While driving if you saw my camera was recording just be going a little too fast would you slow down? That is not the question as cities are starting to put up speed cameras to record how fast you’re going to hopefully bring you below the speed limit.
Speed cameras can substantially reduce the likelihood of deadly collisions and result in long-term changes in driver behavior. If all U.S. communities had speed-camera programs like the one recently studied, some 21,000 deaths or serious injuries would have been prevented in 2013.
Those are the main findings of a report released earlier this week by theInsurance Institute for Highway Safety, a nonprofit financed by the insurance industry.
“We hope this research will help energize the discussion around speed,” Adrian Lund, president of the institute, said in a statement. “We’re all accustomed to seeing posted limits ignored, but it’s a mistake to think nothing can be done about it. Automated enforcement is one of the tools we have at our disposal.”
The study was based in Montgomery County, Md., a large community near Washington, D.C., where speed cameras were introduced in 2007 and used on residential streets with speed limits of 35 mph or less and in school zones. After seven years, cameras reduced the likelihood of a driver exceeding the speed limit by more than 10 mph by 59 percent, compared with similar roads in two nearby Virginia counties that did not have speed cameras, according to the study.