As I understand it, China just has cameras on every street because their goal is to decrease traffic violations and not just generate ticket revenue.
This is correct. Traffic cameras are present on basically every street, and they are highly visible, preceded by a road sign, and your GPS audibly tells you about them. They also flash at you.
China also has a better implementation of red light cameras. Green lights start flashing a few seconds before they turn yellow, allowing you to either make it across the intersection or slow down in time.
The widespread implementation of automatic traffic enforcement cameras in China objectively has decreased traffic violations. Compare driving in China in 2008 to 2024. It is a night and day difference.
I agree with your assessment about American traffic enforcement being more about collecting an informal tax than actually being about improving road safety (see: speed traps). In the UK (which this article is about), the speed cameras do flash (and thus provide immediate feedback).
I'm sure your plan will be popular with the motoring public that anti speed camera rhetoric is trying to appeal to.
Lol the absolute state of speed camera opposers
If you don't drive, you have literally no reason to oppose speed cameras. Speed cameras reduce the negative externalities of cars at literally no cost to you. If you don't drive, you cannot get a speed ticket.
Also, for the China fans out there, consider how the widespread implementation of automatic traffic enforcement cameras in China that do things from watching if you're speeding, to watching if you're driving in multiple lanes at once, to watching if you're wearing a seatbelt have massively improved driving conditions and reduced road chaos in China. Automatic traffic enforcement makes driving better.
Please explain to me where the money to redesign and rebuild like half the city's roads is going to come from if not from a transitional period of speed cameras.
Say, why are you such a virulent opponent of speed cameras? Do you find yourself to be a chronic speeder?
Ah yes, let's just close all the roads in the country until we get that sorted out, great idea.
Speed cameras are applicable to all roads, from the 30 km/h residential street to the 140 km/h highway. Speed cameras are also self-funding and thus have a negative cost. Fines collected by speed cameras can be used to finance road redesign and traffic calming measures.
Traffic calming and speed cameras are carrot and stick in lowering the speed of roads. Lowering the design speed of roads alone is never going to stop drivers in a hurry from driving dangerously fast. People aren't deterred from commiting crimes by heavy penalties, they are deterred by the chance of getting caught. Automatic traffic enforcement raises that chance to 100%.
Cameras have only the mechanisms necessary to record and report, they have no mechanism by which they can divert, slow, or stop a car or pedestrian and no mechanism they can use to stop an accident.
There is no need to stop a crash in-progress when the dangerous behavior that would have resulted in that crash never happened in the first place because of the discouraging effect of traffic cameras.
Do you not feel discouraged from speeding or running red lights when there are traffic enforcement cameras watching?
do you not realize that the existing car infrastructure requires constant maintenance
I wonder if this affects North American models. The IIHS has the Toyota Prius listed as Top Safety Pick+, and I wonder if those test results were tampered with.
https://www.iihs.org/ratings/vehicle/toyota/prius-4-door-hatchback/2023
Urumqi (the capital of Xinjiang) is literally the city furthest from the sea. This makes no sense!
Also, what kind of Uyghur separatist calls it Xinjiang, the Chinese name for the region?
No, definitely not. But Linux has progressed so far that it's now accessible to people who are terminal-shy.
Also, laptops used to not last 14 hours on a single charge. Tech is better now.
Also, the Linux desktop has never been better.
We have reached the point where you can pick any laptop off the shelf and have it work out of the box with Linux. This used to not be possible!
Linux gaming has never been better, now that we have Proton. Games that used to be Windows exclusives now run perfectly on Linux. Linux is now fully viable for video gamers.
GUI tools are now so good that you can use Linux without ever touching the command line.
While Windows may have become worse, Linux has never been better.
I'm the millennial version of a tech illiterate, I have very basic coding skills in Java and that's it
Being able to code at all already places you in the 90th percentile for tech literacy. Many people don't even know what a file is.
When I was young I actually didn't know what the BSOD was because I literally never experienced it. My first BSOD was in 2017 on Windows 8, even though I've been computing since 1998
You've never gotten a BSOD on old versions of Windows?? My personal experience is that old versions of Windows (XP, 7) were much more unstable than new versions of Windows (10, 11).
The golden age for "normie" consumer computing definitely feels like it took place in the 2000s, and ended somewhere around 2014
Why would the golden age of "normie" consumer computing have taken place in the 2000s, when there were pop-up ads that gave you malware and adware toolbars?
The 25th percentile user today has literally never interacted with a hierarchical filesystem. They do not even know what a file is. The Apple mobile ecosystem is so locked down that it's actually impossible to accidentally install malware. I say that now is the golden age of "normie" consumer computing, because tech has never been easier.
I say that for normies, tech has never been better.
That's true. I'm reminded of how the "new car smell" (a smell adults actively seek out as it is considered pleasant) actually consists of toxic chemicals like formaldehyde, benzene, and volatile organic compounds.