MatthewToad43

@GBU_28 @Antigrav That depends on what you mean by physical property.

Is land physical property? What if it was stolen from the locals and passed down from the slaver father?

I’m not saying I support theft. I’m not saying all property is theft. But it’s more complicated than that.

@PowerCrazy Also, while some local councils are intentionally neoliberal, most are just trying to survive.

Central government does of course force them to take the neoliberal solutions you describe. Because all other options are prohibited, impractical, or cannot be funded, due to the rules set down by central government.

Local government can be corrupt (so can central government), it can be incompetent (ditto).

But the villain here is the tories. It’s always the tories. And while they tend to control rural councils, they don’t control most of the cities.

@PowerCrazy IMHO this is not true.

An individual driver speeding will normally receive a £100 fine and 3 points on their license.

You lose your license after 12 over 3 years. Even if you can avoid the points with a course once, you can’t do that repeatedly.

So the practical effect is that people who get caught are more careful.

Which is a win for everyone.

As far as road design goes, while there are discussions to be had around that, there are good arguments for reducing the speed limit to 20mph. Roads are not designed for that. But we can enforce it anyway, cheaply.

@PowerCrazy Because they have a bunch of things that they’re legally required to do and not enough money to do them all.

Some of them are easier to downgrade, ration, or scrap, than others.

Central funding was largely eliminated, while local government can no longer increase its own taxes beyond a certain threshold (requiring a referendum), thanks to laws passed by central government.

So they have to cut something.

Speed cameras save lives. It’s politically easier to get rid of the speed cameras than to get rid of the roads. Mostly because our cities remain car dependent, and even buses depend on roads. Local government cannot get rid of cars for free; that will take a sustained national effort with considerable funding and political will.

Would you rather they cut the already very limited funding for helping old people who can’t afford their own care needs?

Of course it’s a political decision. But the cuts, the restrictions on raising taxes, and turning speed cameras from something that saves lives, enforces the law, and generates revenue, into a cost, are all carefully calculated to restrict local government’s choices and blame them for the central government’s cuts.

How can you be anti-car and still anti-speed-cameras?

And yes, the rule that the national treasury keeps the fines did not apply to traffic wardens. Central government specifically set out to cripple one of the main tools for reducing road deaths, to make a populist political point.

Though whether they make a profit on traffic wardens is less clear. A fair bit of enforcement is actually by the police, which is of course a different budget.

@PowerCrazy You’re saying we shouldn’t have buses, bicycles and ambulances either?

I believe we can reduce the number of cars by maybe 70 to 80% over the next few decades.

But there’s a lot to do to get to that point. We can’t flip a switch overnight to eliminate *all* cars without dealing with accessibility, housing, prejudice, new rail lines, a whole bunch of problems, some of which will take some time to fix.

On the other hand we *can* make significant progress by investing in public transport, especially buses, combined with some mildly coercive measures such as LTNs, reduced parking, lower speed limits, bike lanes, bus lanes, etc.

@PowerCrazy They are removing them because they *LOSE* money on them.

They are, in the UK at least, not allowed to keep any of the money generated.

But they have to pay for the costs of running them.

And they can’t afford to because their budgets have been cut so far over the last 13 years of tory misrule that in many cases they can no longer provide basic services that they are legally obliged to provide.

Back when they could cover their costs, there were lots of speed cameras. Now there are very few. Because evil politicians, usually tories, have always sacrificed lives for political convenience.

@gabriel @sooper_dooper_roofer @mondoman712 Some of this results from the practical reality that many of our cities are specifically designed to force people to drive. Unfortunately it will take time to fix that.

However, as I just boosted, there are plenty of people who can’t drive.

@gabriel @sooper_dooper_roofer @mondoman712 Because somehow drivers have decided that driving is a right in the same sense that freedom of association is a right.

That any restriction on their ability to drive, that any monitoring of their driving in a public place, is somehow against civil liberties.

That the law should be reinterpreted to suit them. That “causing death by dangerous driving” is somehow less serious than manslaughter (aka murder 3).

Freedom to drive has never been a constitutional or human right. Certainly not in my country nor in the USA.

Cars need to be regulated for the same reason that guns need to be regulated.

@gabriel @sooper_dooper_roofer @mondoman712 You can’t do statistics on speed cameras if there are almost no speed cameras.

Which is the reality today. Sometimes the police go out with mobile units. But there are very few fixed ones.

@PowerCrazy We need to substantially reduce the number of cars.

Increasing the number of speed cameras, while reducing speed limits, is a step in that direction.