Cameras are a success in Quebec (for speeding & red lights)
 

There have been a pilot project going on for a couple months in the province of Quebec. 15 speed and red lights cameras have been installed and started sending warnings by mail. Now the pilot project is over and the results are in. Even if the cameras were actually just sending warnings out, speeding has decreased by 44%. Extreme speeding (50 km/h over the limit) is down 94%. The average speed people drive at in the zones cameras were installed is down 9 km/h. Red light violations re also down 77%. The fact that there are pretty big signs warning of the presence of the cameras probably helped a lot get those results.

Yep, but everyone hates them because they infringe on our right to break the law :) I've always wondered why they don't just time people between getting a ticket at the toll booth and paying for it and say "hey look, you averages 78mph in a 65, here's a ticket"

Actually it's not all that bad. 85% of the people here are in favor of cameras. They started sending out tickets today. The govt is running a lot of ads over the radio telling people that all revenues go in a fund to help pay for people getting injured on our roads.

Next time I look up at the sky and think of heaven I'll be looking up at the sky and thinking of canada. :p

Ontario once had speed cameras - cameras in vans randomly parked at the side of the highways. They were removed - one political party vowed to get rid of them if they won an election, and they won. (Not necessarily just on that promise of course.)

I wonder how many tickets a fellow could accumulate taking his pregnant wife to the ER.

If the cameras actually worked right, I would have much less of a problem with them.

Phoenix has them, they're pure revenue generators for the city.

And they waste gas, because regardless of what people should or should not be doing, what people actually do in the really real world is memorize where the cameras are, slow down to 10mph under the limit (for no good reason) just before the cameras and then haul ass back up to 10mph over the limit immediately after the camera.

Causes tons more congestion and has stretched my GF's commute from 15 minutes to over 20 minutes in the morning. Those 5 extra minutes on the road times thousands of cars has to equal a hell of a lot more fuel being used, and certainly a hell of a lot more time wasted - not to mention a disruption to smooth flow of traffic.

All in all, a very bad idea and I wish nothing but the very worst to everyone responsible for those cameras.

Yay for big brother! :P

With any luck we will eventually get our homes wired for cameras too. Just think of the benefits.

I don't mind a camera watching me drive, as long as I can have a camera to watch the people watching the camera that is watching me.

I like red light cameras. If you can't use an intersection properly, then you deserve a ticket, and I don't care where that money goes (although ideally it would be used to force you to attend driving school).

It's the law to stop at a red light not to enable ticketing, but to facilitate the safe functioning of our road networks. Issuing tickets is the current way to enforce the law, and having cameras do the ticketing frees police resources to deal with more complex issues like property crime and violence.

I think the reason it's fairly well accepted is that they are not trying to hide it at all. There are warning signs. They also have a couple mobile cameras, and they tell you they can be anywhere on a specific segment, so people will slow down not just for the spot where the camera is as with fixed ones, but for the whole segment.

I don't get people being paranoid about cameras. You are already being filmed everywhere you go by the private sector anyway. What's it gonna change in your life if you get your picture taken driving?

I'm with Frank on this one, it took an immeasurably small amount of time before the cameras around here were abused for printing money for the municipalities that installed them and not having any effect on safety or efficiency.

I think the reason they are accepted is they fall outside the sheeple's narrow range of vision.

Lets just have our car computers send a satallite signal (via OnStar) to the government when we speed. This way we have coast to coast coverage & you cut down on the infrastucture required.

Well, there sure are whole bunch of happy sheeple around here who have better to do then worrying about the govt spying on them...

You Canucks sound like you have the right idea behind the cameras. Install them for a specific purpose, place many signs warning of them, don't change anything else about the road except install the camera, and use the funds for a specific cause.

Unlike the US where there's no warning and the locals who operate them are often caught gaming the roads around the cameras to encourage tickets. Examples abound of yellow lights set dangerously short (2 seconds or less) and speed limits being lowered excessively.

Frank Lee hit the nail on the head. The true motive maybe far from what we perceive it to be, it takes a lot of work to undistort the original truth. Manufacturing consent is here to stay, and grow.

I agree that red-light running is a big problem, but there's a civil liberty question at stake with using cameras. We're starting to get them here too...

So, it begs the question: there's a tractor-trailer riding your bumper. The light turns yellow and there's no escape lane. Run the light, get a ticket and live? ...or slam on the brakes and enjoy the carnage? Studies have shown that the yellow light duration decreases when these are installed. Revenue generators indeed (also for insurance companies).

The scenarios are endless -- so there has to be at least a simultaneous video feed and some sort of human interface instead of an automated "Postcard" ticket. I doubt that's very common.

Speaking of which, there are video cameras at nearly every major intersection here. I'm told they're for accident investigation until they get the "green light" to monitor violators on a continuous basis.

It's like that small town that generates 95% of its operating budget from driving infractions -- it's just not ethical.

So the next time you're EOC-ing down a hill and go 1-MPH over the limit, you better be ready to pay the price.

RH77

Then there's the technical problem: the lights in my area flash everyone turning right on red. You see the flash and then get to spend 3-4 weeks waiting for that $450 ticket to come in the mail and decide if it's worth taking a day off to NOT face your accuser. Thus, people simply no longer turn right on red, even though it's perfectly legal, and now traffic backs up into the prior intersection.

They're really great at night. You see a blinding flash, but you don't know who ran what, or if the light is timed wrong. I ended up leaving myself voicemails to get the timestamp, describing the exact circumstances of the flash in case I get the notice in the mail. Since then, I (and many others) now tear through a nearby residential neighborhood to avoid the light.

I love it when everybody in the five-state area feels compelled to drive through my neighborhood. Really enhances that homey ambiance. :/

French motorways do that for all articulated lorries. Thats why there are always many of them stopping for lunch/a nap in the last lay-by before the final toll booth!

Red-light cameras are a pointless idea since they're ATM's for local gov't. Having them flash you when doing a legal right-on-red is silly. We should outlaw them here and be done with it. Safety my arse!

I'll throw in my five cents:

Red light cameras suck. Period. Numerous studies have shown that they increase the accident rates at the monitored intersections because people slam on the brakes like crazy. (I don't have any links on hand but I can dig them up if so desired.) Instead of installing red light cameras follow the European example and replace intersections with roundabouts, people will be forced to slow down, traffic flow will be smoother, and less people will have to stop when traffic is only light.

Speed cameras: I'm not a big fan of them, but their application makes sense in some locations/under certain circumstances. In other cases their use/abuse as revenue generating tools does nothing for anyone's safety and should be strongly opposed. Let's start with an example of the later: I did a road trip through Finland and they have them every couple hundred yards on their major highways. Personally they drove me nuts because the highway was relatively empty and after a week in a car, I would've loved to be able to reach my destination an hour early every day by just going a few km/h over the speed limit instead of having to crawl along on a mostly empty road. I would've spent less time irritated on the road, driven with more focus and would thus have been a much happier and probably safer driver too, had it not been for the speed cameras. On the other hand there was an intersection near the town I used to live in, that was notorious for it's accidents, especially involving non-locals. It was a pretty dangerous and very hidden-until-the-last-second intersection indeed and all the warning signs put up barely helped any. After two speed cameras and accompanying signs were installed, accidents dropped dramatically. As I said above, I'm not a speed camera advocate and think that most uses, especially on highways, are preposterous revenue generating attempts that do very little for safety. Rather then setting up speed cameras, cities should focus on catching aggressive drivers that think they need to go 80 in 60 mph traffic by lane hopping and tailgating as much as possible (of course that wouldn't generate nearly as much revenue!). However, there are limited legitimate uses of speed cameras and as such they should not be completely ignored as a safety tool.

This is my main complaint, driving through Chitcago the blasted things are on 45mph roads and the yellow doesn't last long enough to blink.

There should be a law (god forbid) on a fair and reasonable length of time for a yellow light, they used to last a good deal longer than they do now to get the intersections cleared.

In California, they don't have to post signs at a camera intersection; they only need to post signs at the main entrances to the city.

In the Uk we've had red light cameras for a long time and they do reduce accidents caused by people jumping the red.
I'm curious about the duration of the amber light as all ours are a standard 3 seconds or longer. That gives plenty of stopping time at any legal speed.

How do red light cameras generate revenue for insurance companies.?

The DOT has a 'standard' for yellow lights, but it's not an enforceable rule. Studies found that at red-light camera intersections, simply increasing the length of the yellow reduced red-light running dramatically--even more than the camera did--simply because people actually have time to either stop safely or pass through safely.

Insurance companies can raise rates because of tickets.

So it's not the camera creates the extra revenue, it's running the red light.......and being caught..;)

No, it's getting flashed by the camera. There are plenty of ways to get cited by the camera, including an illegally short yellow, faulty camera system or even having the "time from red" set so short, the light hasn't even technically turned red yet. (There's a site that shows a camera ticket where one of the two signals was red (LED) and the other was still yellow (incandescent.))

Well I am strongly opposed to the use of the camera's. Here in Ventura, a camera ticked costs $350, but if it was a legitimate ticket, it would normally be $50.

These rascals can be fought and won, but it is a pain, particularly when legally the yellow light should have been almost twice as long. The ticket I fought, I started checking the timing of the yellow lights and every last one of the intersections with cameras were set to the minimum legally recognized limit, for a 25 mph speed zone. The problem is that none of the lights are on streets with 25 mph speeds.

Every light intersection without a camera had the yellow intervals set to times which corresponded to a safe stopping interval, based on the speed limit which was posted for the street.

The problem is that the cameras are managed by city bureaucrats who are highly tempted to fudge things, simply in order to generate additional revenue for the city. Until someone can figure out a way to manage the bureaucrats, they will just continue to abuse the average citizen, not because it's right, but because they can, in my opinion.

Yah, lets mount web cams on the beurocrats :)

Now you're talkin! Wait, I think it's called C-SPAN :p

The problem is the apathy of the "Can't Fight City Hall" attitude that most of the public has. We have more impact on local issues than we realize. It's easier to complain without a solution (I'm quite guilty of it, to be honest).

I challenge visits to City Council meetings or personal calls to council members. Like Darin said, it worked up North. Our employees can't get re-hired with a bad review :thumbup:

The same goes for State and Federal officials, FWIW...

RH77

IIRC the same study also said that even though accident rates increased, more fender benders, fatality rates decreased due to fewer t-bones. Seemed like a good trade-off from the POV of the driving safety.

Microchip implants and 24/7 real time tracking of every citizen might mean the end of missing persons too. Good from the POV of concerned families.

And concerned families can go ahead w/ that if they wanna. The point of red light cameras is that it reduces public domain fatalities in a fashion acceptable to the society as a whole. Tracking citizens movements 24/7 isn't public domain unless the citizens are in the public domain 24/7, and it's probably not acceptable to society as a whole based on what I've seen. Apples and orangutans.

There seems to be a common line of thouht with everyone not liking those cameras. They feel it's unfair that people are tricked into getting a ticket. I think that's not a problem with the concept of cameras per se, but the way it was implemented.

Sounds like a like of *****ing and moaning to me. Stop speeding, stopping running lights and you won't get a ticket. Don't give me this "implanting chips" crap - that's a stretch to say the least... you're being rediculous.

If I know there's a camera and i stop quickly and someone rams me, well he gets a ticket for following too closely as he should. Don't give him the excuse of "that guy stopped only because of the camera"... no... you stop for the light. You run the light due to lack of camera.

I would LOOOOVE it if all the light-controlled intersections in this town would have cameras set up. I'm sick of watching my advanced green go away because the people in cross traffic are not done running their red light yet, 4, 5, 6 cars at a time. EVERY DAY, EVERY INTERSECTION down the major streets of London (Ontario).

I also want EVERY overpass on the major highways here to have speeding cameras over each lane.

People do stupid things like rear-ending stoppers because they are used to breaking the law. Make them used to following the law and the problem goes away.

Quit your *****ing, nobody is going to tie a shock collar on your neck and install a camera in your bedroom - you read too many books from the paranoid cold war era.

Yes now that you mention that, it rings a bell. However it is generally the one running the red light getting T-boned, so I say good riddance :D

Until the city starts doing what so many cities do and shortens the yellow phase to increase their profits. Many cities have been caught doing this, with some shortening the amount of yellow time so much so to make it almost impossible to reasonably stop (even at the speed limit). For a few examples see here: 6 cities that have been caught shortening yellow times

For a nice list of arguments against the use of cameras, have a look at: http://www.motorists.org/photoenforce/

"don't give the city red light camera because they might shorten the yellows" is like saying "don't give police guns because they might shoot the innocent people". Yeah, it happens but you can't argue the positive effects. Don't bash the cameras, bash the cities that screw their people.