As other commenters wrote, you want drivers to always follow the speed limits. Moreover, I can tell you how things look when drivers know where cameras are placed. In Poland, we have an actual Android app that will tell you not only where stationary cameras are but also where the police currently is monitoring the traffic. It's a hit among drivers, and people use it to look like law-abiding citizens next to a camera, while not giving a fuck about road safety and speeding like crazy the moment they're sure they're not being monitored.
Seriously, the more drivers I know, the more I want linear speed tracking and ALPRs to be deployed everywhere, on every single damn road.
> As other commenters wrote, you want drivers to always follow the speed limits.
Then you need to set sane limits. A speed limit that 80+% of the people violate isn't a sane limit.
Or, you need to reengineer the road so that you basically can't speed. However, you have to accept that you are going to lose a lot of traffic and, with that, a lot of business.
Creating a 6 lane wide street and then slapping a 20 mph limit on it doesn't make sense.
You can't have sane limits because people don't give a damn about them out of habit, hence you can't really observe the impact of them and adjust accordingly. At this point I believe drivers need to be forced to obey the law by any means necessary in order to create room for traffic engineers to do their job of optimizing limits.
And then you still need to force drivers to obey, because as far as I know, most of them are not able to comprehend that they're not the smartest people around. Just because a limit doesn't make sense to you, desn't mean it's not right and optimal in the overall context of traffic flow in the city.
EDIT: Another thing. Have you ever seen a driver maintaining safe distance? Me neither. It's impossible, because even if you try, you quickly get overtaken by an asshole who knows better. And then we have accidents like the one near me two days ago, when a girl started braking because there was a cat on the road, and she got a whole bunch of people behind her to rear-end one another...
Forcing will not work. If there in anything that the old 55mph limits in the US showed, it's that.
> You can't have sane limits because people don't give a damn about them out of habit
Look, there is science behind this--people drive the speed they feel is safe--they basically don't listen to speed signs. If you want them to drive slower, you have to engineer the road so that they don't feel safe at 45 but do at 35.
> Another thing. Have you ever seen a driver maintaining safe distance? Me neither.
In San Diego? Never. In Pittsburgh? All the time. Guess which one gets frequent enough bad weather to clean the idiots that don't leave following distance off the road?
> Look, there is science behind this--people drive the speed they feel is safe--they basically don't listen to speed signs. If you want them to drive slower, you have to engineer the road so that they don't feel safe at 45 but do at 35.
I've heard that idea before somewhere, and I quite like it. Making the environment seem unsafe on purpose so that people adjust their behaviour. I'm interested if anyone tried that on larger scale somewhere, and what were the results.
* always use blinker when turning / change lanes cameras
* turn your lights on:
* 30 minutes from dusk / dawn
* when it's raining
cameras
* bikers without safety lights cameras
* runners without reflective gear yet running in the
road at night cameras
* hand-held cellphone while driving and not stopped
cameras
* tailgating cameras
Speeding is the least of my worries about the road.
30 is still a very painful accident for a pedestrian; but, yes, ideally there'd be less pedestrian incidents... [1, random thought footnote]
That said, most of the things I was suggesting had more to do with highway situations, where I imagine most of the speed cameras would be situated. I was mainly ranting about things that I see almost every single time that I go driving, if not every single time I go driving, that erks me as a safety hazard that seems more dangerous than speeding (where speeding is defined as above the posted limit, but within a modest delta of other adjacent cars on the highway)
[1, random thought footnote] Unless we had some sort of ironic situation where since cars are going slower, pedestrians become more presumptuous about their powers and the car's stopping abilities / driver's attentiveness and it'd result in more accidents. Who knows
No, these are not on highways in NYC. These are on roads directly in front of schools, as per state law. (I guess.)
Some of these roads are called highways ("The West Side Highway" is a surface street), some feel like highways (Queens Boulevard) but they differ from highways in that people cross them to get to school.
How could enforcing the law be a kickback scheme? Don't want a ticket? Don't speed!
As a pedestrian I would personally prefer that drivers always feel they are in danger of getting a ticket, so drivers always have an incentive to follow the law.
Well what if the people enforcing this particular law do so only because they are getting some percentage of the ticket fee?
It could lead to, for instance, inappropriately low speed limits and an inordinate amount of police work on traffic violations instead of things that are more dangerous but make less money.
I completely agree with the sentiment, those are all valid concerns. But in the context of New York City I strongly believe the dangers to pedestrians are paramount.
> inappropriately low speed limits
It's hard to imagine speed limits too low for a pedestrian intensive area like lower Manhattan. According to this fact sheet [1], "In the City of London, the rate of crash-related deaths and serious injuries within 20-mph residential zones dropped by 42 percent." ... probably worth it in an area where pedestrians greatly outnumber drivers.
> inordinate amount of police work on traffic violations instead of things that are more dangerous
I'm not sure there's anything in the city right now more dangerous to the average citizen than unsafe driving, given that there are on average 4,250 permanently-debilitating injuries from traffic injuries due to traffic injuries each year in the city. [1]
If I'm reading this correctly, homicide still kills more people than traffic accidents. So while the injury rate may be higher for traffic, death rate still seems to be biased toward homicide.
As for how to make the traffic better, your source indicates 1/4 of fatalities are from drivers failing to yield right of way. One idea is that if intersections in cities had turn arrows and different parts of the cycle for turning cars and pedestrians, that could reduce that significantly. Doing an analysis of why people get hit even though they're in the crosswalk or whatever might be informative here rather than just going straight for speed limit or installing airbags on the fronts of cars.
Of course, I think the real solution is not better traffic laws, but self-driving cars. People are fundamentally poorly suited to driving cars and only a machine can do a consistent job without getting bored or impatient. Once we have a decent number of self driving cars, any ways to improve pedestrian safety will probably look totally different.
It might save a lot of lives to focus less on new traffic laws and more on making autonomous cars a reality (the legal side of that seems to be progressing very slowly).
Around where I live there is a road where the limit changes from 70 km/h to 50 km/h due to a pedestrian crossing. They also placed a speed camera just after the crossing. When driving there I always find my self checking and double checking my vehicle speed and not paying full attention to the crossing. But in this specific case I guess that the "forced" speed reduction due to the camera is a bigger benefit (fewer accidents and less serious if they do happen) than the distraction caused by it.
If it's about public safety, you WANT people to know that the cameras are there.