Speed Cameras Are Not the Answer

(Source: Wikimedia Commons/Tony Webster.)

Twitter is a really bad place to have nuanced discussions. Even so, I’m blessed to have some smart and thoughtful friends who challenge my thinking in ways that I find helpful, even on Twitter. Recently, I got into a bit of a scrum over speed cameras in a way that brought my friend, Mike Lydon of Street Plans Collaborative, into the mix. Mike challenged me with the following:

So the answer is a uniform expansion of the technology. We all know cops aren’t doing the job and street designs can’t happen fast enough. What is the actual strong towns solution (not critique)? How do you remove racial bias and lack of resources / political will?

— Mike Lydon (@MikeLydon) August 30, 2023

Mike’s a really thoughtful guy with a big heart. I took this as a sign that it was time to take a break, think things through, and be extra thoughtful in response. The following is an adaptation of that response, which you can get in a less-readable Twitter format if you’d like. 

I argue that speed cameras are not even part of a solution to street safety. They are a dead end. This has many people, including friends of mine like the brilliant @mikelydon, asking questions. Here, Mike is asking for the @strongtowns solution. I’m going to take his question as… https://t.co/nbOYveeLVF

— Charles Marohn (@clmarohn) August 30, 2023

A tiny bit of nuance is needed. At Strong Towns, we don’t put forth “solutions.” We see cities as complex and adaptive systems. Solutions imply finality, but cities need to evolve, adapt, and become better over time. There is never finality. 

I point this out because there is a tension over vision here, not just between Mike and I (though I think that tension is minor), but between myself and the broader advocacy for speed cameras. “How do we solve the problem of speeding” is not what we’re concerned with at Strong Towns. We are concerned with the whole patient, so to speak. Speeding is one of many urban challenges in need of addressing.

In a whole-patient mindset, in an evolving city, speed cameras are an evolutionary dead end. This is especially true when they are trumpeted as a self-evident “success.” The original article shared on Twitter by Streetsblog USA claimed that speed cameras are “proven to reduce vehicle speeding,” a claim that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny or neatly correlate to safety.

Without a strategic ethic to deploy cameras, there is more than a little risk that cameras become THE solution. There is significant momentum in that direction, especially when revenue finds its way into cash-starved general funds of local governments. 

At Strong Towns, we have an ongoing campaign for Safe and Productive Streets. We pair “safe” with “productive” because, again, we are working in more than one dimension. We need to slow traffic on our streets because of safety, yes, but also because it is one part of making streets more prosperous, in general. We want cities to prosper.

Finally, as human as it is to want a War on Car Drivers—and I understand it—drivers are victims of this system, as well. We all have something at stake in fixing our streets, building great roads, and eliminating our stroads. The us-versus-them framing, which the conversation on speed cameras reinforces, is anathema to the Strong Towns mindset. We should never fixate on our friends and neighbors as the problem (even when they are irritating—especially when they are irritating).

So, to get to Mike Lydon’s question, here is the Strong Towns approach to improving street safety.

If Not Speed Cameras, Then What?

We recognize that commuter culture is, in fact, a culture (the customs of a particular group of people). Our North Star objective is to replace a culture of commuting by automobile with a culture of biking and walking. Everything pushes toward and flows from that shift in that culture.

We accelerate the systems of street safety as we accelerate demand for biking and walking and a positive culture that comes from it.

We built Strong Towns Media to do that; to shift the culture. We reach millions of people with a radical message of reform, one that is also radically bottom up. We are diligent in avoiding the top-down partisan divides that empower systems and stall bottom-up action. I’ll fight the engineering profession, for example, but we never drag your local engineer through the mud to score points.

All on board. We want everyone to be able to see themselves living a good life in a prospering place, biking and walking on a safe street in a neighborhood they love.

I hear advocates of camera enforcement say that it is the quickest and easiest way to have street safety. They argue that the pro-speed people show up and shut down any talk of fixing streets, that cameras are the only thing we can agree on. I called this “intellectually lazy” because I know it’s not true. 

We have hundreds of groups that we call Local Conversations working to, among other things, make streets safer. This is bottom-up, full-contact type of work. These are thousands of people not just making things happen, but talking to their neighbors with the goal of shifting the culture. 

We tell their stories, cheer them on, and inspire others. There is a group in Baltimore working to calm traffic. Another in Philadelphia advocating for safe streets. One in Cincinnati is getting bump-outs installed and then there are crazy inspiring people like Mary Jones in Hawaii working way outside the box.

This work scales to the challenges we face. It’s multi-dimensional. It’s not a whack-a-mole evolutionary dead end the next generation will need to someday overcome.

The Crash Analysis Studio

This year, we launched the Crash Analysis Studio. This is the most radical, bottom-up way to shift the culture of street design.

Instead of assigning blame to one of the crash participants (aka victims), we are modeling how a team of technical and non-technical experts can identify the design factors that contributed to the crash.

We work with our Local Conversations to source these crashes, gather info, and identify citizen experts. We have held eight sessions this year. Videos, findings, recommendations, etc. are all done publicly and shared for others to learn from and copy. 

We are about to launch a training program so anyone, anywhere can start a Crash Analysis Studio. There is no more powerful way to shift the culture from blame to action than to have communities systematically learn from crashes, then apply that knowledge to their designs.

We plan to have hundreds of studios operating within a couple years. We have one state interested in rolling this out statewide and others we are talking to.

And, of course, we’re sharing these stories, inspiring others to think critically and help us change the culture. Here’s one from earlier this year, where an intoxicated woman was killed while crossing a dangerously designed street on foot. The system blamed her for her own death (since the driver wasn’t speeding, after all). 

The designers of that street received multiple industry awards for “complete streets”—a concept, much like enforcement cameras, where intent diverges from reality in dramatic ways, especially when it can be co-opted and championed by the existing top-down system.

At Strong Towns, we are training bottom-up leaders to think critically about what is being handed to them in the name of safety.

But, We Don’t Have Money for Redesigning Streets

One assertion is that enforcement cameras scale, but street design changes don’t. That is NOT true. Cities are stuck today with a project delivery process that is top down and process driven. (Incidentally, cameras fit in that stuck mentality. They cost little and provide their own revenue stream that doesn’t compete with legacy transportation investments.)

The bottom-up mentality Strong Towns advocates for starts with observation of struggles, then scales responses, providing more rapid and iterative ways to make change. (Reminder: cities are complex and need to evolve, thus many iterative projects instead of a few large transformations.)

We’ve advocated for, and helped cities start, Street Design Teams. I wrote about this in Confessions of a Recovering Engineer. The idea is that streets need to be designed by a group of technical and non-technical experts. An engineer is one part of such a team, but a subordinate part. Streets are complex and our approach to designing them needs to reflect that complexity.

And we have fought against expansion of programs that undermine local efforts, especially federal allocations that give billions to stroad expansions while throwing propaganda pennies at bottom-up safety projects. If we want neighborhood-level sensitivities to our design challenges, we need to stop crowding them out.

Federal transportation programs actually rob cities of resources, inducing them to do projects that shift money from more urgent needs today while committing the local government to maintaining unproductive systems in the future. Here’s just one in a long line of examples we’ve profiled over the years.

You want the money to systematically fix streets? It’s there, we are just stealing it for nasty stroad projects (and then cheering them on because they have a bike lane).

And, there is this argument that we lack the money to do anything but cameras. Come on! It is way more expensive to build dangerous streets than safe ones. Seriously. If we were concerned about the finances, all our streets would be well designed (in a way that intuitively slows speeds), with lots of stuff going on adjacent to them. Too much money has always been our problem. It robs us of our capacity to innovate.

How Cameras Could Be Part of a Strong Towns Approach

Finally, let me deal with cameras directly. I wrote about them in Confessions of a Recovering Engineer and have been consistent about their utility. Enforcement cameras can be part of a strategy, but only where they:

1. Focus on ticketing the truly deviant. If a large percentage of drivers are speeding, that's a design problem.

2. Are paired with an ethic of iterative engineering to reduce violations and improve safety.

3. Use revenue we get from fining people with a camera near the location of that camera. We shouldn't use the money on the other side of the city—it should go toward fixing the source of the problem.

Prolific Twitterer @maxdubler says what I think many/most people believe: that, if we punish people enough, we can alter their behavior. To say that in a Strong Towns way: We can change the culture on speed through increased enforcement. I agree in theory, but I think reality is a lot more complicated, especially when it comes to automated cameras.

We should redesign streets to discourage speeding.

That said, it is straightforwardly true that people will follow the speed limit when they know there are consequences for breaking it, *even where the street design encourages speeding.*

Enforcement is necessary and effective. https://t.co/vTdpAkcYqx

— Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈 (@maxdubler) August 30, 2023

The data reported in another article by Streetsblog NYC (and shared on Twitter by Streetsblog USA) fits a narrative, but it’s not rigorous. Reducing speeds from very lethal (+10 mph over the speed limit) to mostly lethal (over the speed limit but 10 mph or less) for 30% of offenders at a few key points says very little about safety. I’ll give two examples that I think are both fairly obvious, but there are many more.

If we have cameras in Location A, people will do one of three things: (1) reduce their speed at Location A and maintain a reduced speed, (2) reduce their speed at Location A and speed up to compensate in other places, or (3) take alternate routes to avoid Location A. 

Advocates of cameras are suggesting that a 30% reduction in speeding tickets suggests the first outcome. That is a classic case of motivated reasoning. One of the other two outcomes are far more likely, especially in the absence of any design changes. At the very least, the connection between the measured outcome and an increase in safety is not “straightforwardly true.”

In technical speak, this is called “risk displacement.” You can compensate for risk displacement by having enforcement cameras everywhere and at all times. I would not be a fan of that approach, but I would support a city that wanted to try it. It is intellectually honest and consistent with safety (but, if you are serious about safety, you would need to have cameras for exceeding lethal speeds—20 mph—and not just for those going +11 over the posted speed limit). 

The second example stems from what we know about the timing of lethal crashes. They don’t occur during rush hour or peak times, which is when the bulk to the denominator is going to be when we’re measuring effectiveness rates the way Streetsblog is reporting them. They occur in off hours, at random times, often as a result of a handful of random occurrences.

If we want to measure the effectiveness of speed cameras, we can’t just measure speeding at the camera location. We need to look at the area and measure speeding throughout. We need to look at off-peak rates and deviations from the norm. And we need to look at the overall rates of traumatic and fatal crashes. 

In New York City, as per the Streetsblog article, the overall traumatic and fatal crash rate is rising. To suggest it would be worse without the cameras is also not a rigorous conclusion. The system is too complex; there’s too much noise in the data.

In Conclusion

I’ll go back to where I started. Cities are complex systems that need to evolve and change. We have a housing crisis. We have a street safety crisis. We have a crisis in public health, in the climate, in the economy… Crises everywhere!!!!

If you want a solution to these challenges, I’ll give you one: cities.

But not cities as a machine where rote “solutions” are applied to them, whack-a-mole fashion, by desperate people constrained by a top-down set of alternatives. 

No. Instead, cities will harmonize many competing interests—address many challenges simultaneously—when they are allowed to evolve in response to stress and opportunity. The greatest thing we can do for human prosperity is to shift our systems from top down to bottom up, allowing neighborhood actors to be active co-creators of the places they inhabit.

As we say at Strong Towns, cities are not the lowest level of government, but the highest level of collaboration for people working to build a prosperous place.

There are limited applications where speed cameras can be helpful, but automated enforcement of speeding is an evolutionary dead end for cities. Let’s not burden future generations with having to fix yet another well-funded source of stagnation merely because we found the work of truly changing the culture around commuting to be too messy, burdensome, or demanding of our time.

Editor’s Note: This article originally referred to an article published by Streetsblog NYC, and inaccurately attributed it to Streetsblog USA. The error has since been corrected.

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