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85% Of Car Drivers Break 20mph Speed Limits, Reveals U.K.’s Department For Transport
(www.forbes.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
314 points (93.6% liked)
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@PowerCrazy Because they have a bunch of things that they're legally required to do and not enough money to do them all.
Some of them are easier to downgrade, ration, or scrap, than others.
Central funding was largely eliminated, while local government can no longer increase its own taxes beyond a certain threshold (requiring a referendum), thanks to laws passed by central government.
So they have to cut something.
Speed cameras save lives. It's politically easier to get rid of the speed cameras than to get rid of the roads. Mostly because our cities remain car dependent, and even buses depend on roads. Local government cannot get rid of cars for free; that will take a sustained national effort with considerable funding and political will.
Would you rather they cut the already very limited funding for helping old people who can't afford their own care needs?
Of course it's a political decision. But the cuts, the restrictions on raising taxes, and turning speed cameras from something that saves lives, enforces the law, and generates revenue, into a cost, are all carefully calculated to restrict local government's choices and blame them for the central government's cuts.
How can you be anti-car and still anti-speed-cameras?
And yes, the rule that the national treasury keeps the fines did not apply to traffic wardens. Central government specifically set out to cripple one of the main tools for reducing road deaths, to make a populist political point.
Though whether they make a profit on traffic wardens is less clear. A fair bit of enforcement is actually by the police, which is of course a different budget.
Because of the perverse incentive. The UK, much like the US, is a neo-liberal hell-hole where market solutions and "public-private partnerships" are considered the only possible solution to anything. Speed camera's while they can potentially improve public safety, also create an incentive for local governments to design roads that encourage speeding with artificially lower speed limits to improve revenue while ensuring that well-connected individuals are never subject to those fines. As soon as a neo-liberal government finds a funding mechanism outside of progressive taxation, they will preserve that funding source at the cost of the general public every time.
This means more and more dangerous roads because they produce more and more funding.
@PowerCrazy IMHO this is not true.
An individual driver speeding will normally receive a £100 fine and 3 points on their license.
You lose your license after 12 over 3 years. Even if you can avoid the points with a course once, you can't do that repeatedly.
So the practical effect is that people who get caught are more careful.
Which is a win for everyone.
As far as road design goes, while there are discussions to be had around that, there are good arguments for reducing the speed limit to 20mph. Roads are not designed for that. But we can enforce it anyway, cheaply.
@PowerCrazy Also, while some local councils are intentionally neoliberal, most are just trying to survive.
Central government does of course force them to take the neoliberal solutions you describe. Because all other options are prohibited, impractical, or cannot be funded, due to the rules set down by central government.
Local government can be corrupt (so can central government), it can be incompetent (ditto).
But the villain here is the tories. It's always the tories. And while they tend to control rural councils, they don't control most of the cities.