General Road and Highway Discussion

[ijmorlan]

I think people exaggerate the badness of drivers (I'm as guilty as anyone else), but I agree there are some obvious changes necessary.

For example, I don't really understood the opposition to photo radar - ESPECIALLY in pedestrian heavy areas, school zones, and other low speed areas.  It seems like that would be pretty effective in controller drivers (or giving us enough information to remove the bad drivers from the road) w/o a lot of the downsides of things like speed bumps / super narrow roads / etc.

I think it’s the same people who think there is something shady about police hiding behind a sign. Apparently police are supposed to announce exactly where they are ticketing at any given moment so people can slow down there (but not anywhere else). These are also the people who are annoyed that radar detectors are illegal, again because apparently it is their god-given right to speed anywhere that is not currently being enforced (side note: the real fix is to use non-detectable alternatives to actual radar). There is probably overlap with people who think government is out to get as much of our money as possible for taxes (to be spent on what? well, mostly what people demand, obviously, so if people don’t like their taxation level, they should explain what government services should be terminated, and I don’t mean whining about the small amount spent on needle exchange programs or whatever the scapegoat of the day is, but actually explaining how to cut say 20% off of government expenditures in a way that will be acceptable to their fellow citizens).

Having said that, if we’re going to have photo radar, we need to decide what the rules really are. People need to be clear on what the actual speed limit is — is it the number on the sign? A bit faster? Significantly faster? Only ticket people going significantly faster than traffic?

I don’t really care too much what we decide — a 100km/h limit on the 401 with no tickets below 120km/h, or a 120km/h limit with tickets starting at 121km/h, or something else — but it needs to be clear and unambiguous.

Also, with pervasive enforcement, a different approach should be taken. Everybody should get a certain number of free warnings for minor violations. For example, maybe everybody gets 1 incident at 5km/h over the limit per month. Again, I don’t know what the exact rules need to be, but there is a big difference between automated pervasive enforcement of exact rules and judgement-driven occasional enforcement conducted manually.