AI speed cameras to detect phone and seat belt offences

BetterBiker wrote:

we must start to discuss the elephant in the room around town - speeding and rule compliance.

Please explain how cyclists can be speeding when speed limits don't apply to them?

A weak argument to support irresponsible cycling.

Rendel Harris wrote:

BetterBiker wrote:

we must start to discuss the elephant in the room around town - speeding and rule compliance.

Please explain how cyclists can be speeding when speed limits don't apply to them?

 

Let me explain.

Speeding, to the pedant, means something closely defined by a definition involving hard & fast quantities (velocity) determined by a measuring instrument (a speedometer) and enforced by a law. If you haven't got a speedometer, you can thus never be speeding. This is probably why cyclists are exempt from being prosecuted for speeding but not exempt from riding recklessly or dangerously. (Quaintly called "furiously").

A better definition of speeding is: going faster than a pace that is safe by way of the person controlling their velocity being able to see and avoid unanticipatable but possible dangers that may manifest in their path. That is, for a cyclist, not riding "furiously" (i.e. too fast and without attention, for the conditions).

There are many stretches of road where the first definition of speeding, with its speed restriction signs, is not a sufficient guide as to what may be "true" speeding for that section of road.

I already gave you the obvious example of the 60mph limit applied to many narrow and bendy country roads, contained in high hedges, where doing anything over 15-20mph around a tight blind bend would be "speeding" since you'd hit even a stationary thing just around that bend, never mind another such as yourself also speeding 'round it towards you.

Similar judgements can and should be made by cyclists and drivists who are riding or driving along roads on which there are numerous driveways, gateways, junctions, pavements and other features from which unanticipated hazards may emerge only a few yards in front of you.

The legal limit might be 30mph or 20mph for cars. Why would you assume that, because you weight less than a wankpanzer, you and your bike can't hit something and badly damage both what you hit and yourself if you're going full-tilt faster than those maximum speeds in pursuit of your strava boast? In practice, you'd be wise to restrict your speed to the stopping distance required should a child, dog, agile granny or carelessly driven wankpanzer emerge suddenly from the next tangential blind opening. 

They do so emerge, see? Just because they didn't do so the last 21 times you went along there doesn't mean that they won't tomorrow.

In many cases, drivists and cyclists would really need to be doing a lot less than the indicated maximums to avoid such possibilities.

Yes, a car will do more damage. That doesn't mean that you have no responsibilty to avoid doing lesser damages with your bike & body just to satisfy your speed-lust.

If you can't be bothered to consider the potential damage to others, think of how inconvenient it will be to have bad gravel rash, a broken wrist and hip and a bent bicycle you just paid a few thousands for.

Cugel wrote:

If you haven't got a speedometer, you can thus never be speeding. This is probably why cyclists are exempt from being prosecuted for speeding...

No. Cyclists do not have exemption from prosecution - they are subject to the law just like everyone else. There is no law on speeding from which they could claim exemption. And again, no, the lack of bicycle speedometers is no obstacle to Parliament enacting such legislation - should they see the need. Clearly they don't.

BetterBiker wrote:

I'm new to road.cc but certainly not to biking as I made my living in the 90's for over a year as a courier in the city of London & West End. I confess I wasn't always a 'safe' road user. Now older and more mature I want to be accepted and respected as an equal road user with other vehicles - we must start to discuss the elephant in the room around town - speeding and rule compliance.

The simple answer is that it makes no difference whether or not you moderate your speed or obey every single recommendation in the Highway Code - the problem drivers can make up their own reasons to think that you don't belong on "their" roads.

With your previous unsafe history, how many injuries did you deal out or receive that were because of your non-compliance? Now compare that to if you'd behaved recklessly in a car and you should realise that cycling like an idiot is much preferable to driving like an idiot. For this reason, we need to get idiots out of cars and onto bikes and preaching rule compliance and speed moderation might not be the best tactic.

hawkinspeter wrote:

With your previous unsafe history, how many injuries did you deal out or receive that were because of your non-compliance? Now compare that to if you'd behaved recklessly in a car and you should realise that cycling like an idiot is much preferable to driving like an idiot. For this reason, we need to get idiots out of cars and onto bikes and preaching rule compliance and speed moderation might not be the best tactic.

Maybe the injuries were drastically reduced due to the actions of the drivers having to evade him, rather than as a result of his risk taking. 

Perhaps if a driver hadn't braked or moved out the way, he might be dead.

Left_is_for_Losers wrote:

hawkinspeter wrote:

With your previous unsafe history, how many injuries did you deal out or receive that were because of your non-compliance? Now compare that to if you'd behaved recklessly in a car and you should realise that cycling like an idiot is much preferable to driving like an idiot. For this reason, we need to get idiots out of cars and onto bikes and preaching rule compliance and speed moderation might not be the best tactic.

Maybe the injuries were drastically reduced due to the actions of the drivers having to evade him, rather than as a result of his risk taking. 

Perhaps if a driver hadn't braked or moved out the way, he might be dead.

Other road users can be disruptive but I think this one has pretty limited kilometerage.  It sounds rather like the "misogynist driver argument":
"Women are bad drivers!"
"So why is insurance cheaper for them?"
"Ah - they're not having crashes, but they're causing crashes".

BetterBiker wrote:

[...once was an alleycat...] Now older and more mature I want to be accepted and respected as an equal road user with other vehicles [...]

Well Good Luck with that!  If "you're a cyclist!" then it's not respect you'll be getting.  You''ll be expected to give it though - "we all just need to share the roads!"

While driving is the norm, and what is "expected" for a majority of adults, at least.

Human nature is tribal, and "othering" is a thing.  Absent reducing the number of drivers by several orders of magnitude and making it an actual priviledge - working with that nature and creating a "two spaces" solution (though with lots of "sharing" in theory, but much less in practice) may be the best we can hope for.

But... it's actually pretty good.

BetterBiker wrote:

we must start to discuss the elephant in the room around town - speeding and rule compliance.

You mean the two things that the average driver is way worse with than the average cyclist by every metric we have available to us?

So, if drivers are accepted and respected on the roads despite being at fault between 65%-75% of the time in, bike vs car KSIs, despite DfT statistics showing that most drivers are speeding most of the time, and despite a list of reports showing that drivers break the rules of the road at a much higher rate than cyclists - explain to me how being even more disproportionately hard on cyclists in this area will somehow make us accepted and respected too?

They're not wholly a new thing - they've used them in the south-west, but bring it, whatever it is. 

That would be interesting to see, I'm not surprised by the number of mobile offences but one hardly ever sees people driving without a seatbelt these days, at least in my experience. I wonder if the AI isn't very good at picking up seatbelts against black or dark grey shirts and so returns false positives for them?

No seatbelt?  No problem!

There are already those cycling helmets made to look like ordinary hats, I wonder if we ever (heaven forfend) had a compulsory helmet law there would be a market for ordinary hats made to look like cycle helmets?

I'm sure the opposite way round is true now.

Looking at the traffic count for the A30 there are probably around 100,000 motor vehicles in 72 hours, so 500 offences doesn't seem that many.

Why? AI is a powerful classification tool. It is used in radars to identify pedestrians, cyclists, mopeds, motorbikes, mini buses, vans, etc. All of which may have difference speed limits and rules.

I would consider that functionality to be machine learning, not artificial intelligence. 

mark1a wrote:

I would consider that functionality to be machine learning, not artificial intelligence. 

Semantics, pedantics .....

Meself, like, Ah try to look at a thing's function whilst ignoring the label. But I know a lot are label-obsessed these days. Identity as image rather than substance.  It's everywhere! Identity-shaped objects!!

Semantics mattes though. If we don't care what words mean, then they lose any meaning. Same with facts.
AI is a dreadfully misused and usually misleading term.