Safe Speed Forums

Don't know, I must admit. Think it was something to do with lasers measuring the distance between vehicles, and presumably (one would hope) they would track you for a decent distance. Was in the Sunday Times.

Can't quite make my mind up whether it would be a good thing or not.

To catch people dangerously tailgating - Yes, good thing
To catch people getting slightly closer to overtake, change lanes or whatever - No, bad thing

...and in practice impossible for a camera to distinguish, so overall NO, bad thing.

I cannot think of any situation where a camera is currently deployed that there isn't a more effective solution in terms of safety and accident avoidance. Cameras are only attractive when cost/benefit ratio thinking comes into play. There are people who genuinely believe in cheap road safety rather than the best road safety, and have to spin the benefits of cameras to inflate their perceived benefit so as not to be seen to be giving the public 'second best'.

As for bus lane and box junction cameras - they are an entirely separate issue and nothing to do with safety.

Traffic light cameras - I don't mind them so much. However they lose respect if they prosecute people who have to, say inch forward to be out the way for an emergency vehicle. And i've also noticed some traffic lights (with cameras) have a suspiciously short amber sequence

Yellow box cameras - not sure really. I suppose if a car really is just sat there right in the middle of a box then they're not too bad but I've heard stories of council people fining motorist who have like only a half a car inside the box. And it's that sort of enforcement which just instills disrepect for traffic laws in general (like speed cameras).

Bus lane cameras - well I don't really approve of bus lanes anyway as in my opinion, they just waste space on roads. But I suppose something has to be done to enforce that law. Though again as long as they don't prosecute people who have to use the bus lane briefly to avoid a broken down car for example then I suppose cameras are ok for that.

And as for tailgating cameras. No no no no NO! Too many scenarios where innocent and perfectly safe motorists would be fined as guron83 briefly explained.

I have difficulty believing this - all traffic lights have a 3 second amber AIUI.




Yeah, this is different because it isn't a safety issue, as mentioned above. I don't mind bus lane cameras too much because I am an occasional bus user, and am therefore in favour of bus lanes as long as they're in sensible places and are only used at peak hours. It does annoy me when my bus misses his green on the lights because a private car was in front of him in the bus lane!

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I agree with you on the traffic light cameras - generally don't have a problem with these, provided that the fine is waived for any emergeny-related red light running.

Yellow box cameras are are ok provided that the yellow box is reasonable. There was one in Holborn that Camden had to modify because it was on a corner and you couldn't see the exit from the entry?!?! And I saw a box junction the other day with a pelican crossing immediately after it. What the hell are you supposed to do if the lights change while you're halfway across? Jump the lights or stop in the box?

As for bus lanes, it's strange, but I quite like them. They get me to work quickly and I enjoy using the part-time ones to jump the queues of idiots too dense to read the times of operation on the blue signs.

I'd be up for anti-tailgate cameras if they worked. I'm sure there must be some technical solution to the difficulties highlighted.

Which they aren't, as we hear on countless occasions. And even if they are you don't know this at the time, so if you are at a red light and an ambulance comes steaming up behind do you or don't you sneak over the line to let him through? If your answer is "yes" then try repeating the question after first imagining you already have 9 points...


Enforcing yellow boxes and bus lanes isn't a safety issue but purely a congestion issue, so IMHO the penalty for driving in them shouldn't involve adding points to people's licences. If that were the case then I don't suppose cameras monitoring them would be much different to high street CCTV, but as it stands I can't get very comfortable with the idea of people gaining penalty points on their licences merely for holding the traffic up for a few seconds.


To support "tailgating cameras" you have to also support speed cameras generally. Here's why:

In order to decide whether a car is following another too closely you need to measure not only the distance, but the speed as well - what's "too close" at 50mph is fine at 20mph etc.

So for a camera to be "measuring" tailgating it inherently needs to be measuring the speeds of the vehicles involved. Now if the powers that be go to all the expense of putting these things up, and then discover that the speed reading for a passing vehicle just happens to be in excess of the posted limit then do we reasonably expect they are going to turn a blind eye? I don't.

So if you don't support speed cameras (which I don't) then in the real world you can't support tailgating cameras either, as the two are effectively synonymous.

(Which is quite apart from the other obvious problems such as people pulling into your path or "brake testing" you etc).

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Bus Lanes Cameras are already in disrepute, with people being fined for the most minor "misuse" - such as perfectly legal crossing of it to go into or out of side roads. Lambeth have scrapped some of theirs: http://www.lambeth.gov.uk/News/PressReleases/PressReleaseArchive/2005/131205EarlyChristmasStreatham.htm

I would argue that yellow box /bus lane infringements are a safety issue, albeit indirectly.

Rather than being held up for a few seconds, this ends up being held up for at least another turn of the traffic lights on my route home.

Incidently, we have many bus lane cameras in Aberdeen. One place which lacks them is the A90 southbound into the city, where traffic queues up for around 3/4 mile in the mornings.

One morning I found myself at the front of the queue at a traffic light controlled roundabout, waiting at red. A Mazda pickup appeared in the bus lane beside me. On green, he gave it some welly and tried to force into my lane infront of me on the roundabout. I blasted my horn, we both stopped inches from each other and he got out. He began thumping my car. I had no option but to get out and stop him from wrecking my car. Fortunately the driver behind me got out too, equally pissed off, but he was less restrained. I wonder what would have happened had my wife been there alone instead of me.....???

I'm not convinced that such cameras can play a safety role in a deterrent against incidents which incite road rage, which is becoming increasingly common around Aberdeen at least.

On other bus lanes with cameras, the knobends simply drive down the bus lane until they reach a camera then expect to be allowed into the correct lane, moving back into the bus lane after the camera.

Once again, I think that REAL Policemen are what's needed, not photographs of localised areas.

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I'm generally would be fairly ok with bus lane, yellow box, and red light cameras as long as they were reasonable and some kind of human discretion applied to every case. I might be ok with speed cameras if a little more sense was shown too.

On the other hand, I fear that it would be all to easy to get 'done' for just marginally overhanging a yellow box, maybe because you started to move and someone cut into the space you were going to drive into; or it's dark and the road is wet and you can't see exactly where the box ends without getting a little closer. Until a definite guarantee is given that this kind of thing won't be prosecuted, I have to oppose camera enforcement, and sadly most of what we've seen is the opposite signal sent out.

Thinking a bit more about the subject, I think one of the main problems I find with cameras (pretty much all types), is that it generally makes drivers feel "on edge" when you're near them. I'm not saying that these drivers are necessarily lawbreakers or dangerous but when you're near a camera you can end up thinking excessively about the law being enforced by it, often to the extent that you lose concentration and observation of whats happing ahead.

I think perhaps the worst case scenario to me is probably traffic light junctions with the new Redspeed cameras. When drivers approach the lights on such a junction they are going to be only focused on and thinking about the lights or their speedo and that to me could certainly doesn't seem good to me.

You could argue that the same would happen if a police car was by you, but then you would still apply the same proportions of concentration to all aspects of driving even if you did feel a little more nervous - although of course there are plenty of idiots nowadays who think that police cars are just moving speed cameras

I hope that makes sense. Of course, if you feel like it doesn't then feel free to say so

I'm new to this thread and off home in a sec, so apologies if I missed this on the first skimread. More in the early hours.

Firstly welcome to "Fleeced".

Secondly, picking up on Fleeced's very first point: Whilst I wouldn't rule out the possible benefit-outweigh-disadvantage of a small number of very specific cameras, I would say that, in all cases I have considered to date (including the example Fleeced posted in the inaugural of this topic), there are better ways.

In that example, if re-engineering is not possible, the large word "SLOW" on the carriageway, possibly supplemented by a "blind turning ahead" subtitle, would make much more sense than a speed camera.

It would be fairly easy to measure - all you need is something which measures the time from when one car passes a particular point to when the following car passes the same point.
The trouble is, like speed, measurement is the easy bit - the difficult bit is the judgement of whether or not what is measured is important. And cameras do not have judgement - for that you need flesh and blood trafpol.
Without this judgement you need to have a threshold.
For instance, say they decide to make the threshold 2 seconds. Anyone leaving a 1.95 second gap will be prosecuted. Drivers will start doing one of two things:

1) Drive with a gap of much larger than two seconds. This will not only severely restrict the capacity of the road and make jams more likely, but it'll also make many drivers 'switch off' (I've got a large gap so I don't need to concentrate.....boom!)

2) They'll continue to drive the way they do and open up a gap whenever they see a camera. The problem here is, they'll have to brake to open up the gap - but so then will the car behind them, but even more, and the car behind even more, and the car behind even more... It doesn't take much imagination to see what chaos this will cause.

EDITED TO ADD:

Then, like with speed limits, they'll probably start creating different arbitary thresholds in different areas - and also raise the thresholds (3 seconds? 4 seconds?) when they don't have the desired effect, or if the cameras aren't making enough money.

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Only when ideology, prejudice and dogma are set aside does the truth emerge - Kepler

Hmm. What if the trigger range was extended a bit, so that the sign lit up sufficiently in advance of the hazard not to distract you at the point where you attention needed to be on the road, but not so far in advance that by the time you reached the hazard you'd forgotten all about it? And maybe instead of flashing, simply light up so that you'd still have the instantaneous eye-catching change from blank panel to brightly lit sign, but without the subsequent distraction of constantly flashing away until you'd driven by?



So do away with the "Slow Down" text and simply make it a copy of whatever the existing sign would have been. Then have it illuminate as soon as ANY vehicle reaches the trigger point regardless of their speed, which might help to disassociate such signs from the "speeding problem".



On that we both agree, though I'd extend that to encompass both the removal of signs that suggest hazards where none are genuinely present AND the removal of signs which, although entirely truthful in the information they present, detract from the other signs present at the same location which are significantly more important. Basically, we need fewer, more accurate, signs.

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Chris

The simple and obvious answer to this is remove the speed readout... Considering how inaccurate most of them seem to be anyway, I'm not really sure what the point is in keeping them active. And as I commented in response to JT above, it might not be a bad idea to try and keep speed monitoring and VAS's well separated, so I'd be more than happy to see this type of VAS removed.

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Chris

And how many times have we seen such signs, slowed to the 40-50 demanded of us, only to find ourselves cruising along past half a mile of cones/barriers with absolutely no workforce on site. How many times does the average driver have to see such a sign displayed next to a totally deserted working area before they start to associate ALL such signs with totally deserted working areas, and THEN start to wonder exactly what the lowered limit is really there for...

If, as some people suggest (and, for some roadwork setups, I agree with) the lowered limit is actually because of the narrowed lanes, contraflows, uneven road surfaces, risk of debris etc., then fair enough, but in these cases let's then use the signs to highlight those hazards, rather than just using the generic "to protect the workforce" ones that seem to be applied to most roadworks on NSL roads.

Or even better, give road users a reason to believe the signs by getting the government to use a bit more of the cash it's yanked out of motorists pockets, and pay the contractors to have people working 24/7 - the signs would then always be true, and the work would be completed sooner... win-win scenario for everyone except the Westminster bean counters (and making their lives a misery is a bonus )

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Chris

Maybe it's time to replace the existing cameras with video cameras covering all the approaches to the lights, so that when someone passes the red light the system then saves enough footage from both before and after the line is crossed to show the reason for doing so.

Mind you, we'd then still need the law to be revised (or for all courts to agree not to apply it strictly in all cases) so that passing a red light to aid an emergency services vehicle, or any other good reason - e.g. trying to avoid being hit up the backside by a vehicle that misjudged its braking or whos brakes had failed - is then always considered sufficient mitigation to have the offence dismissed, or not even brought to court in the first place.




I'm more in favour of bus-mounted cameras than static ones - static ones can, and do, get used to penalise people for driving in totally deserted bus lanes, whereas being caught on a bus-mounted camera means there WAS a bus trying to use the bus lane at the time...

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Chris

All traffic lights are supposed to have a 3 second amber phase, this doesn't actually mean they DO all have one.

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Chris

Something like SPECS, for instance... But that's the easy bit. Now you have to measure the relative positions of those two vehicles over a sufficiently long distance to verify that the following vehicle is in fact maintaining an insufficient distance to the lead vehicle and could then be classed as a genuine tailgater. No good just taking a second pair of readings 100m down the road, because all that tells you is how far apart the two vehicles are at two discrete points - there are several legitimate reasons for the following vehicle to be as close/closer to the lead vehicle in the second snapshot, without it having tailgated the lead vehicle inbetween the two snapshots.

So what we need is a continuous tracking system which records positions of every vehicle along the monitored section of road and then works out if there's sufficient evidence of genuine tailgating to flag up an offence.

And I bet that if you did come up with a system like this, there'd still be at least one genuine scenario that it couldn't cope with and which, sooner or later, would result in a non-tailgating driver being hauled over the coals for a non-existent offence.

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Chris

round here all the bus lanes are full of cyclists. Will we need to wear cameras as well?