315
85% Of Car Drivers Break 20mph Speed Limits, Reveals U.K.’s Department For Transport
(www.forbes.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
315 points (93.6% liked)
Fuck Cars
9776 readers
11 users here now
This community exists as a sister community/copycat community to the r/fuckcars subreddit.
This community exists for the following reasons:
- to raise awareness around the dangers, inefficiencies and injustice that can come from car dependence.
- to allow a place to discuss and promote more healthy transport methods and ways of living.
You can find the Matrix chat room for this community here.
Rules
-
Be nice to each other. Being aggressive or inflammatory towards other users will get you banned. Name calling or obvious trolling falls under that. Hate cars, hate the system, but not people. While some drivers definitely deserve some hate, most of them didn't choose car-centric life out of free will.
-
No bigotry or hate. Racism, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, chauvinism, fat-shaming, body-shaming, stigmatization of people experiencing homeless or substance users, etc. are not tolerated. Don't use slurs. You can laugh at someone's fragile masculinity without associating it with their body. The correlation between car-culture and body weight is not an excuse for fat-shaming.
-
Stay on-topic. Submissions should be on-topic to the externalities of car culture in urban development and communities globally. Posting about alternatives to cars and car culture is fine. Don't post literal car fucking.
-
No traffic violence. Do not post depictions of traffic violence. NSFW or NSFL posts are not allowed. Gawking at crashes is not allowed. Be respectful to people who are a victim of traffic violence or otherwise traumatized by it. News articles about crashes and statistics about traffic violence are allowed. Glorifying traffic violence will get you banned.
-
No reposts. Before sharing, check if your post isn't a repost. Reposts that add something new are fine. Reposts that are sharing content from somewhere else are fine too.
-
No misinformation. Masks and vaccines save lives during a pandemic, climate change is real and anthropogenic - and denial of these and other established facts will get you banned. False or highly speculative titles will get your post deleted.
-
No harassment. Posts that (may) cause harassment, dogpiling or brigading, intentionally or not, will be removed. Please do not post screenshots containing uncensored usernames. Actual harassment, dogpiling or brigading is a bannable offence.
Please report posts and comments that violate our rules.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Surely Building/Maintaining roads and traffic signals isn't free? The council has to pay the costs of running those? Why not remove/shut-down roads so they can avoid paying maintenance for them?
@PowerCrazy You're saying we shouldn't have buses, bicycles and ambulances either?
I believe we can reduce the number of cars by maybe 70 to 80% over the next few decades.
But there's a lot to do to get to that point. We can't flip a switch overnight to eliminate *all* cars without dealing with accessibility, housing, prejudice, new rail lines, a whole bunch of problems, some of which will take some time to fix.
On the other hand we *can* make significant progress by investing in public transport, especially buses, combined with some mildly coercive measures such as LTNs, reduced parking, lower speed limits, bike lanes, bus lanes, etc.
I'm just trying to follow the logic of removing the speed cameras because they couldn't "fund them". Why remove speed camera's but not stop lights? Ultimately Infrastructure costs the government money, that is one of the fundamental things that government collects taxes for. So why a distinction between speed camera's and traffic lights?
Are traffic warden fine being sent to the central treasury as well? Have they decided to fire all the traffic wardens, after all traffic wardens surely must be more expensive then speed camera's.
@PowerCrazy Because they have a bunch of things that they're legally required to do and not enough money to do them all.
Some of them are easier to downgrade, ration, or scrap, than others.
Central funding was largely eliminated, while local government can no longer increase its own taxes beyond a certain threshold (requiring a referendum), thanks to laws passed by central government.
So they have to cut something.
Speed cameras save lives. It's politically easier to get rid of the speed cameras than to get rid of the roads. Mostly because our cities remain car dependent, and even buses depend on roads. Local government cannot get rid of cars for free; that will take a sustained national effort with considerable funding and political will.
Would you rather they cut the already very limited funding for helping old people who can't afford their own care needs?
Of course it's a political decision. But the cuts, the restrictions on raising taxes, and turning speed cameras from something that saves lives, enforces the law, and generates revenue, into a cost, are all carefully calculated to restrict local government's choices and blame them for the central government's cuts.
How can you be anti-car and still anti-speed-cameras?
And yes, the rule that the national treasury keeps the fines did not apply to traffic wardens. Central government specifically set out to cripple one of the main tools for reducing road deaths, to make a populist political point.
Though whether they make a profit on traffic wardens is less clear. A fair bit of enforcement is actually by the police, which is of course a different budget.
Because of the perverse incentive. The UK, much like the US, is a neo-liberal hell-hole where market solutions and "public-private partnerships" are considered the only possible solution to anything. Speed camera's while they can potentially improve public safety, also create an incentive for local governments to design roads that encourage speeding with artificially lower speed limits to improve revenue while ensuring that well-connected individuals are never subject to those fines. As soon as a neo-liberal government finds a funding mechanism outside of progressive taxation, they will preserve that funding source at the cost of the general public every time.
This means more and more dangerous roads because they produce more and more funding.
@PowerCrazy IMHO this is not true.
An individual driver speeding will normally receive a £100 fine and 3 points on their license.
You lose your license after 12 over 3 years. Even if you can avoid the points with a course once, you can't do that repeatedly.
So the practical effect is that people who get caught are more careful.
Which is a win for everyone.
As far as road design goes, while there are discussions to be had around that, there are good arguments for reducing the speed limit to 20mph. Roads are not designed for that. But we can enforce it anyway, cheaply.
@PowerCrazy Also, while some local councils are intentionally neoliberal, most are just trying to survive.
Central government does of course force them to take the neoliberal solutions you describe. Because all other options are prohibited, impractical, or cannot be funded, due to the rules set down by central government.
Local government can be corrupt (so can central government), it can be incompetent (ditto).
But the villain here is the tories. It's always the tories. And while they tend to control rural councils, they don't control most of the cities.