I've often thought of doing the same thing. Our current and previous houses are/were on corner intersections of our neighborhood.
I'd love to see an open source implementation of this. I'd put it up to get data on speeding and see if it could be adapted to catch people running the stop sign in front of my house. I see at least 2 cars per day run it and that's just in the time I'm outside to do quick things like checking the mail.
This seems like it would be harder. Would you have to lock onto the tires to catch a certain number of frames without movement?
I would thinking rolling through a stop sign (especially at an intersection that is not a 4-way stop) would be much more dangerous than going 30 in a 25.
> I would thinking rolling through a stop sign (especially at an intersection that is not a 4-way stop) would be much more dangerous than going 30 in a 25.
This is exactly the scenario I have outside of my house. The speed limit on both streets is 25mph, but when most people don't stop at the stop signs and everyone is going too fast...
The issue is even worse at certain times of the year (right now) because, depending on the direction you are going, the cars with no stop signs are mostly blinded by the position of the sun between trees and houses. Just last Monday a neighbor stopped by to say he turned the corner and side-swiped my mailbox because he couldn't see anything.
There's a stop sign near my house that is often ignored and when I watch people blow through it (while obviously speeding) I wonder how much fear for letting our children wander is reinforced by behavior like that and how a lack of children playing reinforces that behavior.
As far as speeding goes, I generally stick to the limit in a residential but when I'm being tailgated I'll speed up to 30mph. I'd rather only have to worry about stopping the force of my vehicle if a child runs out in front of my car. But it rarely makes a difference, most people want to go 40-45mph and become visibly irate at anything less than that. Things like that make me happy that self driving cars are somewhere on the horizon.
Speeding—especially on residential streets—causes real injury and death. I think it's great for citizens to use inexpensive technology like this to put pressure on their local authorities for better street design and proper enforcement.
The term busybody normally refers to someone who's trying to force an opinion into a situation, not actual actual violations of the law and definitely not when the problem came to you without having to seek it out first. Beyond the different seriousness of the two things you're conflating – did you notice the bit about him doing this after a kid was hit? – both of those are actually illegal and endanger other people.
It is forcing opinion on the situation -- that speed limits and punitive enforcement is a solution to the traffic problem. It's almost always a knee-jerk.
A 25 mph speed limit on a street with a bus route is applying a band-aid in most situations. You're never going to get 100% compliance with traffic law, so if a safe pedestrian corridor depends on that, you lose. (By the way, "stepped up" enforcement lasts until the local neighborhood association folks get a ticket for rolling through a stop sign.)
I had a similar issue in my neighborhood a mother and child were hit by a driver making a turn in a corridor with a lot of near misses. Instead of going on some punitive goose chase of enforcing an unrealistic speed limit, we (members of a neighborhood association) approached it as what it was -- a traffic engineering problem.
In our case, traffic light timings weren't adjusted appropriately, so drivers felt compelled to "race" in order to catch a light. Lane markings were unclear, so it wasn't obvious where drivers should be if they were turning. Crosswalks tape was pulled up, and it wasn't obvious to a driver turning where the pedestrians crossed. Also, the pedestrian signal buttons were broken.
We lobbied the city council people and mayor pretty heavily, and they made a few modest investments in signals, signage, paint and a traffic study. 5 years later, accidents dropped by 40% in that corridor.
Based on that there were 130,557 deaths from unintentional injury in the USA in 2013. In that same year there were 32,719 fatalities resulting from auto accident. So 25% of the unintentional injury fatalities were car crashes. Which puts the car crash risk lower than most of the other major causes, and lower than either suicide or homicide for every age group I believe.
If you are incapable of driving in a manner that doesn't cause undue risk to human life, then a camera highlighting that should be the least of your worries.
Count me in as a "nitpicking busybody", though I'd hardly equate dog walking offenses with the kind of damage a speeding driver in a residential neighborhood can cause.
Speeding in a subdivision is annoying to those who live in the subdivision -- it adds to the noise and makes it a pain to get out of the driveway in reverse -- but it's way more than that when you have young children, especially when they have disabilities as one of mine does.
My daughter is hard of hearing (not deaf, but requires hearing aids) and is exceptionally ADD. Last year, she was playing with a basketball in our driveway and it slipped out of her hands and into the street. Mom and I were on the porch when we saw her go after a basketball, we got up running and were screaming at her. She didn't notice us or the car as she emerged from behind a parked car into the street chasing her ball. The driver ran over the ball and narrowly missed hitting her (also narrowly missed the neighbor's big brick mailbox as he swerved). He didn't slow down, just swerved and continued on at a breakneck speed. The kids are no longer allowed to play in the front yard.
Now, sometimes residential roads are indistinguishable from main roads -- lane markers and such can make it easy to speed "by accident". This is not the case in my subdivision. We have a large marquee indicating the name of the subdivision and a posted speed limit (25 MPH) sign. It's all houses, tightly packed, except for an elementary school. Because of a light with poor timing that causes a back-up on the main road, our subdivision is used as a bypass during Rush Hour.
I set up an RPi connected camera to help me make the case for increased enforcement after my daughter was nearly hit by a speeding driver. Two-thirds of the cars appear to be going well over 25 MPH and over half are going so fast it's obvious they're going 15 MPH over the speed limit.
I doubt anyone is in such a hurry that they're consciously choosing the safety of residents of my neighborhood over their 1/2-minute reduction in travel time to their destination, but their actions are just that. I'll be adding this feature to the software I use to track traffic in my neighborhood. I might even go so far as to shame the worst of the drivers (mostly 16-17 year-olds). I even toyed with the idea of setting up a sign that lights up a "Slow Down" message when a car is obviously speeding, but I'm betting that'd run afoul of local ordinances. Incidentally, I had tried to get a "Deaf Child/Disabled Child" sign put up, but I was told the township no longer does this and given the dubious excuse that "they provide a false sense of security" (no -- "they're expensive" or "we're tired of having to change them when the wording is decided to be 'politically-incorrect' every few months" is the problem -- they still put up "Pedestrian Crossing" and other related signs and they still maintain the existing ones when they get knocked over).
> Because of a light with poor timing that causes a back-up on the main road, our subdivision is used as a bypass during Rush Hour.
Your kids have been nearly killed on several occasions. Why are you projecting anger at some schmuck trying to drive home, but not standing in front of your town/city/county officials to fix the light?
If the light gets fixed, people stop using your subdivision as a through street.
Look around and try to find a civil engineer who does traffic management to talk to. This stuff is a science -- if you make the right demands, you'll get what you want and be able to sleep at night.
I think an even better application of this technology would be to catch people who aren't stopping at signs/lights, or not yielding at merges. Radar-equipped signs can handle the speeding case fairly well, but are useless in these other - and often more dangerous - cases.
Red light cameras increase rear-end collisions as well as injury because people would rather lock up their brakes one car length before the intersection than get a ticket.
I haven't seen any information on the effect of cameras at merging sites, though.
At least here in the UK, there are sensible guidelines to ensure you don't do that. For example, if the light is amber (turning from green to red) and you are so close to the line that braking would be hazardous, you should carry on. A system as sophisticated as the one presented here could surely take speed and stopping distance into account. And even apart from all that, I'd rather have one car rear-ending another that's braked too harshly, at slow speed, than a car careering through the light, much faster.
I wasn't suggesting anything that triggers red lights or leads directly to a citation. Just gathering the data would often be useful, to drive design of intersections and allocation of other resources in a quantitative way.
Also, if people aren't maintaining a safe distance from the car in front of them, then that's useful information too. So is video of people illegally using their celphones while driving, which this technology could also provide.
Putting words in someone else's mouth is a tactic commonly used by those who can only formulate stupid statements. Of course I care about things that increase or decrease injury rates. That's why I would like to encourage safer behavior. You should haved added "debunked" to your snarky citation, and you might have found this.
Also, as I said, if people are tailgating then that's a separate problem that can also be addressed by this technology. It's insane to say that we shouldn't discourage one dangerous behavior because of some other equally-addressable dangerous behavior. People respond to the knowledge that they're more likely to be caught when they do something wrong or stupid. An actual police officer issuing citations for exactly these offenses is effective, but costly. Having the information about frequency of offense at different locations allows those scarce resources to be allocated to greatest effect. What's your problem with that?
Everything I have seen says that they can increase the rate of crashes but decrease the rate of injuries, because they change the types of accidents which occur, and rear ending is much less dangerous than T-boning. Example analysis:
Yes! If not to catch violators, at least to collect data for use in enforcement. In cities and towns with lots of pedestrians, the stop sign case is key. People check for other cars by habit, but often overlook pedestrians waiting to cross at a stop sign and put them at risk.
> At 4:27 p.m. last Wednesday, the system caught a Route 11 city bus doing 34 mph.
Which isn't even fast enough to get a ticket from local police.
In my state (which is not Virginia, and it will vary everywhere), local police are prohibited from using radar and need to use an actual stopwatch to track your speed. Obviously very error prone, and they're supposed to basically give you 10 mph leeway - meaning on that road you basically couldn't get a ticket for going under 36 mph.
Also it doesn't say what they determine speeding to be. Based on his description the vehicle should be wholly between both markers for 40 frames at exactly 25 mph. Are cars that touch the mark on frame 39/40 considered speeders since they're going ~25.025 mph? There is a reason many states do not start issuing tickets until 5, 6, 9, 10+ mph over the posted limit.
It's literally "start the stopwatch when the front tire hits the first line painted on the road, stop it when the front tire hits the second line (or some other predefined immobile point), and look at a chart to see how fast they're going."
Usually radioed to a second car down at the next intersection.
The 10% margin of error for a speedometer only applies in one direction: they're allowed to say you're going faster than you really are by up to 10%, but they're never allowed to say you're going slower than you really are (in England).
I live in Va, just not that part, and the rule of thumb is anything less then 10mph over and you generally won't get a ticket. The only exception to this is places like school zones.
My car can warn me if I exceed the local speed limit by more than a set amount. I had to turn it off after a while, because it was just getting annoying on 495.
It's pretty funny to drive back into the city from points west on I-66 as the speed limit drops 70-65-60-55. I usually maintain a steady 7 over and that makes me go from one of the fastest cars on the road to one of the slowest.
That's generally the same in Michigan unless it is a subdivision/residential area, but even then it's rare for a cop to waste the time. It's possible to get a ticket for going 1-5 MPH over the limit. It's described as a "we can find a reason to pull you over for what we want to pull you over for but do not have enough evidence to do so" such as you're having done something suspicious at a known drug house or someone calling about how many drinks you've had at a bar despite you not driving suspiciously. It's crap, but it's common.
Most of the time people receiving the 1-5 MPH tickets are receiving them for violating the speed well beyond that amount (with the actual clocked speed written on the ticket). This encourages people to just pay the ticket without fighting it since they've been given a much lower civil infraction and it makes it a lot harder to succeed in court since the judge knows "radar calibration/accuracy" is much less likely with the written, clocked speed.
In the video it looks like there's a gradient applied to the speeds. The color of the speed read out changes from a greenish yellow to red orange around what seems like 10 mph. There one that's yellow at 34 and another that's red orange at 35. They don't say if the 25-35 gets binned differently but that's not too surprising, it's a local news piece not a presentation.
Even so just because the police aren't allowed to give you a ticket because of the measurement error or uncertainty or mercy doesn't discount that they're still speeding.
It's one thing to just get the data and make an argument (in this case, "slow down") - it's an entirely separate thing to do that and start issuing citations or impounding vehicles.
Why is issuing a citation in this way so problematic?
In a few places near where I live there is extremely clear signage about the speed limit, and that speed cameras are in effect, 100% of the time, every single day. If you speed there, you will get a ticket. The systems are configured to only send the data of speeders, and are audited. It is extremely effective.
I prefer this system in every way to the way tickets are generally handled in the US. It's effective, it's fair, it does not discriminate against minorities, it does not endanger lives of the driver/police/other drivers as pulling someone over does, and it's much easier for me to avoid a ticket, it respects my privacy, persuasive / weeping / friends of cops can't get out of it, there's no chance for police to start tacking on other violations (your blinker is broken!)... etc, etc, etc.
It's just better in every way, except the fact that driving on these particular roads is really boring!
Yeah I'd say that too - except its speed limits in residential neighborhoods. We're not talking about what color they're painting their front doors. We're talking injuring people. All sorts of desperate measures are taken to try to control this - speed bumps, no-car zones, cameras. This seems cheaper and maybe more effective than all that?
What's even cheaper is not wasting money on "all sorts of desperate measures" and instead, crack down severely on the people actually out there injuring people with their cars (which is also against the law).
Do you have an objection to government-run cameras enforcing a safe speed limit? In my experience, an awful lot of drivers are really, really bad at driving. Speeding, in particular. If there is no other way to ensure idiots behind the wheel stick to a safe speed, then I'm all for it. This is merely a step towards fully-automated vehicles, anyway, which will be literally incapable of breaking the speed limit.
In practice, implementations of things like red-light cameras end up making things worse, by shortening yellow light durations (which makes intersections less safe) in order to generate more revenue for the city and the company running the program.
The major question for me would be data retention – if they monitor speed (or failing to stop at a red light or stop sign, etc.) but fundamentally aren't doing anything different than if they parked an officer there with a radar gun, it doesn't bother me.
Saving the data for later mining, OCRing license plates to build a record of cars traveling around town, etc. would be a different story because that affects everyone whether or not they're choosing to break the law and spans more than a single incident in time.
1 - Do nothing
2 - Put a camera there just to get a % of cars going 5+ over the limit
3 - Put a camera there to OCR everything and save it in perpetuity
The distance between 1 and 2 is quite large but the distance between 2 and 3 is very small and doesn't necessarily come with the same public notice/disclosure/outrage instituting 2 would. The safest course of action strictly from a privacy perspective is to oppose anything that makes implementing #3 easier.
I think you're grossly over-estimating the gap between #1 and #2 in a world where network-connected cameras are so cheap and include significant local processing capabilities.
More importantly, however, there are multiple forces driving deployment of cameras in a variety of area (e.g. right now my city is offering homeowners a tax benefit to install one because of an increase in crime, many people want all police activity to be recorded, etc.) and it seems unlikely that anything will reverse that trend. I think that means that the way to prevent abuse isn't to try to fight block the technology but rather to focus on legal protections & oversight – things like retention policies, restricted access and logging, etc. to avoid strengthening the argument that privacy activists are preventing legitimate police work.
Or the retiree condo commanders going around measuring people's shrubs to make sure they comply with condo bylaws section 4, subsection 65, paragraph 5. For some people, ubiquitous rule enforcement is a utopia, not a Orwellian nightmare.
My guess is that 99.9% of the people on the road exceeding the speed limit this morning are not going to kill a child (or hurt anyone) with their car today just from speeding. It could be 99.99%. I don't have the statistics, but there are probably a lot of 9's there. No matter what that number is, there are already laws against hitting kids with your car. Enforce them. Why do we need to ruthlessly enforce something that the majority of drivers do and in most cases does not result in injury?
What I'm equating is the mental state of the busybody: The need to go out looking for rules being broken that otherwise would, in all likelihood, go unnoticed.
Really? Speed is a major factor in pedestrian deaths. In fact, this fellow is responding to a child being hit on his street. Seems like he's identified a problem and is doing something to highlight that problem. Good on him, I say!
I'd love to catch all the people who don't clean up after their dogs here on the streets of the Netherlands. This is a high-tech country, they should do something like this to remove a well-known public annoyance.
At my last job I had the chance to use OpenCV quite a bit. Every time I would discover new things in OpenCV my brain just fired off with ideas. I remember trying to write a blur function and then finding about integral images, that was awesome.
Completely agree - does anyone know if there are similar open source projects around this? I already have an RPi camera setup for this exactly purpose, but I estimate speed manually (I've measured distance between two visible points on the camera and do a quick calculation as the front bumper passes each point).
I've had it on my "list of side projects" to solve this problem with OpenCV, but haven't gotten enough "Tuits" to get it done, yet since the camera footage has been enough to get me a police car in front of my house monitoring speed. My cousin is a cop in my county and he's indicated that the spot is basically a "ticket-writing factory" -- they don't even bother with cars going 5-10 over since there are so many going 15+ and parking right in front of my house, across the street, puts the cop in a spot where he's not able to be noticed until the car is too close to slow down enough to avoid a ticket.
For a while, the spot was even marked as a speed trap on Waze (not sure if it still is, nor whether or not I was the one who marked it :), but I haven't looked in a while).
When I get it done, I'll be sure to post the complete code along with a blog post on how to set it up, but if there's anything already out there that could get me close, I'd love to know about it.
This wouldn't fly at all in Germany. If your surveillance camera films public ground, even if it's not the primary object being photographed, you're acting illegally. If, for example, you're trying to monitor your front door to catch a potential burglar and you can see the pavement and the people on it on the video, that's not allowed. You won't be able to use the footage in court even if it shows the burglar clearly. Others, including the state, can also sue to have the camera removed.
Even dummy cameras can get you in trouble (e.g. employer installing them in the office kitchen, etc).
I'm not surprised because Germany seems to be known as a country with one of the highest privacy regulations, going above and beyond what the EU mandates[1]. The 2009 amendment to the Bundesdatenschutzgesetz[2] is quite comprehensive. Working with German companies on technology projects has made me acutely aware of this.
However, it seems many other countries do allow public photography and filming within reasonable limits. On a side tangent, I wonder if this means that German media uses many less public crowd shots than non-German media channels, if only because of the stricter privacy laws that would require individual consent for any person showing up in the image or frame.
There are numerous webcams online showing German public spaces, streaming live and offering access to archived views. Are these illegal, or is there some kind of exception for when the surveillance is for public broadcast, or what?
About webcams, AFAIK, the exception is either because people and car plates cannot be identified clearly for the image quality (and frequency) is low, or because they asked for a special authorisation.
Yes. This is usually part of First Amendment arguments, particularly when police and photographers clash over the right to document police arrests that happen in the public.
Laws vary from state to state covering things like the legal use of telephoto lenses, etc (and some of these laws, themselves, are in violation of federal protections and therefore void). As a general rule you are not violating the law if your camera is aimed at a public place especially if it is located on property you own.
Filming and publishing license plate numbers can get you in trouble in some places and I'm sure there are other rules I'm unaware of related to what you are allowed to publish publicly, but what he's doing is likely very legal and protected by the First Amendment of the US constitution.
A pretty common sight around here (western europe) which seems to work pretty well are dynamic reminder signs: electronic signposts with a speed radar, which simply displays your speed in green if you're under the limit, orange if you're a bit over and blinking red if you're way over (using fairly bright led arrays so it's visible in most conditions)
Anecdotally, it seems to work pretty well, drivers do slow down when they approach the sign and don't seem to speed back up afterwards. I do not know if it's the personal reminder or the shame of showing your speeding to everybody around.
Sign've been here a while and seem to keep their effect, they don't seem to become part of the scenery and ignored over time as regular static signs are wont to do. And that applies to both car and bus drivers.
The article shows evidence for the contrary, the city actually installed such a sign. It slowed motorists for a while, but they eventually sped back up again.
I think people hope that they work by shaming. Remind people that they're breaking the law, and they'll break the law less.
I think they actually work by intimidation. Remind them that The Man is watching and they could get a speeding ticket. Once people realize that this is an empty threat and nobody is handing out tickets, they'll go back to their usual behavior.
Shame usually doesn't work in the US because speed limits are routinely underposted, usually by design. So e.g. 10 MPH over is not only socially acceptable, but often expected.
However they will usually keep drivers under 10 over the limit (that it believed by many to be the threshold for an officer to pull you over).
In Ireland there's a few of these types near school types which have pictures of kids crossing the road and if you're going under the limit it says "Thank you for not speeding", if you're over the limit it displays "Slow Down!" in red
Anecdotally, I've heard of attempts to use things like that in the US, with the result that some people took it as a game to see how big a number they could get. One anecdote I heard told of a set of four of those signs being placed on the side of a freeway overpass, covering four lanes of the freeway, and people were observed to be swerving across all four lanes seeing if they could get a high score on all four signs at once.
NB if you use a dash cam, realize that it can also be used to very precisely calculate your speed in exactly the same way. Good if you are fighting a speeding ticket you didn't deserve, bad if you get into a wreck and were speeding.
> One very interesting approach I have seen overseas is a traffic light that turns red if you are speeding as you approach it. It's incredibly effective; instant feedback on your behavior, and immediate loss of any time you gained by speeding. No ticket, unless you run the light. Drivers quickly conclude they're better off by not speeding.
I like that idea but I do worry about it causing rear-end collisions.
In an ideal world drivers wouldn't speed and they also wouldn't tailgate, but in the world we currently occupy both are extremely common (even amongst law enforcement).
So while this would act to reduce speeding, the unpredictability may increase accidents and it is definitely going to reduce traffic flow.
Rear-end collisions are the responsibility of the person behind. If they're keeping the correct distance, there's plenty of time to stop without collisions.
Usually the lights are also a good distance after the radar so you have plenty of time to go from speeding to a halt :)
Well I imagined that it would turn red but at the same time give enough time to the driver to break. So the detector would be at least 300m or 400m from the light.
Rear end collisions like this tend to be pretty benign. For example, one of the arguments against red light cameras is that they actually increase the number of accidents. However, they also increase safety. How? Because while they increase the number of rear end collisions, they decrease the number of side impact collisions, which are much more deadly. Net result: more bent metal, less bent flesh.
I'd also be surprised if speed-sensing lights really increased collisions much. They still go through a full yellow before turning red. They are only more unpredictable if you know the light's cycle time, watched it turn green, and are carefully timing it so you could otherwise predict it.
These are usually on blinking orange while you approach, warning that they might go red at any time. Most drivers unconsciously slow down and I haven't seen a rear-ending on these lights for more than 30 years.
>I like that idea but I do worry about it causing rear-end collisions.
Chicago had a pretty significant red light camera deployment about six or seven years ago. Drivers used to be okay with blowing through a red that was a yellow a moment before in the past. Now everyone slams on their brakes when they see a yellow. According to time.com, "a 22% increase in injuries from rear-end accidents."
So yes, you can expect more rear end collisions and injuries when traffic light enforcement automation breaks up traditional driving habits.
Arguably, its okay to speed. Say doing 50 in a 40 when there's no traffic, like late at night. Why do we need a system to enforce this? I wish there was more fuzzy logic applied to traffic systems. Say a peak hours vs non-peak hours speed limit. Longer yellows during rush hour when everyone is stressed and potentially distracted. Instead we get hard and fast rules for all conditions, which doesn't make much sense.
You omitted the fact that it reduced injuries by 15% from side-swipe collisions.
The Time omitted the fact that side-swipe collisions tend to have more serious injuries than rear-end collisions. They also failed to mention that red light cameras reduce the number of pedestrian and bicycle collisions.
Emanuel has credited the cameras for a 47 percent reduction in dangerous right-angle, or "T-bone," crashes. But the Tribune study, which accounted for declining accident rates in recent years as well as other confounding factors, found cameras reduced right-angle crashes that caused injuries by just 15 percent.
At the same time, the study calculated a corresponding 22 percent increase in rear-end crashes that caused injuries, illustrating a trade-off between the cameras' costs and benefits.
The researchers also determined there is no safety benefit from cameras installed at intersections where there have been few crashes with injuries. Such accidents actually increased at those intersections after cameras went in, the study found, though the small number of crashes makes it difficult to determine whether the cameras were to blame.
>They also failed to mention that red light cameras reduce the number of pedestrian and bicycle collisions.
From what I can tell, no one has done a study on that and it sounds questionable to me to see any results there. In fact, Chicago has a big problem with cyclists hitting pedestrians since it added so many bike lanes. But that's a discussion for another time I suppose and a problem that'll probably take care of itself as cyclists and pedestrians get used to each other.
I've seen special traffic lights showing at which average speed you will hit the next one green. There was a two km stretch, 100km/h allowed and lights near the beginning would show you if you hit green going 60km/h, 70km/h or 80km/h. There was no (written) sign explaining the numbers but I guess the locals would know how to act.
In summary, he's made a speed camera and is now proposing the use of it to his local council.
Are speed cameras not as ubiquitous in the USA as over here in the UK?
They are common, but not ubiquitous by any means. They're usually used in prominent intersections/stretches in which speeding is observed to be common.
To add to this in some areas they cannot legally be used to generate citations. They can, however, be used to direct law enforcement on which intersections would be best served by increased enforcement.
Speed limits are very much consensus based. The rule of thumb is "set the speed limit so that if you didn't have any signs only 10% of people would be in excess of it if left to their own devices. Adjustments for things like high traffic intersections, pedestrian traffic, school zones, (speed traps the local PD insists upon having) etc are made after that. Typically they're much lower than people consider reasonable and IMO this has resulted in two generations of drivers being trained to always exceed the posted speed limit and instead of thinking about how fast they should be going think about how best to speed (e.g "I'm driving on a 4 lane boulevard at 1AM and I'm the only one around, I can do 10-20 over" or "It's a school zone on a week day, better do 0-5 over")
Looks like Mr. Reynolds has begun building a data-set to support what the handful of highway engineers I've spoken to on the subject just assume based on observation.
People in residential areas (children in particular) tend to jump out of nowhere totally unexpected. No driver experience and reaction can help to avoid a collision in such cases. The only way is to keep your speed at level. Those who are speeding in such areas are retards.
Not all speeding is created equal. I agree that 10 miles over a 30 mph zone is probably deadly, if it was properly zoned and not a money-grabbing move (it looks from the article that it was a correct limit, maybe even too high).
However, many speeding tickets (at least in my country and others) are due to low maximum speeds on roads intended as main thoroughfares.
I read here in HN that plenty of U.S. towns live off speeding tickets, see
In my country they have some similar systems, and made even worse because they specifically target tourists and foreigners (especially Argentineans) for the ticketing revenue.
I work for an insurance company, and I've read some research that suggests that speed limits are improperly sent more often than not (a few times too high, but most often too low). Interestingly, accidents are going steadily down due to better cars. Other factors are much bigger influences than just speed (alcohol, stress, etc.), and insurance companies are introducing monitors for that. Hopefully self-driving cars will continue the downward trend :) .
IMO, dynamic speed limits, based on weather and road conditions and other stuff (lower on school days?), should be the default in the 21st century :) . Germany already does it.
Another problem was improperly planned roads, as in the article (another comment mentions that the road in question is a "feeder" road).
The safety here is not on or off. Each increment of speed causes a corresponding increase of risk. That increase might be small, but that misses the point.
The speed limits are a social contract. If someone feels they should increase the risk to others above and beyond that agreement then they can at least fund some civic infrastructure to balance things out.
I don't drive and I don't have a car - but if 85% of cars are exceeding the speed limit, it sounds like that law doesn't have the moral legitimacy that comes from the consent of the governed.
Speed limits might not fit that 'moral legitimacy' model very well. We don't even think much about speed limits. We just drive. So morals don't enter into it.
I'd say the street must not be posted right, or maybe its got an unusual speed limit for the type of road. That fools people. We have a local road on the West side that should be a thoroughfare. But its zoned residential, so 30MPH. Everybody speeds - there are no driveways, no slow traffic, no pedestrian traffic, no risk. I'd argue they just got the signs wrong.
In a residential subdivision like I live in, speeding is much more dangerous than it would be on a county/city/township road.
There are various things that play against safety in residential roads marked for 25 MPH speeds.
In the winter, they're rarely cleared of snow and ice, making them a hazard to travel even at the speed limit. Cars are parked on both sides of the roads much like a typical city street, reducing visibility of pedestrians as they emerge from between cars unexpectedly. And then there's the children playing in the yard who are preoccupied with their activity and not always paying attention to their own safety.
My daughter is hard of hearing (she requires hearing aids to hear and even with them she doesn't have normal hearing) and very ADD. We've continually lectured her about "not running into the street" without making absolutely certain there are no cars, but on one occasion she was nearly hit chasing a ball despite my wife and I being out front screaming and running after her as she bolted into the road. The ball was destroyed by a speeding car who almost also hit the neighbors mailbox when he swerved to avoid killing her. He missed, thank God, but even afterward continued at his breakneck speed down the rest of the street. Since that incident, we rarely allow her to play in the front yard and never allow it between 4:00 PM and 7:00 PM due to the rush hour traffic using my subdivision as a bypass for a poorly timed intersection's traffic light.
The issue in residential areas is the time and distance it takes to come to a full stop. Speed of travel is a proxy measure for those two values.
A good awareness test to try (on a barren road out of the city and away from any traffic) is to slam on your brakes at various speeds, and in various conditions (dry/wet/pouring), and observe how much time it takes for you to come to a stop. Bonus points if you're still in your own lane when you arrived to that complete stop.
To add to that, and perhaps more importantly, is human brain's constant reaction time and tunneling of the vision at higher speeds. The former means that you'll be travelling a longer distance before being able to react to something like seeing a pedestrian entering the street.
The latter narrows your peripheral vision such that looking straight, you won't be able to detect movements on the footpath and crossing streets.
EDIT: A famous commercial by NSW government [1] about the difference of 5km/h.
I wish he'd give me the source code. I could really use this in our neighborhood. Next step would be to have second and third cameras (if necessary) to get the license tag and a picture of the drive. Then erect a hall of shame board.
It's interesting to look back at the responses [0] from just two years ago to Ford's admission that they know exactly who is breaking the law while driving their cars or what people were writing [1] in 2002 when ubiquitous surveillance of public space was becoming a reality.
Another problem in my opinion is the fact that the metrics in the US are in imperial measures. 30 mph is 50 kph, it's about pure numbers.
50 is higher than 30 so common sense tells you that you are going faster. Even if it is not true. There is a subconscious reaction of people to numbers, no matter the metrics.
Presumably that's next via Tesseract + OpenCV. There's even a license plate library called OpenALPR[1] already available that the professor is probably itching to use if he ever gets city approval.
Just needs to get the right angle for the camera. I don't know if he'd need any approval for capturing. Looking up license plates/acting on the data could get one into trouble I imagine though.
"Locust (Avenue) is classified as a collector road, which means the city prefers not to install stop signs or speed humps. The city is working on alternatives that could include painting new parking spaces, installing planters or narrowing lanes."
The road by (unintentional) design seems promotes higher traffic speeds by having few impediments; it is also intersects a highway (BVP 250 via Google Maps), which I suspect could influence drivers near the highway to be increasing speeds or maintaining speeds they had while on the highway. I'd like to know where the speeding is occurring in relation to proximity to the highway.
This made me want to explore how speed limits are set.
I found this "Methods and Practices for Setting Speed Limits:
An Informational Report" by the U.S. Department of Transportation: Federal Highway Administration.
I don't know if people share this opinion, but to me speeding is due to the inadequacy and inconsistency of speed limits.
Near my home there is a major thoroughfare with a 35 MPH speed limit. It has no homes facing the road, just a few fenced backyards some fair distance away but mostly it has farms, ponds, and golf courses. People regularly go 40-50 MPH down this road.
Another major road that crosses this one has a speed limit of 55 MPH. It has several houses directly on it. I've stopped once to let an old man cross the street to get to his mail box. It has a school (where the speed limit drops to 45 MPH). It is too narrow and dark in my opinion to have a 55 MPH speed limit.
I believe both roads should be 45 MPH.
Furthermore, the freeways through town are 55 MPH speed limit. Ridiculous. Most states have 65 MPH limits even within a city. (I didn't grow up here, obviously.) So naturally there is a lot of speeding.
There are probably several rules and reasons for these limits. The 35 MPH road is within city limits while the 55 MPH road is technically in a different township and would once have been considered a farm/country road though it is now a major road to an office building complex and school. We also have to deal with snow and other weather conditions part of the year, and we don't have electronic speed limit signs to change the speed limit or something based on changing conditions.
Then there's also the fact that city planners never manage to build sufficient roads until the current ones are overcrowded. So this 35 MPH road probably was not originally intended to be such a major road, but there isn't any other good way to go N-S through that part of town because the rest is all winding back and forth through neighborhoods.
I would definitely be in favor of having speed limits that were consistent and actually made sense, then enforcing them very carefully.
(Note that the article doesn't say how much over 25 counted as speeding. Did he count 26 as speeding? My own metric is that if it is less than 5 over then it is not speeding.)
Sounds about right. I'd add, I want the app that tells me in a HUD what the speed limit actually is. Maybe an audible boop if I cross the line. Help me actually try to be in conformance when I think that's helpful.
This exists in many non-Google/Apple smartphone navigation apps. HERE maps (formerly Nokia HERE maps) has it with configurable over-speed limits (in addition to its freely downloadable offline maps, with points of interest). The HUD aspect is a bit more difficult to muster at the moment.
When I was using HERE maps on windows phone previously, it would always display the current speed limit and make a noise when you exceeded the speed limit. It's a feature I miss now that I'm back in android with google maps
> Then there's also the fact that city planners never manage to build sufficient roads until the current ones are overcrowded.
As a planner, I always find this sentiment amusing. The only thing less popular than being stuck in traffic, is the use of eminent domain that would be required to pave ever larger percentages of our urban land.
Planners can't expand roadways into the 5th dimension. Roads require land--a lot of it in fact. Also, it's not like planners don't anticipate that congestion will be increasing if demand for vehicle travel and population also increase.
Lastly, the prevailing wisdom in planning is that "widening roads to combat congestion is like loosening your belt to combat obesity." There's a popular press book that talks about how increasing roadway capacity can paradoxically worsen traffic: https://books.google.com/books?id=ckLcxEb5tM8C&hl=en
In general, I agree with your points. In Michigan, with a few exceptions (freeway design limitations/residential roads), the speed limit is supposed to be set at (I think) the 85th percentile. Effectively -- county/city/township road speeds are set at the speed most drivers are driving. We're strictly set at 70 MPH on freeways with few exceptions for specific freeways not designed to safely travel at those speeds and the limit will soon be raised to 85 MPH for rural freeways. I've watched the city roads increase speed limits over the last 10 years where I live, which is a busy metropolitan area. It's really quite nice since it's less chaotic when everyone is traveling at around the same speeds on the roads. And it has reduced speeding.
I do not speed -- I had received a ticket in my 20s that raised my insurance rates so much that I just don't accept the risk. There's a road near my house that practically everyone drove 50 MPH down despite a 40 MPH posted speed limit. They raised it two years ago to 55 MPH after a traffic survey and as a result, I am no longer passed when I drive at the posted speed. It's an anecdotal account, but I'm on that road a few times a day many days and it's a stark difference. When the speed limit is set to what people drive, most people stop speeding.
That said, residential roads at 25 MPH is a rule that the 85th percentile rule doesn't apply to -- for good reason. Parked cars where pedestrians emerge, roads that are not maintained well or cleared for snow/ice, and children who do not have the proper sense to not "run off into the street chasing a ball" all make speeding in subdivisions dangerous.
Wonder if he's using template matching or classification or background subtraction and moving blob detection or what. And I wonder how it deals with different lighting. I wonder also how out it'd be if the car was a foot or two closer to the camera.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 201 ms ] threadI'd love to see an open source implementation of this. I'd put it up to get data on speeding and see if it could be adapted to catch people running the stop sign in front of my house. I see at least 2 cars per day run it and that's just in the time I'm outside to do quick things like checking the mail.
I would thinking rolling through a stop sign (especially at an intersection that is not a 4-way stop) would be much more dangerous than going 30 in a 25.
This is exactly the scenario I have outside of my house. The speed limit on both streets is 25mph, but when most people don't stop at the stop signs and everyone is going too fast...
The issue is even worse at certain times of the year (right now) because, depending on the direction you are going, the cars with no stop signs are mostly blinded by the position of the sun between trees and houses. Just last Monday a neighbor stopped by to say he turned the corner and side-swiped my mailbox because he couldn't see anything.
As far as speeding goes, I generally stick to the limit in a residential but when I'm being tailgated I'll speed up to 30mph. I'd rather only have to worry about stopping the force of my vehicle if a child runs out in front of my car. But it rarely makes a difference, most people want to go 40-45mph and become visibly irate at anything less than that. Things like that make me happy that self driving cars are somewhere on the horizon.
As the story says, the motivation was that a kid was hit by a car on that street in October.
Next month, he'll have a facial recognition system for dog walkers who fail to curb their dog.
A 25 mph speed limit on a street with a bus route is applying a band-aid in most situations. You're never going to get 100% compliance with traffic law, so if a safe pedestrian corridor depends on that, you lose. (By the way, "stepped up" enforcement lasts until the local neighborhood association folks get a ticket for rolling through a stop sign.)
I had a similar issue in my neighborhood a mother and child were hit by a driver making a turn in a corridor with a lot of near misses. Instead of going on some punitive goose chase of enforcing an unrealistic speed limit, we (members of a neighborhood association) approached it as what it was -- a traffic engineering problem.
In our case, traffic light timings weren't adjusted appropriately, so drivers felt compelled to "race" in order to catch a light. Lane markings were unclear, so it wasn't obvious where drivers should be if they were turning. Crosswalks tape was pulled up, and it wasn't obvious to a driver turning where the pedestrians crossed. Also, the pedestrian signal buttons were broken.
We lobbied the city council people and mayor pretty heavily, and they made a few modest investments in signals, signage, paint and a traffic study. 5 years later, accidents dropped by 40% in that corridor.
Speeding in a subdivision is annoying to those who live in the subdivision -- it adds to the noise and makes it a pain to get out of the driveway in reverse -- but it's way more than that when you have young children, especially when they have disabilities as one of mine does.
My daughter is hard of hearing (not deaf, but requires hearing aids) and is exceptionally ADD. Last year, she was playing with a basketball in our driveway and it slipped out of her hands and into the street. Mom and I were on the porch when we saw her go after a basketball, we got up running and were screaming at her. She didn't notice us or the car as she emerged from behind a parked car into the street chasing her ball. The driver ran over the ball and narrowly missed hitting her (also narrowly missed the neighbor's big brick mailbox as he swerved). He didn't slow down, just swerved and continued on at a breakneck speed. The kids are no longer allowed to play in the front yard.
Now, sometimes residential roads are indistinguishable from main roads -- lane markers and such can make it easy to speed "by accident". This is not the case in my subdivision. We have a large marquee indicating the name of the subdivision and a posted speed limit (25 MPH) sign. It's all houses, tightly packed, except for an elementary school. Because of a light with poor timing that causes a back-up on the main road, our subdivision is used as a bypass during Rush Hour.
I set up an RPi connected camera to help me make the case for increased enforcement after my daughter was nearly hit by a speeding driver. Two-thirds of the cars appear to be going well over 25 MPH and over half are going so fast it's obvious they're going 15 MPH over the speed limit.
I doubt anyone is in such a hurry that they're consciously choosing the safety of residents of my neighborhood over their 1/2-minute reduction in travel time to their destination, but their actions are just that. I'll be adding this feature to the software I use to track traffic in my neighborhood. I might even go so far as to shame the worst of the drivers (mostly 16-17 year-olds). I even toyed with the idea of setting up a sign that lights up a "Slow Down" message when a car is obviously speeding, but I'm betting that'd run afoul of local ordinances. Incidentally, I had tried to get a "Deaf Child/Disabled Child" sign put up, but I was told the township no longer does this and given the dubious excuse that "they provide a false sense of security" (no -- "they're expensive" or "we're tired of having to change them when the wording is decided to be 'politically-incorrect' every few months" is the problem -- they still put up "Pedestrian Crossing" and other related signs and they still maintain the existing ones when they get knocked over).
Your kids have been nearly killed on several occasions. Why are you projecting anger at some schmuck trying to drive home, but not standing in front of your town/city/county officials to fix the light?
If the light gets fixed, people stop using your subdivision as a through street.
Look around and try to find a civil engineer who does traffic management to talk to. This stuff is a science -- if you make the right demands, you'll get what you want and be able to sleep at night.
I haven't seen any information on the effect of cameras at merging sites, though.
Also, if people aren't maintaining a safe distance from the car in front of them, then that's useful information too. So is video of people illegally using their celphones while driving, which this technology could also provide.
But surely your answer to something that quantifiably increases injury rates isn't "who cares it's their own fault" is it?
But since you asked for a citation: http://bfy.tw/4343
http://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/red-light-camera-myths-deb...
Also, as I said, if people are tailgating then that's a separate problem that can also be addressed by this technology. It's insane to say that we shouldn't discourage one dangerous behavior because of some other equally-addressable dangerous behavior. People respond to the knowledge that they're more likely to be caught when they do something wrong or stupid. An actual police officer issuing citations for exactly these offenses is effective, but costly. Having the information about frequency of offense at different locations allows those scarce resources to be allocated to greatest effect. What's your problem with that?
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/05049/
That one actually shows roughly net zero change in total crash rate, but a decent decrease in the injury rate.
Which isn't even fast enough to get a ticket from local police.
In my state (which is not Virginia, and it will vary everywhere), local police are prohibited from using radar and need to use an actual stopwatch to track your speed. Obviously very error prone, and they're supposed to basically give you 10 mph leeway - meaning on that road you basically couldn't get a ticket for going under 36 mph.
Also it doesn't say what they determine speeding to be. Based on his description the vehicle should be wholly between both markers for 40 frames at exactly 25 mph. Are cars that touch the mark on frame 39/40 considered speeders since they're going ~25.025 mph? There is a reason many states do not start issuing tickets until 5, 6, 9, 10+ mph over the posted limit.
That's ridiculous, elsewhere it is 10% because that is the legal requirement of the speedometer
The state police can use radar so the floor goes down to 6 over the limit if they are enforcing.
Usually radioed to a second car down at the next intersection.
It's pretty funny to drive back into the city from points west on I-66 as the speed limit drops 70-65-60-55. I usually maintain a steady 7 over and that makes me go from one of the fastest cars on the road to one of the slowest.
Most of the time people receiving the 1-5 MPH tickets are receiving them for violating the speed well beyond that amount (with the actual clocked speed written on the ticket). This encourages people to just pay the ticket without fighting it since they've been given a much lower civil infraction and it makes it a lot harder to succeed in court since the judge knows "radar calibration/accuracy" is much less likely with the written, clocked speed.
A 20mph speed limit, strictly enforced would drop pedestrian fatality rates to essentially 0.[2]
1: http://humantransport.org/sidewalks/SpeedKills.htm 2: http://www.visionzeroinitiative.com/
FWIW, I've never been pulled when I was following those guidelines (driving in GA + SC).
Even so just because the police aren't allowed to give you a ticket because of the measurement error or uncertainty or mercy doesn't discount that they're still speeding.
In a few places near where I live there is extremely clear signage about the speed limit, and that speed cameras are in effect, 100% of the time, every single day. If you speed there, you will get a ticket. The systems are configured to only send the data of speeders, and are audited. It is extremely effective.
I prefer this system in every way to the way tickets are generally handled in the US. It's effective, it's fair, it does not discriminate against minorities, it does not endanger lives of the driver/police/other drivers as pulling someone over does, and it's much easier for me to avoid a ticket, it respects my privacy, persuasive / weeping / friends of cops can't get out of it, there's no chance for police to start tacking on other violations (your blinker is broken!)... etc, etc, etc.
It's just better in every way, except the fact that driving on these particular roads is really boring!
It's not just a neat tech hobby--this is a busybody pitching what amounts to ubiquitous rule-enforcement to the local government.
http://pix11.com/2015/11/19/red-light-cameras-may-be-causing...
Saving the data for later mining, OCRing license plates to build a record of cars traveling around town, etc. would be a different story because that affects everyone whether or not they're choosing to break the law and spans more than a single incident in time.
More importantly, however, there are multiple forces driving deployment of cameras in a variety of area (e.g. right now my city is offering homeowners a tax benefit to install one because of an increase in crime, many people want all police activity to be recorded, etc.) and it seems unlikely that anything will reverse that trend. I think that means that the way to prevent abuse isn't to try to fight block the technology but rather to focus on legal protections & oversight – things like retention policies, restricted access and logging, etc. to avoid strengthening the argument that privacy activists are preventing legitimate police work.
What I'm equating is the mental state of the busybody: The need to go out looking for rules being broken that otherwise would, in all likelihood, go unnoticed.
I've had it on my "list of side projects" to solve this problem with OpenCV, but haven't gotten enough "Tuits" to get it done, yet since the camera footage has been enough to get me a police car in front of my house monitoring speed. My cousin is a cop in my county and he's indicated that the spot is basically a "ticket-writing factory" -- they don't even bother with cars going 5-10 over since there are so many going 15+ and parking right in front of my house, across the street, puts the cop in a spot where he's not able to be noticed until the car is too close to slow down enough to avoid a ticket.
For a while, the spot was even marked as a speed trap on Waze (not sure if it still is, nor whether or not I was the one who marked it :), but I haven't looked in a while).
When I get it done, I'll be sure to post the complete code along with a blog post on how to set it up, but if there's anything already out there that could get me close, I'd love to know about it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photography_and_the_law#Public...
Even dummy cameras can get you in trouble (e.g. employer installing them in the office kitchen, etc).
However, it seems many other countries do allow public photography and filming within reasonable limits. On a side tangent, I wonder if this means that German media uses many less public crowd shots than non-German media channels, if only because of the stricter privacy laws that would require individual consent for any person showing up in the image or frame.
[1] http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20130625-your-private-data-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesdatenschutzgesetz
About webcams, AFAIK, the exception is either because people and car plates cannot be identified clearly for the image quality (and frequency) is low, or because they asked for a special authorisation.
Filming and publishing license plate numbers can get you in trouble in some places and I'm sure there are other rules I'm unaware of related to what you are allowed to publish publicly, but what he's doing is likely very legal and protected by the First Amendment of the US constitution.
Anecdotally, it seems to work pretty well, drivers do slow down when they approach the sign and don't seem to speed back up afterwards. I do not know if it's the personal reminder or the shame of showing your speeding to everybody around.
Sign've been here a while and seem to keep their effect, they don't seem to become part of the scenery and ignored over time as regular static signs are wont to do. And that applies to both car and bus drivers.
I think they actually work by intimidation. Remind them that The Man is watching and they could get a speeding ticket. Once people realize that this is an empty threat and nobody is handing out tickets, they'll go back to their usual behavior.
However they will usually keep drivers under 10 over the limit (that it believed by many to be the threshold for an officer to pull you over).
> One very interesting approach I have seen overseas is a traffic light that turns red if you are speeding as you approach it. It's incredibly effective; instant feedback on your behavior, and immediate loss of any time you gained by speeding. No ticket, unless you run the light. Drivers quickly conclude they're better off by not speeding.
In an ideal world drivers wouldn't speed and they also wouldn't tailgate, but in the world we currently occupy both are extremely common (even amongst law enforcement).
So while this would act to reduce speeding, the unpredictability may increase accidents and it is definitely going to reduce traffic flow.
Usually the lights are also a good distance after the radar so you have plenty of time to go from speeding to a halt :)
I'd also be surprised if speed-sensing lights really increased collisions much. They still go through a full yellow before turning red. They are only more unpredictable if you know the light's cycle time, watched it turn green, and are carefully timing it so you could otherwise predict it.
https://www.google.com/maps/@38.8393523,-77.0661647,3a,75y,3...
Of course, if I've seen them without any signs then I wouldn't even know it....
Chicago had a pretty significant red light camera deployment about six or seven years ago. Drivers used to be okay with blowing through a red that was a yellow a moment before in the past. Now everyone slams on their brakes when they see a yellow. According to time.com, "a 22% increase in injuries from rear-end accidents."
So yes, you can expect more rear end collisions and injuries when traffic light enforcement automation breaks up traditional driving habits.
Arguably, its okay to speed. Say doing 50 in a 40 when there's no traffic, like late at night. Why do we need a system to enforce this? I wish there was more fuzzy logic applied to traffic systems. Say a peak hours vs non-peak hours speed limit. Longer yellows during rush hour when everyone is stressed and potentially distracted. Instead we get hard and fast rules for all conditions, which doesn't make much sense.
http://time.com/3643077/red-light-cams-rear-end-collisions-c...
The Time omitted the fact that side-swipe collisions tend to have more serious injuries than rear-end collisions. They also failed to mention that red light cameras reduce the number of pedestrian and bicycle collisions.
"Taken together, the study shows a statistically insignificant increase of injuries by 5%."
Time's source is the Tribune:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/watchdog/redlight/ct-red-...
Emanuel has credited the cameras for a 47 percent reduction in dangerous right-angle, or "T-bone," crashes. But the Tribune study, which accounted for declining accident rates in recent years as well as other confounding factors, found cameras reduced right-angle crashes that caused injuries by just 15 percent.
At the same time, the study calculated a corresponding 22 percent increase in rear-end crashes that caused injuries, illustrating a trade-off between the cameras' costs and benefits.
The researchers also determined there is no safety benefit from cameras installed at intersections where there have been few crashes with injuries. Such accidents actually increased at those intersections after cameras went in, the study found, though the small number of crashes makes it difficult to determine whether the cameras were to blame.
>They also failed to mention that red light cameras reduce the number of pedestrian and bicycle collisions.
From what I can tell, no one has done a study on that and it sounds questionable to me to see any results there. In fact, Chicago has a big problem with cyclists hitting pedestrians since it added so many bike lanes. But that's a discussion for another time I suppose and a problem that'll probably take care of itself as cyclists and pedestrians get used to each other.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRHphB-YqN8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxpvwKiOpag
It's been installed in a test location for years, and is being deployed in several cities in Sweden at the moment.
Looks like Mr. Reynolds has begun building a data-set to support what the handful of highway engineers I've spoken to on the subject just assume based on observation.
Speeding kills. Something as small as 10 miles over a 30mph may mean a doubling in fatality rate for pedestrians and bicyclists.
One source: https://www.aaafoundation.org/sites/default/files/2011Pedest...
However, many speeding tickets (at least in my country and others) are due to low maximum speeds on roads intended as main thoroughfares.
I read here in HN that plenty of U.S. towns live off speeding tickets, see
http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2011/10/19/town-that-liv...
http://www.9news.com/story/news/local/investigations/2015/05...
In my country they have some similar systems, and made even worse because they specifically target tourists and foreigners (especially Argentineans) for the ticketing revenue.
I work for an insurance company, and I've read some research that suggests that speed limits are improperly sent more often than not (a few times too high, but most often too low). Interestingly, accidents are going steadily down due to better cars. Other factors are much bigger influences than just speed (alcohol, stress, etc.), and insurance companies are introducing monitors for that. Hopefully self-driving cars will continue the downward trend :) .
IMO, dynamic speed limits, based on weather and road conditions and other stuff (lower on school days?), should be the default in the 21st century :) . Germany already does it.
Another problem was improperly planned roads, as in the article (another comment mentions that the road in question is a "feeder" road).
The speed limits are a social contract. If someone feels they should increase the risk to others above and beyond that agreement then they can at least fund some civic infrastructure to balance things out.
I'd say the street must not be posted right, or maybe its got an unusual speed limit for the type of road. That fools people. We have a local road on the West side that should be a thoroughfare. But its zoned residential, so 30MPH. Everybody speeds - there are no driveways, no slow traffic, no pedestrian traffic, no risk. I'd argue they just got the signs wrong.
There are various things that play against safety in residential roads marked for 25 MPH speeds.
In the winter, they're rarely cleared of snow and ice, making them a hazard to travel even at the speed limit. Cars are parked on both sides of the roads much like a typical city street, reducing visibility of pedestrians as they emerge from between cars unexpectedly. And then there's the children playing in the yard who are preoccupied with their activity and not always paying attention to their own safety.
My daughter is hard of hearing (she requires hearing aids to hear and even with them she doesn't have normal hearing) and very ADD. We've continually lectured her about "not running into the street" without making absolutely certain there are no cars, but on one occasion she was nearly hit chasing a ball despite my wife and I being out front screaming and running after her as she bolted into the road. The ball was destroyed by a speeding car who almost also hit the neighbors mailbox when he swerved to avoid killing her. He missed, thank God, but even afterward continued at his breakneck speed down the rest of the street. Since that incident, we rarely allow her to play in the front yard and never allow it between 4:00 PM and 7:00 PM due to the rush hour traffic using my subdivision as a bypass for a poorly timed intersection's traffic light.
A good awareness test to try (on a barren road out of the city and away from any traffic) is to slam on your brakes at various speeds, and in various conditions (dry/wet/pouring), and observe how much time it takes for you to come to a stop. Bonus points if you're still in your own lane when you arrived to that complete stop.
The latter narrows your peripheral vision such that looking straight, you won't be able to detect movements on the footpath and crossing streets.
EDIT: A famous commercial by NSW government [1] about the difference of 5km/h.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9VWF1DXQ8s
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7036525
[1] http://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/cameras.htm
50 is higher than 30 so common sense tells you that you are going faster. Even if it is not true. There is a subconscious reaction of people to numbers, no matter the metrics.
[1] https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr
The road by (unintentional) design seems promotes higher traffic speeds by having few impediments; it is also intersects a highway (BVP 250 via Google Maps), which I suspect could influence drivers near the highway to be increasing speeds or maintaining speeds they had while on the highway. I'd like to know where the speeding is occurring in relation to proximity to the highway.
This made me want to explore how speed limits are set.
I found this "Methods and Practices for Setting Speed Limits: An Informational Report" by the U.S. Department of Transportation: Federal Highway Administration.
- http://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/speedmgt/ref_mats/fhwasa12004/ - http://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/speedmgt/ref_mats/fhwasa12004/fhw...
Near my home there is a major thoroughfare with a 35 MPH speed limit. It has no homes facing the road, just a few fenced backyards some fair distance away but mostly it has farms, ponds, and golf courses. People regularly go 40-50 MPH down this road.
Another major road that crosses this one has a speed limit of 55 MPH. It has several houses directly on it. I've stopped once to let an old man cross the street to get to his mail box. It has a school (where the speed limit drops to 45 MPH). It is too narrow and dark in my opinion to have a 55 MPH speed limit.
I believe both roads should be 45 MPH.
Furthermore, the freeways through town are 55 MPH speed limit. Ridiculous. Most states have 65 MPH limits even within a city. (I didn't grow up here, obviously.) So naturally there is a lot of speeding.
There are probably several rules and reasons for these limits. The 35 MPH road is within city limits while the 55 MPH road is technically in a different township and would once have been considered a farm/country road though it is now a major road to an office building complex and school. We also have to deal with snow and other weather conditions part of the year, and we don't have electronic speed limit signs to change the speed limit or something based on changing conditions.
Then there's also the fact that city planners never manage to build sufficient roads until the current ones are overcrowded. So this 35 MPH road probably was not originally intended to be such a major road, but there isn't any other good way to go N-S through that part of town because the rest is all winding back and forth through neighborhoods.
I would definitely be in favor of having speed limits that were consistent and actually made sense, then enforcing them very carefully.
(Note that the article doesn't say how much over 25 counted as speeding. Did he count 26 as speeding? My own metric is that if it is less than 5 over then it is not speeding.)
https://maps.here.com/
If pedestrians or bicyclists use a road, the speed limit is 20MPH, strictly enforced.
Consequently, they also have a grand total of 0 pedestrian fatalities most years.[1]
1: http://www.visionzeroinitiative.com/
As a planner, I always find this sentiment amusing. The only thing less popular than being stuck in traffic, is the use of eminent domain that would be required to pave ever larger percentages of our urban land.
Planners can't expand roadways into the 5th dimension. Roads require land--a lot of it in fact. Also, it's not like planners don't anticipate that congestion will be increasing if demand for vehicle travel and population also increase.
Lastly, the prevailing wisdom in planning is that "widening roads to combat congestion is like loosening your belt to combat obesity." There's a popular press book that talks about how increasing roadway capacity can paradoxically worsen traffic: https://books.google.com/books?id=ckLcxEb5tM8C&hl=en
I do not speed -- I had received a ticket in my 20s that raised my insurance rates so much that I just don't accept the risk. There's a road near my house that practically everyone drove 50 MPH down despite a 40 MPH posted speed limit. They raised it two years ago to 55 MPH after a traffic survey and as a result, I am no longer passed when I drive at the posted speed. It's an anecdotal account, but I'm on that road a few times a day many days and it's a stark difference. When the speed limit is set to what people drive, most people stop speeding.
That said, residential roads at 25 MPH is a rule that the 85th percentile rule doesn't apply to -- for good reason. Parked cars where pedestrians emerge, roads that are not maintained well or cleared for snow/ice, and children who do not have the proper sense to not "run off into the street chasing a ball" all make speeding in subdivisions dangerous.