Average Speed Cameras

Start here: http://www.brake.org.uk/

The cheap solution is to stop all road maintenance.

It amuses me that we repair pot holes in roads and then install speed bumps.
Del

Any stops along the route? If so I do believe there will be a problem getting them to work.

Could certainly do that if we get nowhere with the other stuff . Good idea .

Yeah, the cameras can be dummies, but you still can shoot the drivers .

Have someone parked along side the road holding a hair dryer out the window. Looks a lot like a radar gun.

My friend at the Texas State Highway Patrol tells me they've been using hair dryers for years to good effect and have paid for themselves many times over in fines received. Says ConAir-brand are the best and you don't even have to plug 'em in.

• The village of Hempstead in Essex has had considerable success on the 30mph limit through it. The residents, working alongside the Police in non-police roles, maintained radar speed measurement records over a number of months and handed them on, with the Police making home enquiries from the records. One repeat offender turned out to be a local road safety officer...
• A cheap, hand-held, camera flash-gun, fired at the rear of the speeding car with all other safety considerations covered and then hidden before discovery, can do wonders at convincing repeat offenders of the error of their ways with no need to take a record or carry out a follow-up. "No, mate. I was just taking a photograph. Did the flash go off? Oh, sorry."

Perhaps a little deterrent is all that is needed.

I beat that game!!!

You could do this the Massachusetts way. Erect speed limit and stop signs. Plant tall shrubbery in front of said sighs. Pay the local constable overtime to enforce the law and write very expensive citations. That's speaking in a language that the drivers will understand, quickly.

Or~~~~you could be like the police department in National City, California. Change the speed limit signs between morning and evening rush hour periods and set speed traps to increase city revenue.

Another speed trap they commonly employed was parking an unmarked vehicle on the side of the freeway. (equipped with a photo radar devise)

I suspect both practices were highly illegal, but hey, if you're the law, you can do whatever you can get away with.

This looks effective...

Maybe you could hire a street artist to periodically draw these realistic pot holes on the street at different locations....even if you thought they were fake you probably wouldn't chance it....and you might just think you missed it, due to your superior driving skills....

With proper signage of course....

Do like they do in Colombia, SA. At the entrance to a populated area the speed limit drops from 100 km/hr to 60, 30, 10, then there's this huge speed bump that can't be taken at more than 5 km/hr, same thing at the other end of town, with more in the middle for good measure; and this is on the toll road. Passive, no need for a constable, just a few mechanics to repair the underbody damage for the non-believers!

You're missing my point. They have a potential gold mine here. Here in the People's Republic, a moving violation is a least $100. And there's more folks! You get at least a $200 surcharge on you auto insurance, for the next 7 years! And those numbers are at the starting point.

If you forget to pay the ticket, the cops will come to your house and arrest you, I know.

Try this link to get further information <http://www.newforest.gov.uk/index.cfm?articleid=8058> You can also search "SID rental" or "Speed Indicator Device"

We in Weston Underwood, Derbyshire, are in exactly the same position (small village, busy road). We now have a speed indicator at one end of the village, which is quite effective. You may be pushing your luck in asking for two, but one would be a start.

This guy built a bird box which "just happened to look like a speed camera":-

http://www.motorcyclenews.com/MCN/News/newsresults/General-news/2011/August/aug2211-bird-box-disguised-as-speed-camera/

The local council are threatening to have it removed, but I suspect that public opinion will be fully behind him.

Now...how do we keep all of those birds out of our speed cameras?

I am not familiar with "average speed cameras". A camera with a variable shutter speed (as of old) can give "instantaneous" speed from the length of the smeared image. An electronic camera taking dual shots against a measured background can also give speed information. Are you seeking ability to prosecute? Then you need legal advice. If your enforcement agency is not cooperative, then a more creative response seems called for. Good luck. I live in a small hamlet with no speed limit reduction on a country road - at night in the summer with the windows open you can hear the engines revving as they leave speed reduced space half or a mile away and open their throttles. Nearly all make it past us safely.

All it is is one camera at one end of a stretch of road , and one at the other end . Using number plate recognition , the computer inside compares time taken by a vehicle , to time it would take at the legal speed . Anyone doing it in less gets an automatic penalty .

Best speed reducer is allowing parking along both sides of the road- factually it does slow the others down, way better than speed bumps and less costly than bumps or camera.

But does it cause more child fatalities, as motorists can no longer see small kids?
Is that a classic case of solving the wrong problem... surely it's injuries and fatalities that are the problem, not vehicle speed per se?
Del

what statistics show more child fatalities?- in our land there are less as the pedestrians tend to cross at crosswalks. Advocating bad road manners for pedestrians is not an answer. check your statistics

a) I never said there were more fatalities. I asked a question!
b) Not everyone is in the US. The OP doesn't say where he lives!
c) Read the word s_l_o_w_l_y before shooting from the hip.
Del (grrrr ftzzzz hissss)

you are dealing with another cat- a "Leo"- note original appeared to be Scotland- I'll stroke your fur- no animosity- In our area the parking issue raises hackles as it sometime is less attractive visually, but factually is the best deterrent as even dashing out between parked cars, people (and kids),. tend to be a bit more observant and less on a iphone, Also traffic slows as there is less room- Me too S-l-o-w-l-y. Meow

That might have been a useful comment if you allowed us to know exactly where you live!!!!

Even the country name alone would have demonstrated some forethought!!!

DDDUUUUUUHHHHHH!!!!

First, the villages under discussion here have neither crosswalks/pedestrian crossings nor traffic lights. We just cross the road where we think it is safe. Second, I presume the statistics you are calling for have been requested by the Department of the Bleeding Obvious. A child crossing a road between parked vehicles has a very limited view of approaching traffic. A driver passing the parked vehicles has a very limited time to react to the child emerging between them. End of story.

The things you obviously don't realise about British villages are the following:

1. The roads are often only wide enough for two cars to pass - depending on how busy the road it (and many small villages are on commuting routes), great delays can result as only one car can traverse the village at a time.
2. Villages are often only around a mile long (but go back from the road) and thus the expense of any crossing control - the zebra crossing would be the cheapest - would be considered too high. Besides which, any crossing control in the UK must have 50 - 100 feet of no parking either side of it (there's a regulation, but I don't know the exact distance)

Some city councils in the states use that same argument for dispensing money from the coffers:

"...the expense of any crossing control - the zebra crossing would be the cheapest - would be considered too high."

Where the council usually balks is when a citizen asks them the price of one human life.

One could go on and on about this topic, but sadly money usually wins...the cost of one human life usually not exceeding a couple of hundred pounds (dollars, even). In the case of the ingenious birdhouse...the city sees an opportunity and wants to tax the man...go figure...like we didn't see that coming.

You would be surprised: the actuarial value of a human life lost in a road traffic accident is over 1,000,000 GBP. The only problem then is to relate the introduction of zebra crossings to a reduction in fatalities.

I suspect the "logic" goes something like:

• Cost of installing zebra crossing: X
• Cost of maintaining crossing Y/year
• Annual Road Safety Budget: Z/year
• Other calls on ARSB = 2*Z

I also suspect that crossing controls would only be installed if the numbers of pedestrians and amount of traffic were at a certain level. It's not economic to install a crossing if only 3 people a day would use it and there are under 50 cars passing through the village. (The numbers are for illustration purposes only).

The other thing to mention is that some villages/villagers don't/won't want a traffic control - flashing bellishas outside your bedroom all night? Pelican lights changing colour? Modern street furniture ruining the rural idyll....

You can see their point, if the simple acting of slowing down the traffic would solve the problem.

I haven't spotted AG in here yet, so I'll mention how good German drivers are at observing speed limits in villages - they go like stink on the derestricted stretches, then brake for the villages. If we could get that discipline it would help.

They are not as good as you appear to thing ER (3?), they simply know where the hidden cameras are........and there are a lot of those!!!

LOL!! Eitherway, I was grateful to be following them!

If that were the case, why spend any money at all and even bother to put in crossing of any type?

If they cannot be linked to safety, what is their purpose?

pssh...not surprised at all!

This is not the forum for giving a lecture on statistics. Just take it from me that if you have sufficient observations in your study (in this case the relation between the chance of getting killed crossing the road and the availability and use of pedestrian crossings), you will arrive at a conclusion, expressed with a mathematical value of certainty. In this case you will find that there is overwhelming evidence that in general the safest way for a pedestrian to cross a road is at a pedestrian crossing. The problem is arguing from the general to the particular. The council can argue that the quoted study does not include a sufficient number of villages with 231 inhabitants with a main road that is 18 feet wide and 2 miles long, and therefore that its conclusions are not valid for that village.

Exactly the same attitude is taken by some councils to the application of speed limits

Thanks , useful idea . Tom

Reminds of the mischief we would get up to as kids in the village!

2 of us would stand either side of the road and mime pulling an invisible rope taut across the road for an approaching car. They would always slow down and we would run away.

We would also hack open golf balls and stretch the elastic across the road between lampost or whatever we could tie it to. and hide. That caused some sharp braking sometimes, sometimes no effect.

It certainly stopped drivers speeding for a while once they learnt that we were going to get up to mischief all the way through the holidays.

ahhhhh what fun!

It's not the only one -

http://www.edp24.co.uk/news/jim_s_fake_speed_camera_putting_brakes_on_drivers_1_694045

The daft thing is, I go past this one often, and it's clearly NOT a camera.

Ho Hum.

Thanks . this looks like a good solution if Transport Scotland won't do anything . Tom

During the peak of blackberry season there were many drivers in my hometown who used to get the most annoying bug smears across their windshields...and if enough kids got together, down the sides of most white vehicles. Buses were especially vulnerable.

Weird.

There's a tiny vllage in Scotland that I forget the name of (leaving Oban, cross the Connel Bridge, take first right). It has a humungous speed warning sign. The thing willl flash up an alert if you are going too fast. The sign is the biggest message sign I've seen other than on a motorway. If you can track down the place and it's local council, you could ask how it was funded. The place is tiny, so it can't have been done by the locals using their own dosh. The odd thing is, I can think of several other local places where such a sign would have been of much more use.

In my College Psycology class we spoke of operant conditioning. The proffessor lectured on Pavlov and his salavating dogs and then asked what sort of conditioning we had been exposed to.

My contribution was speeding. If you take 3 different roads that are prone to speeding and with the first you do nothing and on the second place a police car in the same spot regularly and the third place the police car randomly then observe results.

With the first road people will speed often with out regard, the second they will slow before the regular spot, but the third road will have the most consistant speed control.

Put up cameras and people slow around the camera and are distracted from the road by watching the camera as they pass (every time!). Put up an average speed camera in one village and I will make sure to stop there for petrol or a drink (good for business!). Put a police car on the road randomly and I will follow the speed limit most of the time.

Drew K.