California Senator Scott Wiener is introducing a new set of bills to make streets safer across the state, including one that would change how you drive.
The funny thing is they could eliminate speeding pretty easily without having to make a single change to cars.
Put up a license plate reader at point a which logs the time the plate was read. Put up another one a couple of miles down the highway at point b when there are no possible ways to either get on or off.
Then the system can use the timestamps to determine The minimum speed the car must have been going to be able to make it from point a to point b. License plate data of cars that were exceeding the speed limit would be sent for review by human officers who can act accordingly.
Speeding cameras are already a thing some places, but there’s been a lot of hooplah over whether the city can actually enforce fines for people caught that way.
They used to do this on some turnpike’s. You’d get a paper punch ticket on entrance with the current time, every exit would calculate the amount of time you spent on the road and determine your average speed. If you were certain number of miles over they would fine you right at the exit.
But it turns out that people end up controlling whether laws happen or not. And your average person doesn’t want the eye of sauron casting judgment on you unless it is truly dangerous. Speed zones around schools are for the children and enforcing speed limits and work zones really does save lives. Local people don’t have a problem with speed checks on a turnpike because almost everyone on the turnpike is from out of state.
Fun fact, better versions of this exist. They do not really work, are prone to abuse by the city overseeing them, and have been known to cause more accidents than they prevent.
There’s always going to be some room for random variation causing a few locations to have worse outcomes after speed cameras are installed, but the overall statistics show a reduction in both accidents and severity.
The funny thing is they could eliminate speeding pretty easily without having to make a single change to cars.
Put up a license plate reader at point a which logs the time the plate was read. Put up another one a couple of miles down the highway at point b when there are no possible ways to either get on or off.
Then the system can use the timestamps to determine The minimum speed the car must have been going to be able to make it from point a to point b. License plate data of cars that were exceeding the speed limit would be sent for review by human officers who can act accordingly.
Speeding cameras are already a thing some places, but there’s been a lot of hooplah over whether the city can actually enforce fines for people caught that way.
They used to do this on some turnpike’s. You’d get a paper punch ticket on entrance with the current time, every exit would calculate the amount of time you spent on the road and determine your average speed. If you were certain number of miles over they would fine you right at the exit.
But it turns out that people end up controlling whether laws happen or not. And your average person doesn’t want the eye of sauron casting judgment on you unless it is truly dangerous. Speed zones around schools are for the children and enforcing speed limits and work zones really does save lives. Local people don’t have a problem with speed checks on a turnpike because almost everyone on the turnpike is from out of state.
Fun fact, better versions of this exist. They do not really work, are prone to abuse by the city overseeing them, and have been known to cause more accidents than they prevent.
There’s always going to be some room for random variation causing a few locations to have worse outcomes after speed cameras are installed, but the overall statistics show a reduction in both accidents and severity.