Safe Speed Forums

_________________
Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

They certainly are. These days you can be travelling along for quite some time on certain roads before you'll see any evidence of limit signage, so it seems as if some local authorities expect drivers to be clairvoyant and somehow just know the speed limit without having to be informed of it.

And what with all the other visual distractions the 21st century motorist has to contend with in the average drive, it's no surprise that on those roads which are poorly signed some drivers may inadvertantly miss the small, badly sited, badly faded speed limit sign which may be the ONLY indication of a drop in the limit before they encounter the next scamera.



Damn, and there I was thinking you were about to add your support for VAS's... after all, they truly are signs that bite back and are certainly harder to ignore than a normal sign. The average scamera is no more a sign than a lump of dog poo on the pavement alongside it - a road sign should provide useful information about the road ahead, how many scameras are positioned in such a way that their presence is actually a genuine warning of a dangerous road layout ahead?

Not to mention that drivers used to be able to tell, with a fair degree of accuracy, what the speed limit was - just from the character of the road and surroundings.
This is no longer the case.

Cheers
Peter

Yes I can vouch for that (having a rant here).

Down here in Herts roads often seem to be closed for "safety improvements" and then re-open - having been "made safer" at cost to the taxpayer - with a lower speed limit It's often a national down to 40 for no apparent reason.

This then adds another problem to the thinking motorist - Having to guess the "real" speed limit a road should have

Not that I advocate speeding for the sake of it; but if the whole road is downgraded to 40 for a difficult junction then it means that I can still safely (although now breaking the law) drive at 60 until I am within the junction danger zone - and then slow down as a thinking motorist.

_________________
Bill

All great journeys begin with a single step

Cameras provide useful information about the laws you have already broken, so in that respect, it is a sign of things to come (i.e. a ban) if you keep on breaking the law. I'd be surprised if a lump of dog poo can do that! Having said that, I hear that in Dresden, an amazing scheme is being planned to use DNA poo tests - a scheme that tracks down anti-social nitwits - a bit like cameras!

_________________
I stole this .sig

I take it that this is the symbol for 'thumb in bum, mind in neutral'?

_________________
I stole this .sig

It was a clear question with a clear answer. You asked "when did a speed camera inform anyone what the speed limit was", and the answers is "usually within 14 days of an offence". Unless you are a persistent offender, this gives you a sign to mend your ways and keep your license.

_________________
I stole this .sig

There is a definite market for in-car limit violation warning systems.

_________________
I stole this .sig

I'm all for them, although they should be paid for by speeders. They work for some people (as would an in-car violation warning system) but there is a hard core anti-social element who just ignore them.

_________________
I stole this .sig

Er, no. That's the symbol for the effect of an very very old and very very tired argument.

_________________
Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

How can you mend your ways if you don't know what the limit is? A demand for £60 is not a 'sign' by any stretch, it's a purported criminal offence, and almost unique because there is no fair trial or requirement of proof of intent.

The requirement to worry about this is also extremely distracting to people trying to concentrate on where they're going.

I don't really see how potentially finding out 2 weeks after the event that whilst driving along a stretch of road you may not even remember having been on (how many SCPs send out NIPs with a sufficiently clear description of the camera location for someone who doesn't use that stretch of road practically every single day to know straight away whereabouts it is?), you were observed exceeding the limit for at least a second, but possibly no more than that, is of any use. I say potentially only because there's no guarantee that speeding past a camera site will result in you being NIP'd...

For me, a really useful road sign will tell me something about the road ahead that might not be obvious from observation and where an absence of such knowledge is likely to be dangerous. Sharp bends ahead, hidden side roads, hidden dips/summits etc. - THESE are the genuinely useful signs. Being told 14 days later that you were momentarily exceeding the limit by perhaps no more than 5MPH doesn't strike me as useful in any way - if driving even by such a small margin over the limit is truly dangerous for that stretch of road, then drivers need to know about it AT THE TIME.




It could easily be taken as a reminder that you'll end up in the poo if you keep on breaking the law...




Strictly speaking, the camera does nothing of the sort, unless Gatsometer BV have introduced a post office module into each of their infernal machines... The camera just takes photos and measures speeds (sometimes it even manages to do so with accuracy ), it's then the responsibility of the SCP employees to process the photos, in an ideal world verify the measured speed against the secondary check marks, generate a NIP if necessary, and then pop it in the post. So the camera itself doesn't inform anyone of what the limit is, that's down to the SCP office, or maybe even the Royal Mail since they're responsible for actually delivering that information to the end user.

But I suspect you knew perfectly well what r11co meant - when did a speed camera inform anyone what the speed limit was at the point in time when they actually need to know it... It's no good finding out 2 weeks later, because by then the damage has already been done, and if it was on a road which the driver in question might never use again then it's of absolutely no value whatsoever for that driver to find out what the limit is on that road. Indeed, even if the driver does use that stretch of road again, it's still of no real value to know what the limit was at the time they were caught, because there's every chance that between then and the next time they drive that road, the limit could have been altered...


So it all comes back to the point that cameras do not and can not inform a driver what the limit is when they need to know what it is. A properly sited and maintained speed limit sign - passive or active - will do exactly that.

This is all very true. The principles behind what you see are because of two types of information – commands and telemetry. Commands are information passed to the thing to be controlled, telling it what to do. Telemetry tells the authorities who administer the system something about what the thing they want to control actually did. Often, command and telemetry is combined into a control loop, involving feedback. The camera system does this.

In that model, the road signs you list as useful are commands - road signs that tell you to watch out for things up ahead – the speed limit, sharp bends ahead, hidden side roads, hidden dips/summits etc. The other type of information, telemetry, monitors what you actually did. As well as all this, in order to vet poor quality drivers out of the system, it is necessary to send ‘commands’ to them, or NIPS, if they are getting closer to a ban. In this way, telemetry is recycled and passed back to the driver as feedback, which gives them a sign that they have to change. In a way, this is a meta-control loop which is not related to real (or operational) timelines, but still allows poor drivers to adjust their behaviour before they get slammed with a ban. I agree that some information is pertinent AT THE TIME (as you say), but other information (about violations, penalty points and fines and so forth) is pertinent latter.



When we talk generally of speed cameras, it is the broad system, including all those back-office processes, that we mean.



I agree that signage MUST be clear and obvious. Where it is not, we should complain. However, it would be wrong for feedback gathered by cameras to be withheld from motorists who have violated the speed limits, this depriving them of a chance to improve their style and keep their license.

_________________
I stole this .sig

It is a very old argument. The luddites were normal people who were protesting against changes which they dissaproved of. I don't see cameras as the end of a process, but the very start. I expect eventually we will scrap the yellow boxes, but enable ubiquitous monitoring using newer technology, such as that jokey dog poop DNA malarkey! Don't blame me entirely for this high-tech outcome - if motorists and dog owners were Saints, these things wouldn't be on the cards at all.

_________________
I stole this .sig

slightly bizarre argument to me this.

since doing my rospa stuff i've not has any problem being aware of the speed limit. is it not the case that if there are no repeaters its either 30 or NSL? the difference between the two types of road is pretty obvious.

I think that when a driver talks of speed cameras, they most assuredly are referring just to the yellow cube on a stick (*) by the side of the road. That's the only part of the system which is visible to the declining majority of motorists (i.e. the ones who so far haven't been NIP'd), it's the only part which is visible at the time the speed limit needs to be known, and it's the one part of the system which DOESN'T tell the driver what the limit is.

A system designed to penalise motorists for breaking a limit, but which doesn't itself tell them what that limit is until they've already broken it, instead relying on a separate system for providing that information with no way of knowing whether that separate system is actually working at the time the penalty is recorded, is a bad system.



* and having said that, I now have a vivid mental image of a 70's dinner party with the host offering around a tray of miniature gatso's instead of the traditional cheddar cheese cube on a cocktail stick...





True, so let's make that feedback immediate - i.e. replace camera with trafpol able to give the motorist a roadside lecture pointing out exactly what was wrong with their driving whilst the act is still fresh in their minds. Giving them impersonal, isolated from the event, feedback some weeks later does little or nothing to improve their driving once the NIP has arrived, and does absolutely nothing to improve their driving between the offence being recorded and the NIP arriving.

All of this anti-camera venom is directed at yellow cube on a stick, which is merely the instrument of detection for a much larger and more complete system of control. Without the cubes, there are any number of other technical methods of detecting how fast you went from A to B, and many of them are ubiquitous, i.e. they don’t cover the 100 meters around a camera site, but spy on you every meter of your whole journey.



The point of the system is to detect already failing drivers. If you are driving well, you know when you are in violation.



You have to hate cameras or they are not working.

I could agree to more coppers if a fee is levied on drivers to finance their own police force via hypothecation. The fee would be staggered to make people with speeding offences pay more for life! Sorry, that last bit was just BW (keep quiet, Basingwerk!)

_________________
I stole this .sig

In theory. In practice, given the state of signage maintenance on some roads, the absence of repeaters only means there aren't any repeaters, it doesn't mean there aren't supposed to be any...

It's the publically visible tip of a system which operates without discretion, targetting only a single offence which most motorists commit every time they venture onto the roads, whilst completely ignoring the numerous other (and far more dangerous) offences which the majority of motorists would be only to happy to see eradicated from our roads, which provides a very poor method of feedback to the driver, and which requires significant expenditure on stats-massaging and propaganda to have any hope of achieving even a small degree of public acceptance.




And if, in some hellish version of the future of the UK, such systems do end up replacing Gatso and friends, you can be sure that public venom will be redirected towards the publically visible elements of these systems.




Even in areas where the speed limit signage is poor? In an ideal world, where every road sign was placed in accordance with the rules and guidelines, and where they were all as clear and readable as those nice pristine examples shown in the Highway Code, a good driver ought to know what the limit was at all times. In the real world, even the best driver on the planet could find themselves unable to state with complete certainty what the limit was on a particular stretch of road.




I don't hate trafpol, but I still make sure I'm sticking to the lower of the legal or appropriate limits depending on the traffic/road/weather conditions if I see them out and about. I don't hate VAS speed limit signs, but I always try and avoid setting them off, and with the exception of the ones where the trigger speed appears to be set below the limit, or where they take a reading of your speed as you're still decelerating down to the new limit whilst still inside the previous higher limit, I manage to achieve that with no difficulty.

There are ways of getting drivers to change the way they drive without having to beat them with a big stick if they fail to comply by even the slightest margin. If cameras are hated, it's because of the way they're operated, not because of what they're trying to do. Most of us here would agree that there are times and places where reducing our speeds is a must, but attempting to enforce those lower speeds with a camera is not the best way to achieve it.

WRONG!

The question was "since when did a speed camera actually inform anyone what the speed limit was", a subtle but important difference. Nothing is clear when you become involved in an argument BW (perhaps you would like to start making things up about what I said again).

You seem to have an obsession with the law and little understanding of the purpose of the law, except insofar as a propensity for control freakery, and anyway, as I have pointed out to you several times now you are supporting a failing policy therefor YOU bear some of the blame for the increase in road deaths we are now experiencing. Your failure to address or even acknowledge that point reminds me of a certain Steve Callaghan of the Cumbria Safety Camera partnership and he was equally self sanctimonious..

Crow all you like and dress it up as the product of some (pseudo) intelligentsia, but you are merely an ignorant mouthpiece for bean counters.