Ben’s Car Blog

I’d always thought that red-light cameras were, on the whole, not that bad an idea. Sure, if you run a red-light you still don’t get caught until the ticket and photo arrives in the mail, but that’s offset by the idea that they’re preventative and the threat of getting caught should be strong enough to restrain you from running the red.

CarPundit says that they’re just about to be introduced to Boston and he’s not happy about it. He even says that red light cameras “increase the traffic death rate” which sounds pretty dramatic. I had thought that the results might have been specific to the United States, however there is Australian research showing the same thing: that there is no benefit to red light cameras in reducing accidents. Reading the report on the Australian data (in part commissioned by Vic Roads!) it seems that some sites that had red light cameras installed had a higher number of accidents after the installation, however, many of those sites were low-frequency accident sites meaning that any change in the number of accidents was significant.

Autoblog reports that in Malaysia some enterprising boffins have made speed cameras that fit into “Botts Dots” (think cats eyes if you’re Aussie).

Big brother meets little brother?

(Cameras embedded in road catch speeders)

Drive reports that Sydney’s cross city tunnel will have speed cameras installed before it opens in contravention of the State Governments speed camera policy of only having cameras at accident black spots.

The government has defended the decision, saying that “conventional policing” was difficult in the tunnels.

(Tunnel a black spot site before it opens)

A speed camera fine was dismissed in the NSW courts recently as a team of Chinese mathematicians have proved that the encryption algorithm (MD5) used to encode the photos and other details is flawed.

David Starkoff, lawyer and IT geek extraordinairre, weighs in and says that while MD5 is flawed, it is not flawed in such a way as to make it a defence against a camera fine.

(Motorist wins case after maths whizzes break speed camera code)

AAMI insurance has done their driver survey again and found that Australian drivers are rude and self centred.

Drive reports:

Results of a survey of almost 2,400 Australian drivers show Sydneysiders are more likely than anyone to get annoyed when they are not thanked for their courtesy.

Nearly 80 per cent of NSW people had seen able-bodied drivers park in disabled spaces, the highest in Australia.

More than 60 per cent of Australians surveyed said another driver had stolen their car space while they were clearly waiting for it.

One in five Australian drivers said if another driver tried to enter a lane when traffic was heavy, they would refuse to let them in.

While the ABC notes that Canberrans are the nations calmest:

The survey, which has been conducted by insurance company AAMI, shows that 58 per cent of people become annoyed when they are courteous to others and not acknowledged.

But in Canberra, that figure falls to 42 per cent.

(via The RiotACT)

Recently the NSW RTA introduced legislation that will prevent p-platers from driving “high performance” cars. The RTA defined “high performance” as cars having a forced-induction engine (ie turbo charged or supercharged) or more than 8-cylinders, leaving the RTA in the strange position of having banned the 0.6L, 50kw Diahatsu Copen but not the 2.7L, 176kw Porsche Boxster. When this absurdity was pointed out to them, the RTA released a list of banned “high performance” six-cylinder vehicles and a list of exempted turbo-charged vehicles. Creating exemptions to the RTA’s rule only further highlights it’s unworkable nature as other cars such as the supercharged Mercedes Benz C180K with 105kw while allowing the naturally aspirated Honda S2000 with 176kw. (The amazingly long list is available from the RTA Website)

Bill McKinnon writes at Drive.com.au that a report published by the Injury Research Centre at the University of WA found that there was no evidence to suggest a link between the performance of the car a P-plater was driving and the likelyhood of the driving being involved in a crash.

The same report found that the Victorian Governments power-to-weight restriction on P-platers

has since had no official review to see if its ban on high-performance cars has been effective in reducing young-driver crashes and casualties.

However, the WA study cites advice supplied in May this year from VicRoads that “there is no evidence to support the efficacy of the initiative as a road-safety measure”.

The WA report also applied the Victorian power-to-weight limit of 125kW/tonne (any car with a higher power-to-weight ratio than this is banned) to its own results, and found that only two of the 662 vehicles involved in crashes were “high-performance” cars under the Victorian definition.

The study also claims that anecdotal reports from Victoria “suggest the regulation is not actively enforced or policed”.

The NSW RTA insists that they have introduced their restrictions “to restrict vehicles over-represented in novice-driver crashes”.

Like a lot of the NSW RTA’s measures, the banned list smacks of being seen to do something, rather than doing it. Introducing proactive measures such as requiring more and better training to get a drivers licence and re-testing drivers would be obviously be politically unpalatable. Other suggestions to improve the safety p-platers have included curfews and passenger limits, measures that are in place in New Zealand and seem to have an actual effect on reducing the incidence of young-driver crashes.