe-9.6955200
22 Kommentare
Tickets are assigned to the car/owner. This is a problem. That being said, I could be open to the approach quoted below—if it is truly about safety, than focusing on danger thresholds makes sense:
“When we first put out speed cameras, I wanted them set at 20 miles [32 km] an hour [over the limit] or something,” said Richard Retting, a traffic safety expert who helped implement North America’s first traffic cameras, in New York City. “If you focus on outliers that are going very fast, you build more public support.”
North Americans in general seem to have an allergy to integrity and being held accountable for their actions, which is why initiatives like this are unpopular. People don’t care about the law if they feel they’re above it, and don’t want to „get in trouble“ for acting on those feelings.
This is one of these things that makes me so frustrated at my people. If there’s a speed limit, follow it; if it’s too low, raise it. But I see no point in having speed limits that are enforced only partially and arbitrarily.
That said… the problem with drivers in Canada is less so the speeding, and more so stuff like:
* Squatting in the leftmost lane on the highway
* Entering intersections in busy traffic and clogging it when the light changes
* Not sticking to a consistent speed at all (cruise control, folks…)
* Not having a clue how to park
* Driving dangerously around cyclists and pedestrians (either due to misguided aggression or simply being unaware of surroundings…)
People driving too fast is the least of my problems.
Speed cameras were often placed in locations where either a) speed limits were unreasonably low or b) speeding was relatively harmless such as open roads with no residences or playgrounds. Or c) some combination of the two. So people felt like they were entrapment and a cash grab.
They needed to be in residential areas, school zones, or on major highways where the speed limit is already 110 but jackasses felt the need to go 140.
That is why Canadians don’t like them.
I would welcome them back of they were reasonably placed where speeders are an actual threat to public safety.
It’s used as a cash cow instead of a deterrent, having police give out actual tickets would be much more effective.
The culture around speeding in Ontario is bonkers all around. Like, most sections of the 400 series highways were designed to be driven at 130 km/h, yet they all have posted speed limits of 100 or 110. Uncongested traffic flow tends to be 110-120, and the police do not enforce speeding until you’re going over 130. Even in normal city roads, police don’t pull you over for doing 10 over. So it’s no wonder that people bristle when speed cameras are suddenly rigorously enforcing the speed limits.
>But Canada’s problems with speeding may go deeper. Retting and Carnis both stress that before speed cameras can be implemented, speed limits should actually make sense.
Step 1, set the speed limits at a sensible level. Step 2, enforce the speed limits rigorously. People are not going to feel it’s fair to jump to step 2 without doing step 1.
The portion of this article talking about road design and sensible speed limits really hits the nail on the head for me.
30 km/h zones in European cities and towns are often narrow streets flanked by busy sidewalks, pedestrian crossings, cycling lanes, etc. I don’t mind driving 30 in those places because I probably wouldn’t naturally be driving any faster than that anyways.
30 km/h in suburban Mississauga, driving on triple-wide roads flanked by nothing but fields and big grass lawns, feels agonizingly slow in comparison. Getting a ticket for doing 40 when nobody is on the road and nobody is even outside of their homes ends up feeling like more of an injustice or cash grab, even if 30 makes sense for a residential area on paper.
Highways in Europe generally also have higher speed limits, anywhere from 120 – 140 km/h. IMO it’s easier to just raise the limit to something more reasonable and then actually strictly enforce it than it is to do the weird unwritten rule thing we do in Ontario, where the limit is legally 100 but everyone *knows* you’re actually supposed to be doing something more like 120.
Some highways here in Switzerland will even do variable speed limits based on the time of day. It might be 100 when it’s the middle of the day and there’s lots of cars on the road, but might jump up to 120 km/h if it’s midnight and there’s nobody around.
The tickets feel more fair because the rules feel more fair.
The problem is a culture where speeding is normalised. If speed limits aren’t actually enforced, people start expecting some other number than the legal one is the real number that counts, then get offended if tickets don’t reflect that. Once speeding is normalised it drives limits down in order to actually get compliance with the real desired speed. We need speed limits that actually reflect what is most safe and to actually reliably enforce those, which is what happens in many other countries.
Judging by my morning commutes, an 60km round trip three days a week, it’s largely because Canadians love to speed, regardless of conditions or other traffic. They tailgate, they swerve, they shake their fists at anybody who has the audacity to drive at the speed limit, or based on road conditions.
I’m of the opinion that not only should there be more speed cameras, I think zeroes should start to be added to the fines.
It just blows me away to see how the feelings of drivers takes precedence over data and tangible serious outcomes. It doesn’t feel fair when you get a fine for speeding in a residential area? Cry me a river.
Lower speed limits in residential areas don’t significantly impact overall travel times, but hugely impact the likelihood another person who isn’t in a car will survive an accident. This is an open-shut case. If you don’t want tickets, follow the law, and spare us all this entitled garbage about how it „feels“ to drive on one road versus another. Or better still, follow the law because it’s the only safe, reasonable, responsible thing to do, and not just because you don’t want tickets.
I feel the controversy is more about the assertion that they are a public safety measure, while many believe that getting a ticket in the mail three weeks later does little to save lives. This is especially evident as cameras don’t go up in high risk areas like school zones, and instead are placed a few hundred meters past a speed limit change on a wide open divided highway.
Then there’s the notion that they are simply a speed tax. If you’re wealthy enough, drive as fast as you like, and write a few cheques over the course of a year.
Canadian in Italy. More than half of the speed ‚cameras‘ where I live in the north are fake. Often, no camera and sometimes instead they put a sticker on the front that looks like a camera lens. Also, there’s peer reviewed research suggesting speed cameras don’t actually work because people know where they are, slow down accordingly and then ramp right back up.
[https://visionzeronetwork.org/promoting-equity-in-speed-safety-camera-programs-from-planning-to-action/](https://visionzeronetwork.org/promoting-equity-in-speed-safety-camera-programs-from-planning-to-action/)
Interestingly, in another sub there was an article posted today about how abysmal the traffic fatality stats are in the USA compared to Europe and Canada where we have initiated planning that enhances safety for pedestrians, cyclists and drivers so it’s kind of weird that I’m seeing a post waxing on about the benefits of speed cameras. There are better alternatives that aren’t effectively a revenue stream.
Here’s the other article: [https://asteriskmag.com/issues/10/traffic-fatalities-are-a-choice](https://asteriskmag.com/issues/10/traffic-fatalities-are-a-choice)
The article answers its own question, largely. Canadian speed limits are arbitrarily low and are mostly performative given our road design. So, yeah, people think its dumb getting a ticket for going 112 on a 100 km/h zone because, realistically, the speed limit should just be 120 km/h.
Becuase Canada employs far lower speed limits.
In Europe – they set the speed limit to 120 or 130km/h and then put in cameras to catch if you are going faster than that.
In Canada, they set the speed limit at 100km/h and expect everyone to go 120km/h – if you put a speed camera in to enforce 100km/h people are upset because the speed limit is set artificially low.
Go to the UK – they have strict speed limits, but rural speed limits are generally 65mph (~100km/h) even on small rural roads. A lot of Southern Ontario is increasingly dropping limits from 80 to 60km/h on rural roads where you can safely do 100km/h, then putting speed cameras on these roads.. It’s no wonder people are upset.
If speed limits were reasonably set for speeds that people actually can safely travel on the road I think people would be less upset. But as it stands right now the standard culture is to set the speed limit 20km/h under what it really should be (or more!) and expect everyone to do 20km/h over the limit and slow down at each speed camera for 2 seconds. And this culture has gotten even worse over the last decade with municipalities going trigger happy on speed limit reductions placing speed limits which can be as much as 50 or 60km/h below the design speed of the road.
If the province set a law saying that the posted speed limit in areas with speed cameras must be equal to the design speed of the road, you would get A LOT less complaints.
Imo we should introduce variable speed limits for summer vs winter and have a new road standard hierarchy for 130km/h roads (fenced along the route), 120km/h (major separated highway but not fenced), 100km/h unseparated highway.
Drop all limits by 20km/h when there’s snow/ice and do it section by section. Put up speed cameras. In fact, I would actually really quite like if the cameras gave tickets for left lane camping
After they got rid of the cameras in Edmonton the driving quality tanked.
When I was in France at the very beginning of 2019 some ridiculous proportion of all the speed cameras in France were reported to be inoperable or destroyed because they had been vandalized by motorists. Sooo… That seems like an unorthodox type of love.
Particularly memorable was some sort of spokeswoman making a statement about the severe penalties that awaited the vandals and her more or less being heckled by the scrum of journalists with questions along the lines of “do you have pictures of the vandals or their vehicles?”
Because here they’re used to make money for cities, not for safety.
There’s a large boulevard in Montreal (3 lanes each way) and on one side there’s a school so they made it a 30 km/h zone. I got flashed by a mobile camera for supposedly doing 46 km/h in the opposite direction (not the lanes next to the school but across the road) on a Saturday when there’s no school.
Who exactly is this protecting?
Meanwhile there’s people speeding and blowing stop signs in my quiet two lane residential street where kids play on the weekend and I’ve never seen a cop there to enforce anything.
They set themselves up on large boulevards where they know they will easily catch people, not where it actually makes a difference for safety.
The speed limits are too low in some areas of the GTA. It’s just cash grab. It’s totally safe to drive 60km in these 50km streets. There’s a huge distance between the side walk and the road yet they kept reducing the speed in the name safety.
Toronto and Oshawa are particularly bad for this.
A great issue with speed limits, at least were I live, is that it takes into account an assumed tolerence of speeding and so the speed limit on highways and some stroads/roads is way too low. People would revolt if a 100kmh speed limit on highways would actually be enforced – in most cases its more of a „minimum speed“. It is known that you can drive 119kmh right by the police and get no trouble – the people respecting the speed limit and going 94kmh are actually more dangerous because they are so much slower than everyone else and even get passed by large trucks and people with trailers.
Speed on these highways should actually be 110 or 120, maybe even 130 – which is the case in Europe – and that actual realistic speed enforced by cameras and police. The 100kmh limit made sense 50 years ago when cars were way shittier and far less safe.
Meamwhile speed limits inside towns and cities are ironically sometimes even too high. Some stroads have a limit of 50 but they are very wide, relatively low traffic and great long distance visibility so you can drive a lot faster safely… but you also have streets with parked cars, kids playing and a million low visibility intersections/parking entrances that also have a limit of 50, were driving that fast is insanely dangerous.
So yeah, make logical speed limits then strictly enforce them. At the moment its just arbitrary – imagine allowing a 12yr old kid to go to sleep at 8PM instead of the official „way too early“ go to bed time ot 6PM which hasn’t changed since they were 4yr old, but randomly once a month absolutely lose your shit at them becauss they aren’t in bed at 6. Good rules have to make sense.
People don’t like speed cameras for a very simple reason: the speed limits are absurdly low.
The speed limits are meant for winter, which is fine when it IS winter. But then forcing people to drive at absurdly low speeds in the summer just makes it seem like a pointless cash grab.
How to fix this? Most obvious but hardest would be to have summer and winter speed limits. The other option however relates to what’s currently being done: Remove speed cameras. That, maybe mixed with police being onboarded into a ‘don’t pull speeders over in the summer, but enforce heavy punishments in the winter’ is the only real solution apart from changing speeds across the country.
For me, it’s the way they are implemented in my municipality (Greater Sudbury) as a cash grab.
They put in community safety zones wherever the mobile speed cameras are (usually high traffic areas) to double safety fines. Then they oftentimes lower the speed limit arbitrarily so that even if people who knew the (old) “speed limit”, they now get a ticket. Then once they move the speed camera to a different location, they raise the speed limit back up.
I have ZERO issues with speed cameras in sensitive areas like school zones, just don’t put them on a “stroad” and lower the speed limit – it’s bullshit.
Probably since speeding here is normalized by well-maintained highways, long commutes between metro areas, and a lack of enforcement. The average speed of traffic on the transcanada between metro areas can reach like 130km/h, which is 20-30 over the limit depending on where you are. On one hand, those roads are designed that way deliberately for safety, but it also means people can be very comfortable at those speeds too. On the other hand, our roads wind through large stretches of natural or developed wilderness and you’re a lot less likely to avoid a deer or raccoon at those speeds so that’s a decent reason to not post a higher limit when you’re not going to (or can’t) fence the whole road. Meanwhile, cops aren’t looking for the 60% of people driving 20 over the limit when there’s 1% going 40-50 over. It’s just a totally different culture and series of circumstances that clash with speed cameras able to reliably book the 60% who are used to doing what they do.