EDIT: since apparently a bunch of people woke up with the wrong foot this morning or forgot to check the group they’re in:
This is a joke. Do not steal or vandalize speed enforcement cameras (or anything else for that matter). That’s against the law and you will likely get arrested.
If you’re addicted to crack or any other drugs, please seek professional help.
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Literally
19842024Or maybe some people just need more coffee 🤷🏻♂️
People get too embarrassed about publicly being wrong. I went in on someone recently in a comment thread, typed up like a whole paragraph tearing down what I thought was an indefensible point.
Homeboy replied like “hey you misread my comment”
Rather than edit everything away to hide my shame, I just replied with “you’re right, I’m drunk on a cruise!” and it was honestly a highlight of the voyage. Maybe some randys can get the same enjoyment out of rereading the interaction, and that’s way more than anyone would get out of “edit: whoops”
The amount of times I’ve seen the “oops, you’re right, sorry/thanks!” equivalent on Lemmy makes me think this place really has attracted some good people.
Disclaimer: yes we have trolls, shit posts, hot takes, etc.
Enjoying messing around doesn’t mean people aren’t good. Shit posts in particular show a level of awareness, otherwise it’s just a post.
True. In fact, I just came here from a shitpost community!
That was the wrong term for sure. I quickly added that part at the end after I envisioned the first reply being “if you don’t think the Reddit trolls came over then I don’t know where you’re looking” or similar.
it was honestly a highlight of the voyage
Bruh if getting politely corrected on social media is the highlight of your holiday, you gotta find a better type of holiday.
replies like this are why it was a highlight 💖
I mean it sincerely. It sounds like the cruise itself wasn’t super enjoyable to you. Which is totally fine. Maybe you’d enjoy going on a guided tour, or self-guiding yourself around another country or region. Or maybe you’d get maximal enjoyment out of just spending a week at the beach. Different people have different sorts of ideal holidays, but if a mediocre social media interaction was the highlight of your cruise, I’d be inclined to think cruises might not be yours.
Lemmy will learn about hyperbole one day.
One day a million years from now.
I had a great time, but thank you very much for all the unsolicited advice. The suggestions that I had a bad time are kinda weird though, maybe reapproach the way you talk to strangers!
go easy he’s on the spectrum
That’s honestly a really great approach. I’m going to do that next time I fuck up at work. Boss: “The production server is down and the database is hosed!”
Me: Omg I’m so sorry! I’m drunk on a cruise!
If I was embarrassed I would have deleted the post.
In Finland we steal dynamite from construction sites and do some sudden nightly dismantling. No crackheads needed.
It does amaze me how many people I’ve met who have a vicious hatred towards speed cameras. Especially interesting e: in a country where people have so much respect for the police.
We don’t like the idea a private company is enforcing laws not for safety but for profit. Especially when things like shortening of yellow light time and cameras that don’t properly report speed. It’s horseshit.
A private company?
Yeah. Even in the US many municipalities outsource almost the entire ticketing process to the company selling the cameras, and the company collects a (usually outsized) percentage of the fees. So the company has the incentive to use whatever shady tactics to increase ticketing infraction events. This could be by changing the camera angle slightly to falsely get plates from yellow throughers or sometimes they change light timing itself to increase ticketing events…
I was talking about Finns in Finland complaining about speed cameras.
I would just assumed because they are using the same Swedish company (Sensys Gatso) that does profit sharing agreements with municipalities in the US, that the agreement is the same.
I can’t seem to find the finnish contract award details, so I can’t confirm that they are. I am thinking now, that their might be a chance that they aren’t, given how extreme finnish traffic violation costs can be (% of salary).
% of salary
If you’re going to issue fines for speeding, this is the most just way to do it though.
We’ll never do that in the US because we hate the poor.
It seems like a fairly risky assumption to make just from you having it work like that in the US.
As a side note, that % thing (day fines) don’t cover all speeding tickets, since they’re considered so minor. It’s the bigger offenses (of speed limits and in general) that are covered. So it actually covers other stuff too, not just speeding.
Here’s a pic showing the amounts. It has the speed limit, how much over the limit you were and how much you end up paying as a fine. Bottom one is “regardless of the limit” and “over 20 km/h”, so whenever you go over by over 20 km/h, you pay “day fines”.
It’s not the local government putting them up, it’s a private company who is in charge and keeps at least half the revenue. Plus when their location is known and they get less effective the same company will try other things like altering yellow light time length to keep profits up.
Do you have a link explaining this? I searched for “poliisi valvontakamera” and “poliisi nopeuskamera asennus” and didn’t find stuff about who puts them up and whatnot or about the income sharing. I have read articles about how they’re a nice source of income for the state but no mention of the companies involved.
They’re talking about in the US.
It seems everyone who replied to me was talking about the US haha, while I was talking about Finland
In the USA, many or most speed cameras are owned and operated not by the local police or city, but by a private company that keeps some percent of the fines they give out.
They are contracted by the city, country, or other authority. They are not randomly placed or operated without permission.
I was talking about Finns in Finland complaining about speed cameras.
Capitalism caused a problem?
I don’t think we have that problem in Finland and we are a capitalist country.
You can at least pretend you are.
What do you mean?
Us Nords are socialist enough to keep a tight leash on capitalism. Less and less of course, but capitalism doesn’t define us, the way it defines basically the rest of the world.
Wait we have respect for the police in Finland?
Are you genuinely asking? Because we absolutely have respect for the police, it’s literally the most highly respected job.
Oh wow, that’s quite a surprise to me. Doesn’t really reflect to what I learned growing up and in adulthood
Dey took 'r jobs
What about vodka, is that needed?
Not always needed but always appreciated.
What’s the copper to crack exchange rate currently?
5.5lbs of copper is apparently about 20$ worth
What is that? Like 1 crack?
Like 4.
I should make a website that shows crack prices across the usa on a map. I could open it up to submissions and build a dataset of what people charge for crack. Then get a perfect business plan. Corner the crack market. Oh wow I know what im gonna do with the rest of my life!
Crack is cheap unless you are in the nice suburbs. Not much variation in price otherwise.
Your competition would not take kindly to your business. See inner city violence.
then I won’t sell in the neighborhood. I’ll start a website, getgoodcrack4me.biz
Even ignoring the likelihood of being murdered, illegal drug arbitrage is going to be low margin for the amount of risk involved. Most of the profit is with the manufacturers and distributors.
You can only get cocaine from the South American cartels. No local production with vertical integration is impossible. You can only cut into street level as a producer and direct customer interface is the only viable business model. That competition would be a direct with likewise retailers. Yes, buying from the producers of raw material and locally producing the finished good has a considerable profit margin, but your direct competition is established brands that have no problem capping a fool stepping on their block. Distancing yourself from the customer-facing business only decreases profit margin and risk, but unavoidable turnover would mandate a more direct customer interface in order to maximize profit margins by absorbing considerable risk.
“1 crack please, Mr. Dealer, sir.”
But that doesn’t mean that you’d get the full $20 if you take it to a scrapyard. Still pretty good though. A relative of mine searches dumpsters for metal stuff and gets good money selling it to scrapyards. They have a job and good money. I think they just do it as a sidehustle and for fun
Wait I can buy 5 lbs of copper for 20 dollars? Making ingots sounds like a blast. Or coinage!
Edit: this is high quality copper, right?
No, it’s a melted down speed camera.
Dude is about to write a complaint letter to crackhead-nasir
That can’t be true, that seems incredibly cheap.
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Perhaps you’re not the intended target audience, then.
Yes, the intended target audience is desperate addicts who can be tricked into committing a crime that doesn’t actually benefit them at all.
Yes, the intended target audience is desperate addicts who can be tricked into committing a crime that
doesn’t actually benefit them at all.benefits society.FTFY
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are you sure? There’s only 1 way to find out
Hey it me, ur mayor. I give u permission do it do it
That doesn’t sound quite right, but I’m sure there’s some platinum in there to make up for anything short of 5 lbs.
deleted by creator
Or a Balrog.
Gotta enforce speed limits.
And these things don’t shoot you if you look at them wrong – or are black.
Edit: "No, you can’t just stick a camera worth a couple of thousand [local currency] next to the road, that takes photographic evidence of infractions. You gotta rip out the entire surface, redesign the sides and introduce a few sharp curves by demolishing a few blocks of buildings here and there. In the mean time speed is only enforced by violent cops who feel like you were speeding.
It’s the only logical way."
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Where I live they are mostly used in school zones and residential areas, and they only trigger when going 12+ miles over the limit. Seems pretty reasonable.
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Yeah people not respecting speed zones around schools is a real problem. I can’t believe how people drive, and I’ve always got some Dodge Ram or Ford F150 riding my ass because I’m driving the proper speed.
Even if there was no posted speed limit, there are children everywhere and children are unpredictable.
Rule of thumb: if you feel like you need a huge trophy truck to feel protected on the roads, chances are you drive like an asshole.
They also can’t testify in court, depriving accused speeders of their constitutional right to due process.
But back to your first claim: “gotta enforce speed limits:” No, we do not. Speeding is a symptom of a street that was designed wrong to begin with. The correct solution is to fix the design, not install a speed camera as some sort of big brother band-aid.
Edit: why do y’all apparently hate the idea of improving street design? As a former traffic engineer, I’m telling you that that’s the only way to truly fix the problem of speeding. I don’t get why that’s controversial.
Sorry, but that is a gross misinterpretation. Drivers are not victims of an intrinsic speed devil that they cannot escape. They still choose to violate the speed limit in most cases.
What was done in these countries is to acknowledge, that physical design is more effective as enforcement, than the cop with a speed-meter.
Still the explicit intent is to enforce speed-limits, knowing that people would violate them if they could, but they can’t because they would wreck their car. Still those people choose to violate and are responsible for their actions.
I gotta be honest; I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make. First you tell me I’m wrong that it’s essential to fix the design of the street to facilitate the correct speed, then you agree with me that “physical design is more effective as enforcement,” then you say that the risk of people wrecking their car effectively deters them from speeding, then you say they choose to speed anyway.
You say that speed limits shouldnt be enforced as they would be a “symptom” of poor road design. This abolishes the speeding drivers from their own responsibility for violating the traffic rules.
You misinterpret the design choices shown in the video as the opposite of “bad road design”, therefore “good road design”, which implies a generality. However these design choices are made solely and explicitly to enforce speed limits. They have disadvantages in other ways e.g. if you make spots where only one car can pass at a time, it makes traffic less efficient. These disadvantages wouldn’t be needed if people would uphold the traffic rules by themselves.
Good design or bad design, many people will speed if they can get away with it. With a proper enforcement through speed cameras, and proper penalties for speeding, e.g. losing your licences for repeated offenses or having your vehicle impounded, could equally serve for enforcement. They are just more expensive, so making design choices is prefered by some countries.
But still people who speed chose to speed. They chose to violate the traffic rules and they chose to endanger other people and themselves. So speeding is never a “symptom” of road design. It is always a “symptom” of selfish assholes that should not be given the right to operate dangerous vehicles.
However these design choices are made solely and explicitly to enforce speed limits.
No, they’re designed to discourage people from exceeding the design speed, which is different.
But still people who speed chose to speed. They chose to violate the traffic rules and they chose to endanger other people and themselves. So speeding is never a “symptom” of road design. It is always a “symptom” of selfish assholes that should not be given the right to operate dangerous vehicles.
Jeez, it’s not as if the vast majority of speeders are mustache-twirling villains doing it for the evulz who are incorrigible short of being punished by the law! They just think it’s safe to be driving that speed because the overly-generous street design misleads them.
Look, here’s the bottom line: the whole concept of a “speed limit” only exists in the first place because of a mismatch between the design speed and the speed people want to drive, which makes it unsafe. If you fix the geometry of the street to eliminate the mismatch such that the speed people want to drive at is safe, you don’t need the limit anymore and can just fall back on “reasonable and prudent.”
Y’all are acting like we need speed limits for their own sake, just to have something to enforce.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
overly-generous street design misleads them
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
And there is disagree. We don’t need speed limits for their own sake. They are the speed that is deemed appropriate in the area for a multitude of reason. Primarily safety, but also things like noise and emission reductions.
It is the same question of whether someone wants to uphold rules like right of way, or red lights. They have been implemented to order traffic in a way that is deemed beneficial. Anyone who deliberately violates speed limits is deliberately violating the rules that have been put in place to provide safety to everyone. subequently it is also people that are more likely to violate right of way and other rules.
Your argument again is to be apologetic for people deliberately violating the rules. Your idea of simply designing streets in such a way that everyone will drive safely doesnt work out. It is still individual actors with a highly subjective idea, of what it safe and what isnt. But traffic as a global system needs reliable actors, who can be predictable for other actors too. That is why we will always need a set of global rules, to which a speed limit belongs just as much.
I am all for designs like speed bumps to additionally discourage reckless driving. But being apologetic of people who are reckless and subsequently often killing or injuring people doesn’t fly. Especially as there is still enough people who are not stopped from driving over chilren in front of schools, despite speed bumps and other measures. The only thing that works for these kind of people is to permanently remove them from operating motorized vehicles and to give them some time in prison to think about what they have done. being apologetic of them instead, encourages lax traffic laws and lax consequences for people who are injuring and killing other people in traffic.
I am particularly aggrevated at that, because in germany drivers who kill pedestrians or cyclists are often given a slap on the wrist and allowed to drive again soon. This includes particularly elderly people who are clearly unfit to drive, but being a car nation and all that, it is apologized by the courts. But how do you design streets in such a way that it is impossible to drive on the wrong side of the road, which one elderly women did, killing two cyclists? How do you design the road in front of a school that an already convicted of traffic offenses mother doesnt slowly roll over a young girl on her way to school, smashing her under her SUV? You can’t. It is simply impossible to design car traffic areas in a way that makes them safe by design.
You can only make them more or less safe. But it will always be necessary to identify and punish reckless drivers. And if necessary that means prison sentences and permanent exemption from driving. Being apologetic of them is in no way helping traffic safety.
And there is disagree. We don’t need speed limits for their own sake. They are the speed that is deemed appropriate in the area for a multitude of reason. Primarily safety, but also things like noise and emission reductions.
No, that’s what the design speed is. Speed limits are just a crutch to enforce the design speed when the engineers screwed up and the design fails to do it itself.
Your argument again is to be apologetic for people deliberately violating the rules.
Your argument again is to be apologetic to incompetent engineers, which is way worse!
I know, from first-hand experience, that traffic engineers in the United States are systemically bad at a lot of what we do. A lot of the industry’s standards of practice are outdated, misguided, or misapplied, and the whole profession needs reform. Often, the goals that we’re trying to accomplish in our designs aren’t even the correct goals to begin with.
And by the way: No. No, I am not, in any way, shape, or form, trying to excuse bad drivers. Never mind that you’ve strawmanned my argument to the point of unrecognizability; even if I did want to abolish speed limits like you seem to think I do, “reasonable and prudent” would still be a thing and it would still be possible to punish dangerous drivers!
Frankly, you’re way the fuck out of line.
The only thing that works for these kind of people is to permanently remove them from operating motorized vehicles and to give them some time in prison to think about what they have done. being apologetic of them instead, encourages lax traffic laws and lax consequences for people who are injuring and killing other people in traffic.
You clearly don’t realize it, but in actual reality, attitudes like yours are part of the problem! Having speed limits divorced from design speeds breeds contempt for the law, which is why consequences are often so lax. Everybody speeds when the speed limit is set too low – that’s human nature whether you like it or not – so of course even judges and juries who speed themselves won’t think speeding is a big deal and will give offenders a slap on the wrist. By prioritizing enforcement of speed limits over fixing street design, you are actively trying to perpetuate that contempt.
I’m starting to think you’re so bloodthirsty to punish people that you’re willing to put more people at risk by accepting bad design just so you can manufacture more violators!
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We also need to keep in mind the mechanism it is using to detect speed. If it uses radar it will need regular calibration. Handheld units for example are supposed to be spot checked before and after each shift with tuning forks and sent back to the manufacturer to be recalibrated every 6 months or so.
Lidar and optical flow most likely have different requirements, but I am not as familiar with them.
Lidar is supposed to be checked like radar. You have a standardized distance and you check that the machine is exactly matching.
Bullshit. You are allowed to cross examine your accuser which you can’t do for a camera. It is not the same. Random tech should not be judging humans for crimes.
Sorry but it’s a black and white thing in this case, r either you’re under the speed limit and not breaking the law or you’re over the speed limit and breaking the law.
This isn’t actually true. It’s entirely possible to be breaking the law while driving under the speed limit: “driving too fast for conditions” is very much a thing.
But that’s beside my point, which really was just that changing the design of the street to make people not want to speed in the first place is way more effective (and frankly, way less totalitarian) than punishing them after-the-fact for doing so.
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What if the speed limit is unreasonably high or low?
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if it’s too low, good, drivers shouldn’t go fast. If it’s too high, fine, drivers can go fast.
Eh … What?
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So you consider the law to be the definition of safety?
My question was intended to get you think about the fact that laws (and speed limits) are made by people, with all their flaws and biases, and they don’t always do a good job.
What would you prefer? That some people drive slightly over the speed limit? Or a spot where people suddenly slam on the brakes to avoid getting a ticket, endangering those who might be behind them with their sudden change of speed?
Because the latter is what these devices tend to do.
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street that was designed wrong
Not Just Bikes?
*checks link*yep, Not Just Bikes.Yeah, speeding is a symptom of poor infrastructure design. It means one of a few possibilities:
- You don’t care and get speeding tickets
- You do care and piss off everyone else on the road
You do care and piss off everyone else on the road
Or worse, incite a bunch of extra passing maneuvers, making the road less safe.
Isn’t that part of “you piss off everyone else on the road?”
No. Although they often go hand-in-hand, it is possible to either piss people off without them doing anything in response or to incite people to feel the need to pass you without them getting mad about it.
I’m sure it varies by area.
Where I live they install speed cameras in residential areas, school zones, and bus routes. They also only trigger when you are going 12 or more over the limit, and the highest speed limit I’ve seen with one these was 45mph, 35mph during school times. They also have an officer review and sign the citation, it is a flat fee, and no points. If needed, the officer who reviews will testify in court.
If someone is going 12+ over on school zones, school bus routes, and residential neighborhoods, then they deserve their fine.
I’m sure it varies by area.
They are illegal in my state
I’m a big fan of NJB (shout out to [email protected]), but I’m not going to argue against speed cameras. That’s ridiculous. Yes, if I have to choose one or the other I’ll take the better road design. But even with good road design, some people will choose to be dicks because they can, or they see it as a challenge or some shit. And speed cameras can be implemented right now, whereas better road design waits (even in the Netherlands!) until that street is next due for repaving.
I don’t find improving road safety through intelligent engineering controversial, I think blaming the street design instead of the idiot deciding to speed through it is controversial. In the end it is the driver who accelerated, not the road engineer.
In fact I actually like how much attention has been brought over the past years to road design. I’ve always been scared of cars.
why do y’all apparently hate the idea of improving street design? As a former traffic engineer,
I think people are intuitively understanding that it’s not really a possibility in a country as large as America. There are only 139,000 km of public roads in the Netherlands, compared to 6,743,151 km of roads in America. We also have different types of traffic compared to the Netherlands, more large vehicles and people without access to public transportation for daily commutes. Compounding all this with the fact that the federal government has no control of how most of these roads are built… It’s understandable why people don’t see this as realistic option.
I think people are intuitively understanding that it’s not really a possibility in a country as large as America.
Their cynical intuition is wrong, though, and the “large country” argument in particular falls apart at the slightest scrutiny. So what if we have more roads? We have commensurately more traffic engineers, too! There is no excuse not to design properly.
Anyway, NJB has an entire video debunking that, so I’m just going to cite it instead of wasting my time arguing the point myself.
We also have different types of traffic compared to the Netherlands, more large vehicles and people without access to public transportation for daily commutes.
Vehicle size is irrelevant. Lack of access to public transportation is indeed a problem; however, in general “we shouldn’t fix problem A because we also have problem B” is not a valid argument. It just means you should fix problems A and B.
Compounding all this with the fact that the federal government has no control of how most of these roads are built…
Sigh… look, you’re not wrong to argue that that’s a popular perception; however, that’s much more a consequence of the shitty state of civics education than it is an accurate description of reality. There’s a bunch of different ways the Federal government exerts control, including things like taxation and funding (including for state- and local-maintained roads in a lot of cases, not just U.S. Highways) and collaboration between the FHWA (government) and AASHTO (industry) on design standards. It’s more complicated than just a unitary central government dictating things, but rest assured, roads are designed in a relatively standardized way nationwide.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
NJB has an entire video debunking that
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Their cynical intuition is wrong, though, and the “large country” argument in particular falls apart at the slightest scrutiny. So what if we have more roads? We have commensurately more traffic engineers, too! There is no excuse not to design properly.
I think we’re having a problem determining the difference of what is possible and what should be possible. Your argument is ignoring the most important aspect of any public project. There isn’t enough political will in this country to pass universal healthcare, something that would end up saving the country billions of dollars. In what world do you think American politicians are going to replace 4 million miles of working roads?
Anyway, NJB has an entire video debunking that, so I’m just going to cite it instead of wasting my time arguing the point myself.
I don’t have the time ATM to watch this, I’ll give it a try after work. However, I doubt they’re going to be able to explain how they would get through the gridlock of our current government.
Vehicle size is irrelevant. Lack of access to public transportation is indeed a problem; however, in general “we shouldn’t fix problem A because we also have problem B” is not a valid argument. It just means you should fix problems A and B.
Traffic congestion won’t improve unless we improve public transportation. It doesn’t matter how well you build the roads, unless there is an alternative to driving there will be too many people on the roads. My argument is if we have to solve problem B before we work on problem A, there is no real reason to address problem A.
look, you’re not wrong to argue that that’s a popular perception; however, that’s much more a consequence of the shitty state of civics education than it is an accurate description of reality.
I think we’re just just getting into sematics now. Yes there is somewhat of a standardization of roads, but that does not mean they have the power to unilaterally create a new standard in which they could enforce with the power of the purse.
Your argument is ignoring the magnitude of funding and state and federal cooperation that would be required to revamp the entire transportation network of a huge country. Even if you could get a bill passed through our current Congress, how much money would it take, how much time?
Do I think we should be designing walkable cities with ample public transportation, of course. Do I think any politician in America would actually care about that…? No.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
NJB has an entire video debunking that
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
There isn’t enough political will in this country to pass universal healthcare, something that would end up saving the country billions of dollars. In what world do you think American politicians are going to replace 4 million miles of working roads?
We do have the political will in this country for universal healthcare, or, at least, most people, a majority, think it would be a good idea. it’s just I guess up to how you define “political will”, because we can have a majority that think we should have it, and then still not be able to get it even with popular support because the american government just straight up sucks and has bad voting systems and gerrymandering and even at the local level most of them are awful and are victims of circumstance of the presiding state and federal government. So that’s just kinda. I dunno. It sucks.
I always find it very strange how this shit comes up, though, right, basically as nihilism. I don’t think that guy’s point was to try and convince you to like, go out an canvas for better road conditions, his point was just to convince you that your arguments and causes were wrong and that you should be thinking about road design differently, mostly in that it’s a deliberate decision, and a bad decision. If you look at NJB, the guy who made that video, he’s an omega doomer that doesn’t really think progress will be made towards good urbanism within like, two generations, so he moved to amsterdam to escape it, basically. He’s also a doomer.
The point wasn’t to convince anyone to be an activist for anything, because that’s a pretty rare person that’s gonna be able to do that, the point is just that, the next time it comes around that the city has to do road maintenance, and they have a couple different options for proposals on how they might improve things, or if they will improve things, or if they’ll just leave things to rot, you can vote to make them better and it will take like 5 minutes cause someone talked about this shit previously.
Which, was the other point I was gonna make. We’ve just had a big new infrastructure bill passed and new passenger rail funding, and new amtrak proposals, and even though it’s not enough we’re seeing progress on that front. And more than that, at the local level, things don’t happen all at once with federal funding projects. They happen by degrees. You change the local standards, zoning regulations, so on, you know, shit you can precisely do because most politicians don’t give a shit about it, or shouldn’t right, if they turn it into a political issue where they’re like “we’re fighting the war on cars” with that mayor of toronto, gerard ford? it kind of becomes a mess. But if you can get it done, then over the next 20 years, things slowly shift in the right direction, as things have to be maintained by the city, and they decide hey maybe we’ll redo some of this in a different way that makes more sense and will legitimately feel better to drive even if suburbanites have been so propagandized to hate everything but a 6 lane totally car centric road.
I also would maybe contest the point about people driving in lieu of anything else, you know, I mean, this is sort of always the problem with urbanist solutions, right, is this chicken or the egg problem. Sometimes it’s easier to get big funding, even venture capital funding, for new development along a newly federally or state funded rail project, right, and that’s obviously a good thing, and then sometimes it’s easier to just change your regulations and then slowly make it so people can actually take their bike some place, right. I mean, you just kind of have to do both at once, whenever they become available as options, whenever prevailing conditions allow, and it takes a while. Hopefully you don’t get shafted with a useless kind of commuter park and ride rail line, but I suppose that’s better than nothing, and you know, hopefully some sort of development could come in and help fill some of the surrounding development with walkable shit so people have actual destinations at the suburban end of that, but then, you know, that requires you change the zoning regulations around that end of the track. I dunno. If you make the neighborhoods more walkable and have more destinations you might actually want to go to, more intracity places to go to, then public transit usually gets better, and if people have good public transit then that’s good for making walkable places because then you can kind of have the ability to expand people’s horizons and let them go places without having to own a car. I dunno, chicken or the egg, but also you just kind of do them both because there’s not really a dichotomy between them, is what I would assume that guy to be getting at.
We do have the political will in this country for universal healthcare, or, at least, most people, a majority, think it would be a good idea. it’s just I guess up to how you define “political will”, because we can have a majority that think we should have it, and then still not be able to get it even with popular support because the american government just straight up sucks and has bad voting systems and gerrymandering and even at the local level most of them are awful and are victims of circumstance of the presiding state and federal government. So that’s just kinda. I dunno. It sucks.
When I referenced political will I mean the politicians.
always find it very strange how this shit comes up, though, right, basically as nihilism. I don’t think that guy’s point was to try and convince you to like, go out an canvas for better road conditions, his point was just to convince you that your arguments and causes were wrong and that you should be thinking about road design differently, mostly in that it’s a deliberate decision, and a bad decision. If you look at NJB, the guy who made that video, he’s an omega doomer that doesn’t really think progress will be made towards good urbanism within like, two generations
My entire point is explaining the diff between what should be and what can be. Yes, we have the tech and the ability, but that doesn’t really matter if it never gets put to law.
His original statement questioned why people weren’t agreeing with his idea, I simply explained why it was an unrealistic goal.
Which, was the other point I was gonna make. We’ve just had a big new infrastructure bill passed and new passenger rail funding, and new amtrak proposals, and even though it’s not enough we’re seeing progress on that front.
I think you have a problem realizing the difference between 550 billion and 7.7 trillion. We have a lot of infrastructure that needs to be addressed, pretty much all of it makesore sense to do than spending trillions of dollars on roads.
Again, I understand roads should be better, but I also understand it’s not really a politically viable option.
I simply explained why it was an unrealistic goal.
See, so this is kind of my problem, right. You’ve said that it’s an unrealistic goal because it’s not politically viable at the federal level, which, you know, other comment, right, I don’t necessarily think that the majority of roads that people interface with on a daily basis have to be dealt with at the federal level, or have to deal with federal budget. I think the feds really only have to deal with like, amtrak and highways, and, again, not as much progress as there should be, right, but, progress on that front. More than we’ve had in the past 50 or 60 years, at least, which is a start.
But all that aside, right, like, this is a problem, a pretty major one at that, looking at death statistics, and even looking at projected problems like climate change, and the negative effect that this has on that. Not even necessarily just on the emissions of cars, which people plan to deal with via electric (booooo), but in terms of the cost of human development in such a fucked up way. Like ecological destabilization, and flooding from runoff, heat islands, shit like that, which, you know, climate change exacerbates. So we can agree, it’s a problem, in general, that we need to deal with. Why is this, what the fuck are we talking about, you know? Like, what is the tradeoff here? What else would you rather spend fake money on? Why can’t we just have healthcare and roads instead of having neither? Why is there this dichotomy, here? Like you’re agreeing with the premise of the argument here but the disagreement is that it’s like, not something you think we should spend political capital on, or just. Not something you think will get done? Like, why not? I dunno it is just kind of boggling my mind that you are agreeing with the core issue here, but you’re disagreeing on the premise that nothing will happen about it.
Ah yes, “tHe UsA iS tOo BiG, wE cAnT sOlVe ThIs”
Yes you can fix this. The Dutch bicycle culture was started by municipal votes, where resolutions passed municipal governments with margins of single votes. If American politicians can pull their heads out of their asses and even only pass a resolution that:
- Disseminates empirical research on road safety to all traffic engineers,
- Prioritises safety for all users on roads and streets, with priority given to those without armour (i.e. a car), and maybe
- Penalised engineers and politicians who choose to fail to design for safety
Then in the next thirty odd years, I think that the worst offenders can be rebuilt.
Do note that few things are as good at destroying themselves in regular, correct use as car infrastructure.
If American politicians can pull their heads out of their asses and even only pass a resolution that:
This is my entire point… It is unrealistic to believe that American politicians would do something for the good of the people. Especially when a large portion of Americans themselves rarely vote for their own self interest.
What would be the cost of redesigning and paving 4.19 million miles of road? Well let’s do some real conservative napkin math. Let’s choose the cheapest type of road, a rural minor arterial on flat ground. The reconstruction for this single lane would be 915,000 per mile, per lane. Assuming every road is just rural and two lanes the cost would be around 7.7 trillion dollars. Roughly a third of America’s GDP.
That’s the absolute minimum according to The most recent estimate for road reconstruction and while using the least expensive options available.
No politician is ever going to ask for 7.7 trillion dollars for infrastructure.
yeah see that’s what I was talking about. you don’t have to ask for 7.7 trillion dollars all at once, because we already spend a pretty ludicrous amount on road maintenance already. you just redesign the road the next time the maintenance schedule comes around, which works out to be like. what you were already gonna spend, + the cost of paint you were already gonna use, + maybe some bollards, - the projected amount you would save by making it so people can take more trips by bikes and walking. which decreases car usage, which decreases the frequency with which you have to do road maintenance and upkeep, because cars weigh a lot and wear down the roads way more than any other use of roads.
yeah see that’s what I was talking about. you don’t have to ask for 7.7 trillion dollars all at once, because we already spend a pretty ludicrous amount on road maintenance already.
That’s how every congressional budget is configured… When they run scare tactics about universal healthcare going to cost trillions of dollars they don’t mean all at once. When they pass something like an infrastructure bill they also have to explain how to pay for it and for how long.
you just redesign the road the next time the maintenance schedule comes around, which works out to be like. what you were already gonna spend, + the cost of paint you were already gonna use, + maybe some bollards, -
That’s not how roads work… The maintenance schedule is just fixing the top layer of paving. The bulk of the cost is in reshaping land and pouring the concrete foundations. If all you’re doing is repaving the top layer it’s not going to make any significant changes.
If all you’re doing is repaving the top layer it’s not going to make any significant changes.
more than you might think, again, even just with paint. a road diet can take a four lane road down to two lanes, and can add bike lanes and a turn lane, which cuts down on traffic accidents from lane changes, and potentially road speed. you can do a lot with on street parking, and then you can increase the width of bike lanes and increase their traffic separation even more, if you really want to encroach on the space cars are taking up. you can focus larger projects on given intersections, you can increase the size of curbs, once foot traffic increases, and it becomes easier to justify. I don’t have solutions for like a six lane fully stroaded out shithole, outside of maybe trying to make it into a boulevard with planters and trees and pedestrian islands in the middle, because the crossings are too long. you can also do that shit they did with covid and just cut off a street for a weekend and then see whatever the increase in foot traffic ends up being, and then present the results of that trial, which is a good way to get the idea across and raise support in the community.
if none of those, combined with changing zoning laws to allow more mixed-use development, and more built up development, if none of that strikes you as “significant changes”, then I don’t really know what to tell you. it takes a while to accomplish, and at this point in most places in america is a multi-generation effort, but I dunno, that’s just kind of the way it is. if you’re really cynical, I guess there’s caltrops? like I dunno, what’s your alternative here?
Shit like this is why I think the only thing that will save America is a complete purge of state and federal government, and a very clear and specific explanation why the US governments have been forcibly emptied and rebooted.
It should be governments’ jobs to act for the betterment of their subjects. The fact the US doesn’t, and happily marches the troops into places where they do “too well” if you’d ask them and read between the lines of their answers, is a crime against humanity.
I think we’re about 40-50 years too late for that option unfortunately. I think the whole world is going to be a little too busy addressing our rapidly deteriorating climate to do anything meaningfully good anytime soon.
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I mean, I agree people hating speed cameras is nonsense, just drive the speed limit! However, traffic calming is legit and makes the road a much safer place for pedestrians, and usually it’s by narrowing the road, not widening it.
I’m not a fan of them because
they have been known to cause accidents in the past from people trying to slow down and not get ticketed.TIL this is bupkiss. I’ve read it so many times I took it for granted. That and it only slows people down in that specific area. You slow down, drive past it, then just speed back up.I think Europe uses a better system, where you post two cameras on either end of the road you want to regulate the speed of. You take pictures of the license plates and time how long they were in the road for, then divide the distance by time to determine average speed. If that speed is above the legal limit, you look up the plate and they get a ticket in the mail. It’s lower tech because it doesn’t need LiDar, it’s harder to ‘cheat’, and it can be pretty cheap for regulating long stretches of road without exits.
While the system you describe does exist a lot in Europe the single cameras are much lower tech. They don’t have to read the license plate (twice!) correctly – they just take a picture. And while the mobile ones (non-descript grey van with blacked out rear windows parked at the side of the road) do use LIDAR, the static ones use just induction coils that are put into the road surface about 2m apart, rivht where the camera is looking. In Germany they’ll often put these coils in both directions of the road and just randomly turn the camera around, though newer ones just work in both directions all the time.
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Good call. I’ve taken those accusations for granted for a while. I’ve now edited the original comment.
And what would it be doing in there?
Conducting electricity would be my guess?
It’s a camera in a box, pretty sure it doesn’t use that amount of power
It’s actually a wireless charging station for
government drones“birds” /s
You’ll never find out just sitting here talking about it. Whatever it is, it’s gotta be exciting!
Some of them used to contain bog standard DSLRs, so they were worth stealing.
Someone actually stole a bunch of cameras but couldn’t offload it and ended up getting caught when he tried to sell it on craigslist. Lol. Apparently the camera units are proprietary in the office shelf.
Guys, guys. Hear me out. What if (tokes) yeah…what if like if we like yeah. Oh? Sorry. What if we train pigeons to shit on traffic camera lens. It could be done. The military had trained pigeons to guide bombs against warships. Let’s train and breed pigeons to do this and release them in the wild.
Birds aren’t real
So we are replacing pigeons with crackhead?
Semi-related: Only small amounts of copper are typically stored in the human body, and the average adult has a total body content of 50–120 mg copper. Most copper is excreted in bile, and a small amount is excreted in urine.
More if you have Wilson’s Disease
Get to work, crackheads
Water: 35 liters, Carbon: 20 kg, Ammonia: 4 liters, Lime:1.5 kg, Phosphrus: 800 g, salt: 250g, saltpeter:100g, Sulfer: 80g, Fluorine: 7.5 g, iron: 5.6 g, Silicon: 3g, and 15 other elements in small quantities… thats the total chemical makeup of the average adult body. Modern science knows all of this, but there has never been a single example of succesful human trasmutation.
These are the Things that Make a Man Iron enough to make a nail, Lime enough to paint a wall, Water enough to drown a dog, Sulphur enough to stop the fleas, Potash enough to wash a shirt, Gold enough to buy a bean, Silver enough to coat a pin, Lead enough to ballast a bird, Phosphor enough to light the town, Poison enough to kill a cow, Strength enough to build a home, Time enough to hold a child, Love enough to break a heart.Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith
saltpeter:100g
So we can make explosives out of humans? Oh boy.
I believe this is a minor plot point in Fight Club
If I’m ever a crackhead I’m stealing everyone’s pee.
Roughly 2.5 kg.
8.17$ per kg equals 20.43$.
I don’t think dubious scrappers taking obviously stolen copper are paying fair market value. You’d have to throw in a vcr or two amd haggle a bit to get enough for a dub.
I know. I never traded scrap, but I guess many or most won’t trade in so low numbers, I’d assume professional scrap traders have a minimum amount to not waste their time.
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A pile of speed camera guts, 10 meters of 900-pair phone line, a grounding grid from a substation, and some coils from an orphanage’s air conditioner, probably.
how much crack will that score you
About 2 $10 pieces.
According to some US government website, a fifth of a gram.
People who are addicted to crack cocaine experience tolerance and dependence. Tolerance means they need increasingly higher doses of the drug to feel the desired effects.
Lol at that quote. Show me a drug that doesn’t gradually increase tolerance.
that’s why I included that quote
however much $330 gets you
let the intrusive thoughts win
This one is in a school zone. People really shouldn’t be speeding through them unless they’re a “fuck them kids” kinda person, and if you are you’re a piece of shit.
sir this is a shitpost
Yeah, but how many people are seeing this post thinking “obviously it’s a shitpost, but also based?”
I for one was until someone said it was a school zone
Even better solution though: (re-) build the street at a school zone so that no driver more sane than the most insane Florida Man would not fathom driving any faster than 20 km/h, no speed cameras required.
Even better solution though: the street at a school zone that no driver more sane than the most insane Florida Man would not fathom driving any faster than 20 km/h, no speed cameras required.
What?
It’s simple. If you design the road to be wide, straight, with wide, clearly marked lanes, clear sides and a smooth surface, people will naturally be inclined to drive faster. This is based on experiences with forgiving design. For motorways, this is fine. But for residential neighbourhoods and school zones, it’s a bloodbath waiting to happen.
So out there, you do the exact opposite. Make the street so narrow that anything bigger than an average pickup truck barely fits in a lane. Make it out of brick and don’t mark the centre of the road. Surround the street with shrubs and other obstacles, and stick it full of sharp chicanes.
This is the deliberate inverse of forgiving design, called traffic calming.
Make the street so narrow that anything bigger than an average pickup truck barely fits. Make it out of brick and don’t mark the centre of the road.
School buses are a thing.
School busses do nothing to solve the problem of speeding in school zones.
I specifically quoted the part about making the road in front of a school so narrow a pickup truck would have trouble.
If it’s too narrow for a pickup truck, how are school busses supposed to function?
Then let me specify:
Wide enough for one pickup and no opposing traffic, but so narrow that two pickups are going to really have to negotiate to move around each other.
They used to be. Now everyone drives their kids to school for reasons.
The urban planning in many cities is so absurd and not meant for buses. This means school bus routes are absolute madness and can take hours to get everyone home
No, not here.
Firetrucks? Ambulance?
My city has exactly one road designed like this. Fire trucks have no problem
I really want to see these cities. They have a dedicated grid of streets for cyclists, a different grid for fire trucks, a different grid for pedestrians, and a Kafkaesque nightmare of curves for cars. Cars that presumably often break down and the drivers are found later fleshless with teeth marks on their bones. Somehow 4 seperate roadway structures are imposed on a single city.
I wish my suburb’s streets were rebuilt to pedestrian/cyclist friendly style. It would be easy as every street has very easy access to the 80km/h square of main roads that surround it
You could block every street in the suburb in its middle and force all drivers to take the shortest path to a fast road, and let bikes and walkers take the short paths within the suburbs.
My street has about 2000 cars a day, with over 90% of them using it as a short path between two fast roads, or accessing or leaving a destination in a different part of the same suburb.
A friend lives in a suburb that’s a tree structure, that’s about a third best as there are no destinations from the “trunk” roads to anything but destinations within the suburbs. I’d hate to see that suburb needing to be evacuated quickly, but they’re deep in suburbia and on a hill, so safe from fire and flood
Not an issue in Europe. Though granted the US would probably need to replace their fire trucks with sanely-sized ones. You also don’t need to haul a big-ass ladder in a low-density area what’s your plan use it to do a header into a suburban pool.
Regarding response time absence of gridlock will be more important than the last hundred metres on a residential street, consider investing in public transportation, walkable cities, and generally everything that abolishes owning and using a car being mandatory.
Hey, I live on a road like that. It’s not even bricks, but good ol’ cobblestone. The cars also share it with a tram.
There’s a lot of pedestrians crossing. It’s a residential area with shops in the ground floor of all the buildings.
There’s multiple schools and kindergartens around, so they set the speed limit to 30km/h. Does that matter? No. People go 50-60 during the day and 70-80 at night. The only times that doesn’t happen is when the cops set up a mobile speed camera.
The road is fairly straight, I’ll give you that, but I guess they can’t just demolish a few kilometres of 100yrs old houses to make to road a bit winding.
I mean, if the
roadstreet takes up only part of the width of the right of way, you can do a lot with blocking off half theroadstreet and alternating which side every few dozen metres. No demolition required.Upon closer inspection, what you just described is a street, not a road.
Also, even with a narrower street, with strategically placed obstacles, you can convince drivers to zig-zag and reduce their speed that way.
I didn’t know there was a difference, I’ve been using them synonymously.
With the proposed changes traffic would have to wait constantly to let the other side pass. You would not only limit speed, but als throughput. If you just go slower because of speed cameras, the amount of traffic can stay the same.
There’s a lot of cars and lorries going through here. Sometimes a road/street that has a lot of traffic just goes through a fairly residential area and we kind of have to live with the fact.
And if you think that’s bad city planning call the eighteen hundreds and complain to these people.
There’s a difference. A road is meant to be a fast connection between points at the ends. This calls for forgiving design and higher speeds.
Meanwhile, a street is meant to be for allowing access to the nearby land. That warrants lower speeds, and the expectation that anyone can be on any of the sides as they see necessary. A street should function less like a vehicle artery, and more like an outdoor room.Notice that these are incompatible uses. North American traffic engineers clearly didn’t, allowing main streets to become the main thoroughfare, i.e. the main roads through an area as well. This produces the most dangerous type of transportation infrastructure: the stroad. Which is both meant to be a fast connection AND access to the nearby land, and in doing so fails at both.
If this stretch of car infrastructure you were discussing is supposed to be a street, vehicle throughput should probably be one of the last priorities, and vehicles are better off on a road a few blocks over.
nah fuck brick roads. the rest sure. not brick. dangerous for panick braking (less traction), wears iunt tires and suspension prematurely
Problems that are all reduced, eliminated or rendered irrelevant altogether if traffic moves slowly, which it probably does, thanks to all the other modifications.
Plus, they add a ton of road noise inside the vehicle, further increasing the level of discomfort at higher speeds, contributing to a lower design speed.
Do you work for IBM on Lotus Notes?
Main roads shouldn’t be brick, but local residential streets certainly should. The speed limit should be 30 km/h or less anyway, and in a well-designed road network they should only make up a tiny portion of your overall drive, so wearing tyres and suspension isn’t an issue.
Panic braking from 20 km/h isn’t going to be impeded by a brick surface, even wet brick.
Wrong. Making winding roads slows down traffic but increases the amount of time it takes to cover a given distance. Which leads to less people walking and cycling plus more local air pollution. You want nice grids. People walk in NYC they don’t walk in burbs. This is what city planners refuse to grasp. You don’t make driving more difficult, you make alternatives easier.
I agree with that last point, but the rest ignores the fact that this refers especially, specifically to school zones, where, as stated previously, fast traffic is a bloodbath about to happen.
Define school zone. Like real school zone or town that zoned everything a school zone so they could get rid of sex offenders?
We’re talking the area just around a school where it’s safe to assume there are likely to be a lot of children outside of vehicles.
The road can have unnecessary curves that the sidewalks and bike lanes do not.
There are other ways to slow vehicles as well such as chicanes that narrow the street at certain points such that only 1 vehicle can pass fit through it at once, raised crosswalks, etc. There are a lot of ways to design the street to force drivers to slow down and pay attention.
Unfortunately, if drivers have room to speed then it comes at the expense of the well being and safety of everyone else (even other drivers).
I agree that winding culdesacs suck btw, but a street grid doesn’t solve the problem if safety in front of a school. If designed poorly it can make it worse since long straight streets can easily be turned into drag strips of speeding vehicles. Street grids are fine and good, but they should not allow drivers to go faster than is compatible with a pleasant and safe environment for people outside of the vehicles.
I want to see a road that curves with a bike lane that doesn’t that isn’t so bizarre that no one would ever use it.
Hard to find exactly that with a Google search but here’s an example of roughly what I was talking about
https://djelr4m41m2tz.cloudfront.net/br/t/brisbane-dec-06-kf_164.jpg
Not hard to imagine doing the same but with bike lanes and sidewalks
Making winding roads slows down traffic but increases the amount of time it takes to cover a given distance
You don’t do this everywhere. You do it where you want traffic speeds to be low. Residential streets, school zones, shopping precincts, and the like.
Plus, you further aid pedestrians and cyclists by having these residential streets not be through-traffic, except to pedestrians and cyclists. Use “modal filters”.
The pedestrians and cyclists get good straight paths. The curves on the road are made by consuming its excess width
Cool show me an example of your fictional city. I want to see one that is a grid for cyclists+people and a burb for cars.
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Another relevant Not Just Bikes
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Essentially, yes.
Besides, speed cameras, especially in NA, enforce by punishment. Punishment that some people are unable to afford, because for some reason they coddle billionaires while letting a fifth of their citizens rot in the gutter.
Meanwhile, a traffic calmed school zone enforces proactively. Are you sure you’d like to risk scratching your brand new $50k truck’s pristine paintjob? A properly traffic calmed street will force drivers to face that question, and in many cases, they’ll answer the question with “no”, and slow down. Mission accomplished.
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Counterpoint:
How often do you think most people watch their speed gauges?
You and I might do so regularly, but you sure as hell cannot say that for sure about every other person on the road.Furthermore, how obvious is the speed limit?
I can tell you with certainty that, outside of a few, mostly European, places, this may be unclear. North American traffic engineers happily design roads with speed limits anywhere between 40 and 80 km/h, with no changes to the cross-sectional geometry of the (st-) road.Systemic speeding because of misguided road design is more common than you’d like to admit. And a few cameras probably only do so much to fix that.
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And putting up signs and cameras literally only does so much to convince people to slow down on wide, straight roads. How likely is the average driver in your area to speed? I can assure you, half of the road users are worse than that.
If we’re going to start pointing to other discussions, make it as easy to find your point as you can. Case in point, what I’m talking about.
Buy chilean copper instead.
Using vehicle velocity as risk assessment method is fucking dumb. Might as well put that copper to better use.
No it’s not. Speed is a very significant element of road safety. At lower speeds, you can stop in a much shorter distance, and if you hit someone their chance of death or serious injury goes way down. Braking distance is proportional to the square of velocity, and reaction distance is directly proportional. If hit at 50 km/h, a pedestrian has a 90% chance of death. At 30 km/h, they have a 90% chance of survival.
At lower speeds, you’re also far more likely to notice something that might require you to stop or slow. Your cone of vision at 60 km/h is 40°. At 80 it’s 30°, and at 100 km/h it’s 20°. A different source I found says under 50 km/h it’s 104° and at 65 it’s 70°. Whatever the specifics, lower speeds are much safer.
This isn’t to say that speed cameras are the best or should be the only method used to ensure road safety. Narrowing roads, adding furniture by the roadside, and increasing the complexity of the route, are all good ways to reinforce a lower speed limit by reducing how safe drivers feel driving at high speed. But speed cameras are a useful supplement to that, for those drivers determined to be irresponsible.
Why is high speed highway driving safer per km if vehicle velocity is a ‘very significant element of road safety’?
The problem, as ever, is retards driving fast on slow roads and slow on fast roads. The camera doesn’t discriminate, it triggers no matter the context. It will trigger the same way for a racing driver with lightening fast reflexes in perfect conditions as it will for tired grandma with cold treacle reaction time driving on snow.
Don’t believe their lies.
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Both risk of collision as well as risk of injury / death if a collision occurs correlate heavily with speed, there’s literally no better factor than speed to consider. Of course, it’s not the only factor, that’s why we have safety and license requirements for vehicles and drivers as well.
