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Only if traditional cars are completely outlawed and only driverless cars are allowed on the road. It'll be many decades before that happens if it happens at all.

   

Just ONE speed camera raked in £4million since 2014: Over 210,000 drivers are stung by motorway limits which keep changing

210,538 drivers were caught by the cameras on roads with changeable limits
With fines costing £100, the monitors have raised around £21million since 2013
A single camera on the A1 at Great Ponton, Lincolnshire, raked in £1,661 a day


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z4hE24zipo


Cameras have nothing to do with safety.

   

Playing games to catch motorists off-guard like changing speed limits, moving the cameras around or concealing them are misuses, IMO. BUT that doesn't mean they can't be used properly.

I'm not aware of anywhere in Canada where the speed limit changes regularly....camera or no camera that's unsporting.

   

I agree that red light/speed on green cameras may create that safety bubble, but the photo radar that increases safety the most (and pisses off most people) are the vans/trucks sitting beside the road, taking pictures of license plates as people speed by.

As to your second point, the province doesn't use photo radar on any of its highways -
although municipalities are allowed to place them on provincial highways within their city/town limits - so that's beside the point. Speed enforcement on those roads, as well as rural gravel roads, is still done the way it always has been, with police officers in police cars handing out tickets.

   

Given that the vast majority of collisions in most places are caused by human error (87% in Alberta for example), driverless cars will indeed end photo radar and much of the death/injury on our roads.

   

Rural roads are usually pretty damn empty, and any gravel road you can drive that fast on, you can see who is coming for miles. Effectively, when a person is only endangering themselves, it's their choice.

Also, some counties do a better job maintaining their gravel roads than others. You could be doing 120 on some gravel roads down in the Special Areas and it would feel no different than doing 120 on the highway. Not sure how well that scales up after that, but I could imagine 200 is doable.

   

While municipalities will see reduced photo radar revenue, states and provinces may actually see their expenses decrease, as the cost of rescue services, traditional traffic enforcement, health care and lots of other services will drop.

I've seen figures that projected the cost of collisions to society on Alberta highways is somewhere between $5 - $12 billion annually, which isn't surprising given that rescue costs alone at one collision can easily exceed $1 million. Tack on things like insurance, lost income, health care costs (medicine, physical therapy, etc.), and all the other things that you have to deal with after a crash, and it gets pretty damned expensive for society.

   

Highways are also a little bit more forgiving. Doing 10-20 above the limit in a 100 or 110 area while travelling in the same direction as everyone else, with no pedestrians to worry about, is much less likely to be the direct cause of an accident than when doing 10-20 over the limit in a school zone or residential area. It may be a contributing factor when something else goes wrong (distracted driving, DUI, driver undergoing medical distress, etc), but it is almost never the direct cause unless someone is speeding excessively.

That said, if Alberta were to do the same as BC and actually up the highway speed limits to what most people consider reasonable, then again I wouldn't mind photo radar. Same for cities on major city streets. My qualm with photo radar isn't that it is another meathod to get caught. My qualm with it is that it is often used to catch people who are driving at what most people consider to be a reasonable speed, in an area where the speed limit is too low. If all the speed limits made sense, like school zones and residential areas (which are often too fucking high), then by all means ticket away!

   

But that's why I say they do not change behavior! The owner of the car gets a fine in the mail. Whoopdedoo! There is a stop sign in the Grove where an SUV will sit half a block away, and photograph any car that doesn't stop at that stop sign. Everyone knows it, and the only stop sign in town that any one will stop for is that one. Driving behavior is not altered, the public is not safer.

In the rest of the world, a cop pulls you over, tells you why you are getting a ticket, you pay a fine AND get points against your license. Too many points, you lose your license. That changes behavior!



And like I said a while ago, the last time I got stopped was for a 'enforcement blitz' by the Sheriffs they were checking documentation on my rural road, verifying registrations and insurance. I have yet to see one this year actually pulling anyone over on the highway, like the guy who 5 minutes earlier was closer to me than a trailer I'd be pulling doing 110. Somehow my having my documents on me seemed more important to them than an actual dangerous driver.

It may be just my perception, but it seems like photo radar is being used by municipalities in place of enforcing the Highway Traffic Act. That has resulted in a lot of bad behavior that produces a lot of the road rage and consequently increases the danger on our roads.

   

You are deluding yourself.

As Mr. Scott said "Ye canna change the laws of physics".

K=½​​​⋅m⋅v​​²

The force of a vehicle in motion is a product of the mass of the vehicle and the square of the velocity. You want to do 200 on a gravel road with a posted speed of 80, for a 2000kg vehicle you've gone from 438kJ to 3.08MJ! Nearly an order of magnitude greater.

The road has a posted speed limit not to inconvenience you, but because that road was designed to keep a vehicle safe at those speeds. You hit washboard, a deer, a pothole, the muffler of the rustbucket ahead of you, doing 200 - you will die.

There is some pretty complicated physics that goes into building roads, and you'd be advised to pay attention to them. You might get away with 10 - 20 over, but when you start into the 20 -30 over, you've reduced your breaking ability, stopping ability and reaction time while also doubling the kinetic energy of your vehicle. That will also exceed the safety systems built into your car that keep you safe in an accident.



People have no idea what is 'reasonable'. They think they can drive 120 because they always have and they managed to get away with it. Until they don't.

https://www.castanet.net/news/Kelowna/1 ... -on-Hwy-97
http://bc.ctvnews.ca/hwy-1-in-surrey-re ... -1.3390362
http://www.9news.com/traffic/2-separate ... /433638386

Like I wrote, roads are designed for certain speeds in order to keep traffic safe. Exceeding those speeds, following too closely, not paying attention - all contribute to accidents. I'm not willing to pay to have all the roads resurfaced and widened so that your commute home is 2 minutes shorter.

Leave earlier!

   

All the car wrecks along our stretch of gravel back that up.

   

The idiots on the road, even if they are "only" endangering themselves, are the ones that keep your insurance costs way up.

   

SOME highways are more forgiving - such as the QEII and Highway 16 are safer because of various safety features built into them (cable barriers, rumble strips, interchanges, etc.), but the fact is most highways in the province are pretty old and often do not have those safety features, nor are they twinned.

   

^ This - they also increase the cost of health care, emergency services, and a host of other things when they crash. The societal cost of crashes in Alberta alone is in the billions of dollars each year.

   

That still happens in Alberta, even in Edmonton. Photo radar and intersection safety devices are there to support traffic safety, because police simply can't be everywhere at once.

Honestly, I would prefer more police officers and fewer automated traffic enforcement devices, because you get a triple whammy when an officer hands you a ticket - a fine, demerits, and the humiliation of sitting there as everyone rolls by laughing at you for getting caught. Sometimes, you get increased insurance fees too, depending on how many demerits you already have and the infraction. However, police forces everywhere are starved for resources and can't afford to have as many officers patrolling traffic as they used to.

If small towns really wanted to increase safety, they'd install those intersection cameras at every intersection in every direction - that would force people to slow down and follow the rules...however, once again, resources prevent that.





Well, I can tell you that even though haven't seen them, law enforcement is out there enforcing the rules to the best of their abilities. For example, you can follow the enforcement topics the RCMP plans by following their media feed:

http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/en/news?province[]=1149]

As you can see, May is Motorcycle safety month, and March was Seatbelt month.

They also are running a pilot project to reduce speed-related collisions that started in April.

   

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