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So as usual, a couple of bad apples speeding has somehow triggered yet another a call for photo radar to return. The time it is coming from busy body Burnaby Councillor Colleen Jordan.
Quote:
"I would like to see photo radar come back," said Jordan.
This is likely in response to the fact that CTV has unfortunately been trying to push for some sort of change because there was all of 3 accidents over a 6 year period in about the same place as some sort of misguided public service. They had a reporter out there with a radar gun going "OMG everybody is doing 10~15 over in a 50 zone... that person is doing 80, the world will surely end! What about the children... bla bla bla".
You know... never mind the fact that even the cars going 80 are somehow still firmly on the road.
Anyway, if you are like me and feel like doing your part to curb this before it starts to snowball and we end up with photo radar that tags you anytime you go marginally over the limit, you can e-mail her at: cjordan@comsavings.com
People do tend to drive fast on that stretch because it's downhill without any traffic lights and most of the drivers are getting preparing to enter highway. But often, there are RCMP with speed guns at the bottom of the hill anyways. Just fixing the speed reader board should fix some of the excessive (100+) speeding
I sent a nicely worded e-mail to her account (e-mail addy posted above in OP if you would like to do the same) with some reasons of why I am against photo radar... if I get a reply, I will post it up here
Speeding (aka following flow of traffic) isn't necessarily dangerous.
The speed limits are WAY TOO LOW.
The MAXIMUM SPEED in BC, in reality, is MINIMUM SPEED.
When you drive on 50km/h zone, you are EXPECTED to drive AT LEAST 50km/h.
When you drive on 90km/h zone, you are EXPECTED to drive AT LEAST 90km/h.
People do tend to drive fast on that stretch because it's downhill without any traffic lights and most of the drivers are getting preparing to enter highway. But often, there are RCMP with speed guns at the bottom of the hill anyways. Just fixing the speed reader board should fix some of the excessive (100+) speeding
But pls fuck no to photo radar
The police speed traps are OFTEN USELESS, they do NOT contribute to the road safety.
Police officers love to hide behind the highway where long stretch is. Where it's easier to speed. (going over 90km/h on long straight line)
However, if you look at ICBC stats, those cops hiding spots aren't necessarily dangerous.
Usually the most dangerous places are busy intersections, where law enforcement is actually needed, but almost never try to prevent accidents monitoring most dangerous spots, rather, they would hide where people are going 120+km/h where it's a lot more safe to do so, as proven by accident stats.
Also as we know by now, some of the most dangerous behaviors are texting, drinking & driving, etc. Not speeding itself. (again, I'm not talking about kids in Ferrari trying to hit 300km/h)
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Photo radar should be set up at the top-20 intersections or stretches of road based on crash statistics. Permanently. And everyone should be made aware of this.
Elsewhere, police should be enforcing speed limits only when the limit is reasonable (ie. not 80kph on a stretch of straight, divided, fenced, low-risk highway) and the risk is high. The rest of the time, police should focus their resources on enforcing drunk/distracted driving laws and fighting actual crime.
Variable speed limit corridors are a good start, as is the "keep right except to pass" movement, but our road laws are way out of touch with the modern automobile and the road safety research/statistics currently available from other jurisdictions.
It's time to create a culture where we replace "speed kills" with "driving too fast for the current road conditions" so that people stop thinking that doing 130kph is the only reason people crash. Germany features thousands of miles of highway (40% of all roadways) without speed limits, but a strong driving culture and good investment in infrastructure means their crash statistics are below European averages.
Also, time for ICBC to push for review and updating of the province's speed limits, making sure that the limits are always reasonable and consistent relevant to the risk. The Pat Bay highway in Victoria is the safest stretch of road ever invented, with very low risk, and features a laughable and strictly enforced 80kph speed limit... while stretches of the Coquihalla or Hwy 1 in southeastern BC -- often with no fencing, bad weather, narrow shoulders, and frequent bad weather -- are 120kph. How the fuck can you expect the public to respect speed limits when there's such a ridiculous disparity or incongruity between different roads?
Update the province's limits based on actual risk data and allow the highest possible speeds within the acceptable level of risk for that particular road. This way, people will actually do the limit, and a culture of safer driving for the sake of safety will be fostered (instead of having people only drive the speed limit to avoid being ticketed and ignoring the road conditions).
Photo radar should be set up at the top-20 intersections or stretches of road based on crash statistics. Permanently. And everyone should be made aware of this.
Elsewhere, police should be enforcing speed limits only when the limit is reasonable (ie. not 80kph on a stretch of straight, divided, fenced, low-risk highway) and the risk is high. The rest of the time, police should focus their resources on enforcing drunk/distracted driving laws and fighting actual crime.
Variable speed limit corridors are a good start, as is the "keep right except to pass" movement, but our road laws are way out of touch with the modern automobile and the road safety research/statistics currently available from other jurisdictions.
It's time to create a culture where we replace "speed kills" with "driving too fast for the current road conditions" so that people stop thinking that doing 130kph is the only reason people crash. Germany features thousands of miles of highway (40% of all roadways) without speed limits, but a strong driving culture and good investment in infrastructure means their crash statistics are below European averages.
Also, time for ICBC to push for review and updating of the province's speed limits, making sure that the limits are always reasonable and consistent relevant to the risk. The Pat Bay highway in Victoria is the safest stretch of road ever invented, with very low risk, and features a laughable and strictly enforced 80kph speed limit... while stretches of the Coquihalla or Hwy 1 in southeastern BC -- often with no fencing, bad weather, narrow shoulders, and frequent bad weather -- are 120kph. How the fuck can you expect the public to respect speed limits when there's such a ridiculous disparity or incongruity between different roads?
Update the province's limits based on actual risk data and allow the highest possible speeds within the acceptable level of risk for that particular road. This way, people will actually do the limit, and a culture of safer driving for the sake of safety will be fostered (instead of having people only drive the speed limit to avoid being ticketed and ignoring the road conditions).
The Pat Bay Highway in Victoria's speed limit should be set to 120km/h or so.
If you look at ICBC Stats, Pat Bay or not, highways are usually very safe. Only a few accidents a year. If you look at Shelbourn/McKenzie intersection in Victoria, there are so many accidents(3 figure number a year).
But police never care to enforce dangerous spots, they would keep giving 7 day impound for going 120km/h on 80km/h zone(a long straight line), which is completely safe to do so.
Same thing as Marine Drive in West Vancouver as well.
As traffic engineers have recommended, 85 percentile should be the speed limit.
Also some people love to drive at 80km/h on left lane, when everybody else is going 110+km/h.
The Pat Bay Highway in Victoria's speed limit should be set to 120km/h or so.
If you look at ICBC Stats, Pat Bay or not, highways are usually very safe. Only a few accidents a year. If you look at Shelbourn/McKenzie intersection in Victoria, there are so many accidents(3 figure number a year).
But police never care to enforce dangerous spots, they would keep giving 7 day impound for going 120km/h on 80km/h zone(a long straight line), which is completely safe to do so.
Same thing as Marine Drive in West Vancouver as well.
As traffic engineers have recommended, 85 percentile should be the speed limit.
Also some people love to drive at 80km/h on left lane, when everybody else is going 110+km/h.
Some stretches of the Pat Bay (ie. Haliburton to Island View Rd) should be 90 or 100kph, while other sections (like the heavily policed Royal Oak to the end of the highway at Uptown / Saanich Plaza) should be 110kph at minimum based on risk and crash stats.
Quadra @ 40kph is arguably even worse, if we're talking Victoria oddities.... Other places in town you could argue have limits too high for the road, which really just reinforces the lack of public faith in speed limits being a useful tool for determining safe driving speeds.
Also, I think it would be a cool idea to fix things like the Keating X Road highway exit, where crashes are frequent and often lead to injuries. I know this is a nutty suggestion here, but what if we stopped putting in new intersections where they're not really needed, and instead focused on addressing the actual high-risk places where you have to cross very busy high-speed oncoming traffic at the top of a blind hill? (Referring to Keating X Road, an insanely dangerous highway turn lane used by a huge volume of cars every day, which is about 500m from a totally useless and irritating stoplight used to access a few rural homes and farms.)
Anyone else think a day and night speed limit for certain roads would make sense? Think Blenkinsop Rd in Victoria, or other rural roads with no risk during daytime, and higher risk at night due to deer, drunk teens, etc.... that way people would recognize that the conditions change at various times and it's necessary to adjust your driving accordingly.
(Also, those of us with 17" vented 4-piston carbon ceramic brakes should be allowed to drive up to the electronic limits of the vehicle, such as 260kph..... amirite??)
Comparing different sections of highway almost never makes sense. Look at highway 18 between Duncan and Lake Cowichan, 100 km/h speed limit on a 2-lane undivided highway through the mountains loaded with wildlife and heavy trucks. It has the highest speed limit south of Nanaimo ...
Highway 1 between Duncan and Parksville is 90 km/h (except through Ladysmith and Nanoose Bay), but once you pass Parksville, it suddenly becomes a 120 km/h limit. Aside from wildlife fencing, there's virtually no changes between the stretches.
They recently repaved Tansor Rd here in Duncan. This section used to be part of the old Lake Cowichan highway. It has been 70 km/h since before I was born, used to have a school on it that closed about 15-20 years ago, used to have logging and chipper trucks traveling on it, used to have two active quarries on it (one shut down years ago and the other is barely active), had narrow road-level sidewalks on either side, and had been seal-coated numerous times.
Well, after they repaved it, smoothed out the undulations, widened the shoulders and added bike lanes, they reduced the speed limit to 60 km/h.
So, somehow, with substantially safer vehicles, no heavy truck traffic, substantially better road engineering, a substantially better road surface, better visibility, substantially fewer pedestrians (especially children), etc., they LOWERED the speed limit. This in spite of the fact that I can't recall ever hearing of a major accident (or even minor accidents outside of when it snows) on this stretch in the 30+ years that I've lived here. And, wouldn't you know it, the police have started setting up speed traps on the stretch of road (first two times I've ever seen speed traps on that stretch were since they repaved it).
Some stretches of the Pat Bay (ie. Haliburton to Island View Rd) should be 90 or 100kph, while other sections (like the heavily policed Royal Oak to the end of the highway at Uptown / Saanich Plaza) should be 110kph at minimum based on risk and crash stats.
Quadra @ 40kph is arguably even worse, if we're talking Victoria oddities.... Other places in town you could argue have limits too high for the road, which really just reinforces the lack of public faith in speed limits being a useful tool for determining safe driving speeds.
Also, I think it would be a cool idea to fix things like the Keating X Road highway exit, where crashes are frequent and often lead to injuries. I know this is a nutty suggestion here, but what if we stopped putting in new intersections where they're not really needed, and instead focused on addressing the actual high-risk places where you have to cross very busy high-speed oncoming traffic at the top of a blind hill? (Referring to Keating X Road, an insanely dangerous highway turn lane used by a huge volume of cars every day, which is about 500m from a totally useless and irritating stoplight used to access a few rural homes and farms.)
Anyone else think a day and night speed limit for certain roads would make sense? Think Blenkinsop Rd in Victoria, or other rural roads with no risk during daytime, and higher risk at night due to deer, drunk teens, etc.... that way people would recognize that the conditions change at various times and it's necessary to adjust your driving accordingly.
(Also, those of us with 17" vented 4-piston carbon ceramic brakes should be allowed to drive up to the electronic limits of the vehicle, such as 260kph..... amirite??)
I think mayors, city counsels or workers do not get the fact that car needs to move reasonably fast in order for them to be useful.
You wanna reduce the fatal accident? Sure, lower the speed limit to 5km/h everywhere in Canada, I bet the fatal accident will be the thing of past.
But in reality though, it needs to be at 85th percentile like all the traffic engineers have been recommending for many years.
Artificially lowering the speed limit isn't going to make it safer, the differentiation of flow of traffic is more dangerous.
If you're talking about digital speed limit display, it's been done since couple decades ago.
They adjust the speed limit according to the weather and flow of traffic.
Comparing different sections of highway almost never makes sense. Look at highway 18 between Duncan and Lake Cowichan, 100 km/h speed limit on a 2-lane undivided highway through the mountains loaded with wildlife and heavy trucks. It has the highest speed limit south of Nanaimo ...
Highway 1 between Duncan and Parksville is 90 km/h (except through Ladysmith and Nanoose Bay), but once you pass Parksville, it suddenly becomes a 120 km/h limit. Aside from wildlife fencing, there's virtually no changes between the stretches.
They recently repaved Tansor Rd here in Duncan. This section used to be part of the old Lake Cowichan highway. It has been 70 km/h since before I was born, used to have a school on it that closed about 15-20 years ago, used to have logging and chipper trucks traveling on it, used to have two active quarries on it (one shut down years ago and the other is barely active), had narrow road-level sidewalks on either side, and had been seal-coated numerous times.
Well, after they repaved it, smoothed out the undulations, widened the shoulders and added bike lanes, they reduced the speed limit to 60 km/h.
So, somehow, with substantially safer vehicles, no heavy truck traffic, substantially better road engineering, a substantially better road surface, better visibility, substantially fewer pedestrians (especially children), etc., they LOWERED the speed limit. This in spite of the fact that I can't recall ever hearing of a major accident (or even minor accidents outside of when it snows) on this stretch in the 30+ years that I've lived here. And, wouldn't you know it, the police have started setting up speed traps on the stretch of road (first two times I've ever seen speed traps on that stretch were since they repaved it).
I agree with your point about the limits on various roads being totally inconsistent. This is a big reason why many people ignore the speed limits from a safety perspective, and only respect them (at times) to avoid getting a ticket.
An effective speed limit will help drivers figure out a safe speed at which to drive any given road in average conditions. If it's reasonable and most drivers find it to be fair given the road and risk factors, then most drivers will obey it or at least not disregard it completely.
There will always be 18 year olds who drive 180kph regardless of the posted limit, but that's not going to change even if you change the limits to 10kph, so it's irrelevant.
A province-wide review of major highways and updates to make limits more consistent and more reasonable for each stretch of road and the risks it presents to drivers would be a good start to earning back the respect drivers have for posted limits.
At the moment, that 60kph limit on a vastly upgraded and safer road you mentioned is a complete joke and will be ignored by everyone except Grandma Slowpoke....and even those turds who obey the rules no matter what are a problem because other drivers will do dumb shit to get past them (tailgating, risky overtaking). Why not change it to 80kph (or whatever) so people think it's pretty reasonable? Do that on the majority of BC roads and you'll foster a culture of drivers who respect the limits and use them as a tool to drive more safely according to the road they're driving on.
(To be fair, this inconsistency and the resulting lack of respect for limits in general is a huge issue many places in the world. I've seen some HILARIOUS speed limits in developing countries, and even in California, for example, there's some roads where the posted limit would cause an average family car to end up in a ditch and others where it's impossible to fathom actually doing such a low speed on that particular road. We aren't way worse than everyone else at this, we just suck as much as most jurisdictions do on this topic)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jmac
It's all about $$$, not at all about safety.
I actually stopped agreeing with you at this point in the reply.... if it's just about money, why not police the roads with silly limits exclusively and pull over everyone doing 89 in an 80 zone? Sure there's quotas to hit and money to be made, but that's not the core justification when setting speed limits.
I think speed limit issues stem more from silly bureaucracy, uninformed opinions among politicians and policymakers, and a general lack of any coordination between various levels of gov't and ICBC / police.
I think mayors, city counsels or workers do not get the fact that car needs to move reasonably fast in order for them to be useful.
You wanna reduce the fatal accident? Sure, lower the speed limit to 5km/h everywhere in Canada, I bet the fatal accident will be the thing of past.
But in reality though, it needs to be at 85th percentile like all the traffic engineers have been recommending for many years.
Artificially lowering the speed limit isn't going to make it safer, the differentiation of flow of traffic is more dangerous.
If you're talking about digital speed limit display, it's been done since couple decades ago.
They adjust the speed limit according to the weather and flow of traffic.
So basically, it all boils down to a need to use data and statistics -- along with actual research and expert analysis -- to drive policymaking, rather than preconceived notions or outdated opinions which appear to be guiding the current speed limit policies most often.
Also, on a side note: public opinion here in Victoria sucks when it comes to driving and road safety. The driving culture here is really quite tragic, and your average citizen will likely push back against progressive road laws, I think. That's a hurdle you won't find in many places, but I think it's an issue here and in some other places in the province where the idea of speed being the root of all traffic accidents is deeply entrenched in the public mindset.
A healthy driving culture is one theme you can point to as a common theme among countries with low traffic accident and fatality rates. Germans are well trained during driving school (mandatory) and there's investment in roads and ongoing education for drivers... not to mention a strict understanding of lane discipline on unregulated roads and a better understanding of cars and driving / physics fundamentals. Same goes for other countries in Europe with similar policies like Finland or Switzerland or Britain.
Faster is not more dangerous if everyone is aware of the risks and taking necessary steps to mitigate or minimize those dangers. 140kph in a well-maintained vehicle in good, dry conditions with proper tires and a focused, well-trained driver is probably far safer than a rust-bucket being driven 90kph on the same road by an untrained housewife applying makeup and talking to her kids in the backseat. Time to change the public service announcements to reflect this instead of demonizing speed and texting as the only things that cause crashes and fatalities, which distracts from the real problems.
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