It’s infuriating to me how often you see car drivers ranting and complaining about things like speed traps, and how common apps and traffic radio report these.
Drivers are probably the only group of people on earth who not only routinely whine about the consequences of their illegal actions, and attempts to enforce those consequences, without any broad pushback, but in fact get broad systematic support specifically designed to help them avoid these consequences.
Imagine if restaurant owners routinely complained about how “predatory” and “unfair” random health inspections, and fines for non-compliance are. Imagine if someone made an app that warned restauronteurs a day or two ahead of every health inspection, so they don’t have to bother keeping their kitchen code compliant any other time. People would be outraged. But when drivers make those same complaints about speed cameras or traffic enforcement in general, and get those same systems to avoid them, everyone just accepts it as a completely normal thing.
Addendum:
People often underestimate just how dangerous speeding can be. Going 20km/h over the limit doesn’t mean if you crash, it’ll be at 20km/h higher than the limit. Because you’re moving faster, even if the total stopping time would only increase by 25%, the distance covered during that stopping time would be much higher, meaning you reach the “crash” point earlier during the braking process, and at a much higher speed. That’s why small changes in speed can have exponential impacts on the severety of a crash.
For a simplified hypothetical.
If two cars are driving down a road with speed limit 80km/h, one is keeping the limit, the other is going 100km/h. When they are exactly neck on neck, at a dirt road intersection ahead, a tractor driver doesn’t check left and right properly, and starts turning onto the road.
Both drivers notice the tractor at the same time, react equally fast (average reaction time from recognition of a hazard to the start of brake application) and slam on their brakes as hard as they can. Using average deceleration rates for emergency stops, if they noticed the tractor early enough that the car following the speed limit just gives the it the tiniest of kisses, coming to a full stop right when reaching it, then the car going 100km/h would have crashed into the tractor whilst still going 80 km/h.
That’s going from a succesful emergency stop to an almost certainly fatal accident, over “only” 20km/h speeding on a high speed road. After subtracting measurement tolerances from a speed trap, in most countries that wouldn’t even get you a license suspension.
Similar thoughts definitely exist for other things that are not regularly enforced. There is a well known Facebook group in my city that tracks the location of ticket inspectors in public transport so you can avoid them. And bar owners in neighborhoods warn each other whenever there are checks for underage drinking or smoking inside because these laws are also rarely followed.
But I agree that if someone said similar things about health inspections it wouldn’t sit well with people. And it’s weird that something as dangerous as speeding or running red lights is not considered as important but rather as a minor thing.
Fare evasion doesn’t actively endager others, like speeding, so that’s not a valid comparison. Some people also literally can not afford a fare, but still need transport. Simply not speeding is basically ALWAYS an option for every driver. As for underage drinking, teenagers are immature idiots, that’s well known, I wouldn’t exactly consider “teenager do it too” a valid defense for negative behaviour of supposedly mature adutls. And underage drinking is a personal decision, that also doesn’t endanger anyone uninvolved in the activity.
Perhaps I should have been more explicit, and said “illegal things that endanger innocent third parties”, instead of just illegal, that was a indeed a bit too broad, I just felt it flowed better.
Yeah I wasn’t talking about the teenagers but about the bars themselves. The point is, it doesn’t matter if it’s illegal, plenty of illegal things are treated the same way. It matters that it’s not taken seriously while it should.
I’m sure bars would love to sell to underage people if it was legal, and I’m sure they occasionally turn a blind eye in the name of the profit, but I’ve literally never once in my entire life heard someone who sells alcohol openly complain about enforcement, or talk about how “unfair” it is that enforcer try to “entrap” them.
Yeah, sure there’s far far fewer bar owners than car drivers, but I personally hear drivers complain about speed enforcement like every other day. Avoiding speed enforcement is a massive institutionalised industry, like I said, there’s apps, traffic radio, most sat navs show stationary speed cameras. That is not even remotely close to the odd bar owner saying they’d like to sell to younger people. Also, whilst it’s absolutely harmful to teenagers to drink alcohol, it at least doesn’t directly endanger uninvolved people. The people who are being endangered, the teens, need to actively choose to participate in the illegal activity. Drivers, cyclist or pedestrians following every speed limit and traffic regulation, are still endangered by speeding drivers, and there’s nothing they can do personally to avoid that risk. So that’s still not an entirely valid comparison.
In my experience, there is literally no other illegal activity that endangers uninvolved third parties which is so widely accepted as normal by the public, that there is literally a major institutionalised industry specifically around enabling people to do that activity without consequences, and I’d be surprised if you can name one.
I’m not talking about just people broadly doing illegal things that endanger others, or even occasionally complaining about them getting caught, my point is just how ridiculously accepted and systemised it is specifically for speed enforcement.
People just like to complain.
I complain about speed traps because ACAB. I don’t blame drivers for speeding- I blame bad civil engineering for roads that always seem to optimize high-speed vehicle traffic first and then slap a much lower “speed limit” sign on the side of that road.
If having safer roads was truly the goal, the government responsible would use proper traffic-calming designs. Narrower streets, tighter turns, raised pedestrian walkways. Trees and other barriers at the roadside to make drivers uncomfortable speeding.
I 100% blame drivers. People don’t appreciate just how dangerous a car is. Driving one is an enormous responsibility, should be treated as such. It is 100% your responsibility as a driver to always ensure you are operating your vehicle as safe as possible. “The road was so wide and I wasn’t checking my speedometer” is not even in the same neighborhood of being a valid excuse for excessive speeding.
That’s a bit like saying you wouldn’t blame someone for leaving an unsecured gun around a child, because lax gun laws encourage unsafe gun handling.
Or you wouldn’t blame a corporation for their “fines are just the cost of doing business” approach to dealing with safety and environmental regulations, because the low fines and lax enforcement clearly heavily encourage corporations to behave like that.
If you are doing something that potentially significantly endagers/hurts others, it is your responsibility to that thing safely. Not being legally or structurally forced into doing it safely, is absolutely in no way whatsoever an excuse for not doing it safely.
If you are speeding, you either actively chose to ignore the speed limit, or you didn’t notice you’re significantly above the limit, which means you aren’t paying enough attention to the road, whilst flinging 2 tons of metal down it at upwards of 100 km/h, That’s irresponsible and indefensible.
Bad road design leading people to speed more often is a structural, societal problem, not an individual one.
(Also complaining about speed traps “because ACAB” is like complaining about coppers peacefully arresting a triple murderer because “ACAB”. ACAB doesn’t mean that literally every single thing that literally any cop or PD anywhere on earth ever does is automatically bad and rotten to the core, that’s an utterly ridiculous stance to have. Many things cops do are legitimately valuable public services. ACAB is about the systemic flaws of the system, that protect cops who cross the line from any (real) consequences, and the systemic biases and bigotry inherent to police forces, that every cop is at least silently complicit in)
There are still some cunts who’ll floor it between speed bumps and down narrow streets. Any copper who bangs one of them up is fine by me. acab is only because mostly they don’t.