Sean Tierney over at “Scrollin’ on dubs” has a nice little rant about why he hates speed cameras and what might be done about them.

I hate photo radar. Hate it. And it’s not because occasionally I drive too fast and get a ticket. It’s because the city prostelitizes it as being a safety measure when in truth they’re using it purely as a revenue-generating tool. Last year in Scottsdale after only six months of installing speed cameras on the 101 highway, the city issued nearly $3MM in tickets… that’s just absurd. It didn’t make anyone drive slower. What it did was cause car accidents because inevitably some of the cars in traffic would hit the breaks as they approached the zones where they knew the cameras were. With a random fraction of the cars sporadically slamming on the breaks without warning, it’s no wonder that stretch of highway became one of the most dangerous in Arizona.

In the UK, drivers adopted a different countermeasure–bunching.

In response to automated speedtraps, drivers are adopting the obvious tactic of driving just below the trigger speed for the cameras, presumably on cruise control. So instead of cars on the road traveling at a spectrum of speeds with reasonable gaps between them, we are seeing “pelotons” of cars traveling closely bunched together at the same high speed, presenting unfamiliar hazards to each other and to law-abiding slower road-users.

The result is that average speeds are going up, and not down.

I wanted to include Schneier since, in Beyond Fear, he reminds us that one of the key items to consider when assessing risks are the agendas of those involved in the risky activity.

As Sean points out in the Scottsdale case, the city was on par to potentially generate over 6 million dollars a year in revenue from the cameras. Any increase in the accident rate would be largely (although not entirely–there would be some increased need for police, fire, and ambulances) an externality to the state.

we made a detection device for all the cameras in North America