That Really Rather Random (Interesting) Fact Thread

[r]

They're triggered to only go off if a car goes past them at a certain speed (the speed limit + 10%) so if it takes a photo of a car, the car was speeding. I think they also use clever lasers and stuff to work out how fast the car was going and that speed is printed on the photo. If you go fast enough, though, the exposure time of the camera is too long so the photo is too blurry to be able to use as evidence. That speed is about 180mph though...

And I think it's fair to say that they are the sworn enemy of the British motorist. Fair enough having them in built-up areas to stop some berk in a 3-series driving past a primary school at 90mph or whatever, but exactly how am I posing a threat to anyone's safety if I'm doing 80 instead of 70 along a straight and deserted stretch of motorway at 1am? People don't realise that speed on its own doesn't kill, it has to be combined with something else. 0.04mph is a speed. That wouldn't kill you.

We have intersection cameras here too, but everyone gets around them by, sort of, you know, obeying the traffic signals. Although quite a lot of people get quite miffed when they roll through a red light to let an emergency vehicle past and end up with a £60 fine. And being able to turn to the nearside at a crossroads on a red light is the best thing the Americans have given to the world of motoring and I wish we'd adopt it in this country.

Related trivia: the biggest speeding ticket ever issued was 242mph, on a Koenigsegg CCX in Texas.

[ace62394]

Actually, someone did 400+ mph...



...on a moped. It was on the news, the speeding camera glitched

[Dark Spark]

...We have intersection cameras here too, but everyone gets around them by, sort of, you know, obeying the traffic signals. ...

People in the U.S. are also getting around the issue by stopping at the intersection rather than risk getting caught by the camera. The trick is that they're doing so by slamming hard on the brakes when they might have otherwise cleared by instead, which puts the cars behind them at increased risk of rear-ending the first car.

It's that the police were ignoring those kind of accidents just outside the intersection when they cite statistics to say cameras reduce the number of collisions.

Speed cameras are a different thing, though. They sound like they can be more easily corrupted than red-light cameras. And red-light cameras have been corrupted: there's a case on the books where one city installed cameras and then made the amber light at those intersections burn shorter than other intersections. Motorists thought they had the usual time to clear the intersection before the red light came on, and instead the red light came on quicker. When the judge found this out, he threw out all citations made against motorists within that margin of change.

The American Revolution has ingrained this suspicion in the minds of Americans that government, if left to its own means, has the power to turn laws into instruments of oppression if given the chance. Rather than aimed to control the undesirable, it is used instead to exploit the commonplace. It's why the third branch of government, the Judicial, is used to keep the other two branches, the Legislative and Executive, in check. The idea is that legislatures and executives will blithely override principles in favor of practicality if it is more convenient to "stealth tax" the populace through punishment of increasingly stringent laws rather than re-administer the government. If they pull such a stunt off, they have to get past the principles enforced by the courts first.

It influenced the American legal system with a bias towards the defendant: placing the burden of proof on prosecution and granting the defendant the right to face their accuser. The idea that the government (be it at the civic, state, or federal level) could corrupt itself for the sake of obtaining more revenue from its citizens may seem reprehensible to the point of impossibility, but we Americans are ingrained with this suspicion that it can happen: the story of the Revolution is built around that very assumption.

Thus, the argument of "We took your picture. The picture itself doesn't show you committing an offense, but the very fact that we took it in the first place is all the proof enough we need..." irks me at an instinctive level.

[r]

I think no British man is under the illusion that speed cameras aren't a stealth tax. Like I said, fair enough if they're actually making people to slow down where they need to, but my mate had to hand over £60 to Gordon Brown once because someone had put a Gatso at the bottom of a hill, at the top of which was a flat and straight road, where the speed limit had just changed to 30 from 60. I used to drive that way to college every day and you really have to mash the brake pedal into the carpet to slow down to 30 in time, bearing in mind that it's human instinct to put the hammer down if you're on a straight de-restricted road. That is a speed camera there purely to make money. Same as the ones in vans parked on bridges over motorways. Of course people are going to be doing 80mph on the motorway if it's the middle afternoon and the traffic's light.

It also annoys me that they'll readily punish people who go above the speed limit, but what about those that go below the speed limit? I'm talking people doing 30mph on de-restricted, straight roads with a single lane in each direction which make people pull over onto the wrong side of the road to overtake them. If the person had actually been driving at a speed that qualifies as 'movement' that wouldn't have happened. Slow people cause other drivers to change lanes on motorways, which causes more variations in traffic speed, which causes congestion. If you're not confident enough to handle a car at the speed limit you shouldn't be allowed on the road, if you ask me. When that old biddy was banned from driving for life after driving at 10mph down the M1 (which at motorway speeds is basically not moving at all) I really had to wonder how she had been allowed to have a license in the first place. How is doing 80 when the speed limit is 70 more dangerous than joining the motorway at 6mph, causing all the lorries in the inside lane to have to suddenly slam on the brakes?

redit:

Thus, the argument of "We took your picture. The picture itself doesn't show you committing an offense, but the very fact that we took it in the first place is all the proof enough we need..." irks me at an instinctive level.

I wouldn't say that's really the case with speed cameras. Like I said, it prints the speed any offending vehicle was doing on the photo. The trigger threshold is purely there so that civil servants don't have to wade through millions of photos of cars obeying the speed limit to find offenders - with the threshold, every photo the camera takes will be of a speeding car.

[Wolf]

This has got to be the most thought-intensive trivial fact forum the world has ever seen; while what you're saying isn't short, it's all fact, and it's all interesting. Maybe not random, but stream-of-consciousness markets-- like fora-- are never really random to begin with.

It also seems the destiny for you, r, to be the primary benefactor of most of my threads.... I'm not unhappy about it because I really, really like you in general. I guess a thanks is in order....

Oh bloody hell... it's actually in back-order, now; it'll be coming by post in about five business days, then*. Sorry about the wait.





*I swear to god that most businesses have a five business-day waiting period just to be sarcastic. It's just enough time for the weekend to hit when you order on Monday and have to wait till the next Monday to receive the package instead of the Friday before, which would be much too convenient.

[r]

It also seems the destiny for you, r, to be the primary benefactor of most of my threads.... I'm not unhappy about it because I really, really like you in general. I guess a thanks is in order....

Oh bloody hell... it's actually in back-order, now; it'll be coming by post in about five business days, then*. Sorry about the wait.

Tidy. Ironically I can't think of a fact to post at the moment though, so I'll just make one up.

David Cameron should not, under any circumstances, be allowed near tangerines.

[dag71]

apparently my choir teacher also taught taylor lautner (the loser werewolf from twilight) when he was at hudsonville.

[The Raven]

Australia was originally a place where the English moved their prisoners to, when their owns prisons became too crowded.

...I think.

[Dark Spark]

.

Thus, the argument of "We took your picture. The picture itself doesn't show you committing an offense, but the very fact that we took it in the first place is all the proof enough we need..." irks me at an instinctive level.

I wouldn't say that's really the case with speed cameras. Like I said, it prints the speed any offending vehicle was doing on the photo. The trigger threshold is purely there so that civil servants don't have to wade through millions of photos of cars obeying the speed limit to find offenders - with the threshold, every photo the camera takes will be of a speeding car.

That's the rub. A speed camera is a machine, and a machine can't think. Set the switches one way, and it will respond in a certain manner. Flip the switches, and it will perform the task in another matter. It will keep doing whatever it has been told.

But what happens if it is told to do something wrong? What if it is told to lie? Well, it will do it, then. No conscience, no moral background, no accountability. A police officer testifying against a speeder has such qualities, and even requires them to establish their credibility. A machine doesn't care if it delivers erroneous data. It isn't aware if its programming has been adjusted by a human operator to place higher values into its results. It has no fears of being penalized for perjuring itself in a court of law. There are no checks within its essential nature to prevent it from providing false information.

Some might think the machine has infallible credibility because it has no motivation to lie. I'd say the speed-cam has none because it has no motivation to tell the truth. But the operators behind it, using the anonymity the machine gives them, might just have a motive to fudge the results a bit. And who do the operators work for? Yes, those same folks that we have a sinking suspicion are out there looking for more money.

[r]

At the end of the day, though, you're being prosecuted for breaking the law. I don't think anyone's ever been done for speeding when they were going at or under the limit. You'll also rarely get done for doing 80 because it's so close to the legal boundary (77 as I explained elsewhere) and no-one can be bothered to do all the paperwork. And however much fun it is to really put the hammer down in something with a rear-mounted V8, anything above 80 really is too fast if there's anyone else on the road.

They make their money by putting cameras where they know people will be speeding, as I mentioned earlier. It's usually quite obvious if a speed camera is just contributing to the 10 Downing Street Christmas party fund and they're the ones people get angry about.

For the record I have no problems with the speed limits in this country. I know that whenever cars are mentioned I have a tendency to talk about Aston Martins and shout "Poweeeeeeeeeer!" a lot but 30 is plenty for a built-up area, I rarely exceed 20 around Brighton and 80 is fine on the motorway. Note that even though the speed limit is 70, unofficially it's 80 - the only reason they don't make it 80 is because then everyone would do 90 which is too fast.