If a drivers late for work, meeting friends or family function they will usually tend to speed up a bit, even if you do not have a time to arrive somewhere, sometimes we tend to be speed along anyways hoping to get there faster. However sometimes being faster will end up taking you longer since you were pulled over by the police or even worse if you get in a car accident. For that very reason cities have started putting up speed cameras to show how fast you’re really going to yourself and everyone else around you.
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 the Insurance, 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.