Originally published at: Quebec traffic light only turns green if you're driving under the speed limit | Boing Boing
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A brilliant idea that will never catch on. There’s too much money to be made in speeding tickets.
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With out a camera useless, cos its not at a junction and does not seem to do anything but try and stop speeders, people will just start driving threw it as its not a traffic light but a gimmick.
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This is pretty common in Portugal.
The difference is that the enforcement comes from the glares from the other drivers, as well as any old Portuguese women dressed in black on the sidewalk. How dare you trigger a red light!
From experience, you only make that mistake once. You never ever want to be the one to trigger a red light!
In many jurisdictions, the money to be made on a red light ticket is even more!
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For a lot of jurisdictions this is true, but there are lots of instances where speed reduction techniques are far more favorable than traffic cop enforcement. For instance, we used to live on a town’s Main St. that was also a state highway. It is very heavily-populated with homes, driveways, businesses and pedestrians, but because it was State, the town couldn’t reduce the speed from 35 to 25 mph as they wanted and were denied a petition request to do so. It’s also very impractical for the town police to do pullovers as there is nowhere to pull over on the narrow, two-lane street with side parking. They eventually installed solar-powered speed alerts that showed the oncoming driver their speed as well as the posted speed and flashed if they were exceeding it. It had a noticeable impact. Once someone merges onto Main from the other highway, there is a fairly blind curve that could give the impression that you were leaving town instead of just entering it. People would gun their motors around that curve and then begin hitting the more residential part of the street. That’s right where the speed monitor was and most people would immediately slow down before entering the pedestrian-heavy business section (town is like 3 blocks long, but extremely active).
Edited for typo
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I am pretty sure I have seen traffic lights like this in Scotland almost 30 years ago. This is hardly a new idea. Usually, running a red light is a much more serious offence than being a few clicks over the limit, so people shy away from red-light-running much more than from speeding.
The common German version is a display that displays your speed and a green smiley or red frownie face depending on your speed. And even those work pretty well!
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Of course there will be objections to this, because a scary proportion of the driving public treat any suggestion that they shouldn’t be going exactly as fast as they please to be a serious insult.
If we took the number of people who die on our roads as seriously as we take deaths from any other mode of transport, enforcement of traffic laws would be much stricter and we would have to revoke a good percentage of licenses. At the moment, if you kill someone, do it with a car to escape punishment.
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Maybe they could try a water curtain that triggers when a speeder is detected.
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