August 3, 2025
Nice. I know y’all don’t speed in front of the schools, it’s just other people driving cars and trucks, right?
From Charlottesville Community Engagement:
“Albemarle County to expand speed zone cameras, add stop arm bus cameras”
The first time I read that, I read that as “and arm bus cameras” and thought that might be useful.
“As the beginning of the 2025-2026 academic year approaches, Albemarle County has announced that more locations will be subject to speed monitoring of school zones.
“Beginning Wednesday, August 13, 2025, speed enforcement cameras will be operational in the school zone on Rockfish Gap Turnpike (U.S. 250) in Crozet, adjacent to Western Albemarle High School, Henley Middle School, and Brownsville Elementary School,” reads an information sent out this afternoon at 2:48 p.m.
The first cameras were set up last year at the Lambs Lane campus which covers Albemarle High School, Journey Middle School, and Greer Elementary School. The county claims that there was a 49 percent decrease in speeding in the northbound traffic pattern and a 42 percent decrease in speeding in the southbound pattern.
The cameras are intended to detect and identify vehicles that are going ten miles an hour above the posted limit. There will be a warning period for the Crozet cameras from August 13 to September 14. The cameras go live for enforcement on Monday, September 15. The fine is $100.”
Read Albemarle County’s press release here.
Did you know?
In March 2025, “Albemarle County has made nearly $300K from Hydraulic Rd. speed cameras“
I’m slowly reading “Killed by a Traffic Engineer” and just read this the other day. From pages 151, 157, 158: (bolding mine)
Still, the sentiment that design speed represented the uppermost limit stuck around for at least the next six decades. Even when the folks at AASHTO changed the definition in the 2001 Green Book to get rid of the phrase “maximum safe,” it did so “in order to avoid the perception that speeds greater than the design speed were ‘unsafe'” and sidestep liability concerns.”
They didn’t change anything else.
In fact, for another decade, AASHTO continued to tell us that
“every effort should be made to use as high a design speed as practical to attain a desired degree of safety.”
And AASHTO kept this doozy in right on up until 2018: “The selected design speed should fit the travel desires and habits of nearly all drivers expected to use a particular facility.”Add all this up, and I’m not surprised that traffic engineers still treat design speed like our max design load. So we end up designing our roads to placate and protect those that think they are in the next Fast and Furious movie.
This isn’t the road to safety.
…
When it comes to safety, this approach hasn’t gotten us very far.
The reality of the situation is that we’re setting everyone up to fail.
Lower speed limits on their own will help, but only to some extent. Since drivers select their speeds based on the design of the road more so than on the posted limit, we need street designs intended to self-enforce these speeds.
The good news? It’s a problem that traffic engineers can do something about.
