There are a number of reasons why it’s safer to be an adult or child interacting with road traffic in Sweden than in the United States. However, just about all of them can be sorted into one of three categories: driver behaviors (including the use of best practices with car seats), vehicular safety, and road infrastructure. Today’s article is no exception. We’ve talked about how red light cameras reduce collisions and increase safety in the United States (despite fierce opposition to them throughout the country). Today we’ll take a look at traffic cameras, or road safety cameras as they’re known in Sweden, and the impact they have on speeding and road casualties. The upshot is that they reduce injuries, save lives, and are seen quite favorably among Swedes (who enjoy staying alive and unmaimed). Let’s take a closer look at the technology and its implementation.
Why are road safety cameras used in Sweden?
Per TrafikVerket, which is Swedish for the Swedish Transport Administration, road safety cameras are obvious, logical technology:
Speed is the factor that has the greatest impact on the serious consequences of a traffic accident. Road safety cameras contribute to reduced speed, which saves lives.
They make no bones about it. Speed is the X factor. It’s what turns a crash from the kind you walk away from to the kind you’re remembered for a week later before being lowered into the ground. When discussing kinetic energy, as we often do on the CCD, it’s the part that’s squared. You multiply the mass of the object (e.g., the car you’re driving and the passengers inside) by its velocity. You then multiply that value by its velocity one more time. Speed is what kills you. You can run into a semi-trailer and walk away from it–if the speed is low enough. You can be hit by a train while standing naked in front of it and live to tell the tale–if it’s moving slowly enough.
Speed is what separates a fender bender from a crumpled heap of body parts and metal. Road safety cameras discourage speeding. Lower speeds save lives. This is why you want road safety cameras everywhere.
How many lives do traffic cameras save each year in Sweden?
At present, there are about 2,000 traffic safety cameras along the state roads. They save about 20 lives a year. In addition, more than 70 people per year are saved from being seriously injured in traffic.
Twenty lives a year may not sound like much. On the other hand, they’d certainly sound like more if you counted yourself, your spouse, your children, and just about anyone else you cared about. A family of four–two children, two parents–killed or alive due to speed cameras would certainly see the value in them. Remember this when advocating against the additions of effectively painless safety features. All you need to do to reap the benefits of safety cameras is install them and teach police to monitor and process them. Most of the work is done automatically.
Something else to keep in mind is that Sweden already does such a great job of managing road traffic trauma that there just aren’t that many deaths to be had there. They currently have a death rate per capita of around 3.2 per 100,000 per the 2019 road safety annual report by the International Transport Forum, or IRTAD. I enjoy reading their reports each year. Here’s the section on Sweden. You’ll note that they actually had an increase in deaths year over year, moving from 252 deaths in 2017 to 324 in 2018, which is where their per capita rate of 3.2 comes from. With that said, they still have one of the lowest rates of death in the European Union. For comparison, more than 3 times as many individuals die per capita in the US; our figure was 11.4 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2017, to a total of 37,133 deaths. You can see the full report here or look at individual countries (they’re mostly OECD members).
What is public opinion like regarding road safety cameras in Sweden?
The most important success factor for road safety cameras is that road users understand that cameras save lives. The Swedish Transport Administration’s annual surveys show that more than 70 percent of Swedes have a positive attitude towards the traffic safety cameras. The positive attitude has been at a high level since its inception in 2006.
This is perhaps the most important difference between Sweden and the United States. There is a much greater cultural respect for communal safety there. To put it bluntly, Swedes are far more likely than Americans to support policies that help fellow Swedes than Americans are to help fellow Americans. There, the majority of Swedes think traffic safety cameras are a good thing because they reduce speeding and save lives. There aren’t people hopping mad in large numbers about how their personal rights to drive at high speeds are being infringed by Big Government. It isn’t that Swedes enjoy receiving speeding tickets. It’s that they understand that reduced rates of speeding means a greater likelihood of themselves and their loved ones making it home each night. Presumably they also don’t like other people needlessly dying due to irresponsible and preventable behaviors. This cultural respect for safety is also seen in the Swedish approach to car seat safety, which is the best in the world, as well as in other elements of life tied to road safety, such as mandatory daytime running lights, required winter tires, low alcohol driving limits, and a wealth of Vision Zero policies.
Safety is a pretty neat thing. It means more people get to live. It’s a communal way of thinking–the idea that what benefits my neighbor benefits me, rather than the idea that my neighbor and I are in constant competition for resources, and to hell with anyone who isn’t under my roof.
If they’re such a good idea, why aren’t they in the United States?
This is the inevitable question that arises after learning about good ideas in other countries. The reasons are, as usual, political. We have a long history of cultural brainwashing related to the automobile in American society. Our cities and roads were built around it, and life was designed to require it in large portions of the country. We drive more than people in any other country on the planet, and it’s a significant part of why our death tolls–37,000 needless ones each year–are as high as they are. People have been trained to respond, much like Pavlov’s dogs decades ago, with anger and foaming at the mouth when presented ideas related to traffic calming. We’ve been taught to see high speeds, running over pedestrians, and other kinds of reckless, fruitless behavior behind the wheel as good, right, normal, and part of being red-blooded Americans. There’s certainly blood as a result of these ways of thinking, but there’s nothing right about it.
Are there any legitimate arguments against speed cameras?
In a word, no.
Speed cameras are based on the fundamental ideas that a.) speeding kills, and b.) enforcing safe speeds leads to (unsurprisingly) less speeding and safer speeds.
In this country, however, we still have plenty of people (mostly young and middle-aged men) arguing that speeding isn’t unsafe (hence our ever-rising speed limits across the country) and that it doesn’t need to be enforced (hence our tacit acceptance of speeding throughout our society and throughout law enforcement, aside from when people of color are involved).
The arguments that speed cameras are unnecessary are nonsensical. The numbers are clear. We lose more lives per capita to road trauma than citizens in just about any other wealthy country. We also have a much poorer level of enforcement of speeding laws (and much higher speed limits) than just about all the other rich countries.
There’s plenty of evidence that the use of speed cameras in countries that use them in large numbers (such as Sweden and Norway) see significant declines in speeding and speed-related casualties. There’s very little evidence that speed cameras are simply used to harvest money from freedom-loving citizens (one of the most frequent straw-men used in discussion in the United States).
Speed cameras exist to encourage responsible behavior. If we don’t see our cars as giant toys, pedestrians as speed bumps, and roads as race tracks or obstacle courses, following safe speeds and encouraging others to do so through automated enforcement isn’t nearly as threatening as heartening. The goal, after all, is for everyone to make it home safely. It isn’t to get where we’re going as recklessly as possible without getting pulled over. If you doubt this, just ask the dead.
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