Fuck Cars
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.
view the rest of the comments
"Speed trap" cameras are an entirely apt name. The solution to speeding isn't cameras, or patrols, or administrative controls, it's traffic calming, and that reduces capacity, so it's not considered. The trap is driving on the road at speeds they seem to be designed for, with speed limits significantly lower.
Fuck cars, but fuck cops more. We don't need to live in a panopticon. These cameras are a step in the wrong direction, and while I don't think the person who cut them down is doing the right thing for the right reasons, they are doing the right thing.
So you think they are doing the right thing for... the wrong reasons?
Yeah, the omnipotentEntity seems to lack a bit of reasoning here.
Cameras are enforcement without the discrimination and potential for violence that cops bring.
Traffic calming is great but it's also more expensive. Maybe drivers should just try driving below the speed limit.
Incorrect; they discriminate disproportionately on poor people
Unless the fines are proportional to wealth, I don’t see how you can argue that they’re not disproportionally punishing the poorest who are caught.
I agree the fines should be proportionate, but a police officer doing the enforcement can stop whoever they don't like the look of whether or not they are actually speeding whereas a camera will only target those who are actually, you know, speeding.
I didn’t say pigs are any better.
My point is if someone has the wealth to not feel the fine, the camera does nothing to influence their behaviour and such target those who can’t afford it.
If not cameras and not police then it's what? Just let people drive as fast as they want?
Shrug a better solution? Most roads have neither, why are you speaking as if it’s a requirement?
Speeding drivers get points on their licence regardless of their wealth.
I've had a speeding ticket where I was offered a "no points" option to pay a higher fine. That was only offered after I showed up in court. This would discriminate against poorer drivers.
So they get a few opportunities before feeling any kind of punishment?
However it throws hundreds of people through the equally discriminatory criminal justice system, and allows car insurance companies to jack up rates. Functioning even more effectively as a tax on being different than regular cops do. It also creates a financial incentive for the government not to fix the underlying cause of the problem of speeding.
Wishing and hoping for people to be better than they are isn't a solution. Just because traffic calming is more expensive, that's not a reason to not do it. It is something that needs to be done if you want to break car dependency.
We should be doing that, but local councils don't have the money after more than a decade of tory austerity. I also believe that driver's should be able to drive below the speed limit even if the road isn't correct for it, because there will always be places like that (around construction, for example), and like you say we can't just wish and hope for them to follow that rule so some enforcement is needed.
In engineering, there is an idea called hierarchy of controls.
Traffic calming is a "substitution" of the hazard. It, like unexpected construction, forces drivers to slow down due to the road not being psychologically safe to drive fast on.
Speed limits are an "administrative control" on the other hand.
People will drive as fast as they (possibly incorrectly) feel is safe, and a lot goes into that, of which speeding fines are only one very small part. If you really want safe streets for pedestrians and motorists, it is just not as effective an option.
Additionally, I'm level certain that Tory austerity is not really a viable excuse here, because I'm sure that there are ongoing efforts to "alleviate the traffic problem" by adding capacity. It's not that the money doesn't exist, it's that the money doesn't exist for this. Because elected officials aren't interested in this, because they're more interested in fine revenue and keeping car people happy.
No offense but you should re-read the posts above.
The sentence just prior.
The camera is not what's discriminating (in theory), it's the justice system that they have to deal with after the camera triggers on them.
To expand on what the above commenter said, the cameras are also discriminating because of the simple statistics of class dynamics. There are more poor people than rich ones being filtered into the justice system by cameras. Cameras also could be installed disproportionately in minority or poor neighborhoods, for example. Pretending that there aren't other discriminatory dynamics at play and acting like it's as simple as "tEchNoLoGY iS nEutRaL!" is ignorant.
The world is larger than just Cornwall. Your bad faith reductionist arguments are idiotic.
You acknowledge that systemic discrimination exists, but you want to paint borders around where it's appropriate to talk about it. Why? Systemic discrimination is always worth examining. Yes, even in Cornwall, but also everywhere else.
Nice how you conveniently ignore the other points made in this thread about how speed cameras actually are used. They don't call these approaches "speed traps" for nothing, there is intentional entrapment built into the system.
Theres an interesting argument by Chuck Mahron against speed cameras: https://podcast.strongtowns.org/e/the-arguments-for-speed-cameras%e2%80%a6and-why-they-don-t-hold-up/
The core of his argument is that it's bad to punish normal behavior, instead you should just do traffic calming, even cheap traffic calming
You will unconsciously drive as fast as the road allows you unless you keep checking your speedometer. Some cars too can insulate you from the noise and sense of speed that you will drive faster than you’d typically do in another car.
Spoken as someone who doesn't drive.
Did you know that keeping track of your speed is easy and a critical part of driving?
How about electric cars?