Denverite here. I historically have been a consistent opponent of "automated enforcement" in general; it's typically run though partnerships with private companies, so the drive for profit sets up perverse incentives, like shortening yellow lights at red light cameras, placing speed cameras at valleys to nab people coasting a few mph/kph higher before heading up a hill, etc.
All that remains true, but it's _less bad_ than the zero-enforcement era we've been in since Covid. Rare is the un-blown red light in front of a bicycle crossing, or an un-rolled stop sign in front of an elementary school, or an un-exceeded speed limit on residential streets. I'm not super concerned about speeding on freeways, but in the absence of police doing any traffic enforcement work in cities, these seem like the least-bad solution for now.
Running red lights to me is way worse than doing 75 mph in a 65 zone. However, red light violations aren’t enforced where I am and indeed every single day I see someone running a very red light. As a motorcyclist this is terrifying.
Here is what happens in the US: police departments derive a non-trivial amount of money from speeding tickets. Everyone speeds because our roads have poor quality control (you can have pristine pavement or potholes and bumps that will send your head through your sunroof) and speed limits haven’t been updated. Actually going the speed limit will cause huge traffic jams. However, if you are caught going over the speed limit you’ll be issued a fine of a few hundred dollars. Who gets caught? Mostly people going faster than average but generally it is a lottery. A cop on the side of the road decides that your car today looks like it deserves a ticket so he takes off after you.
Oh and you can fight tickets by simply requesting a second review and get a 50% or so discount unless it was more than a routine speeding ticket.
Also in the US a speeding ticket is a criminal thing. You are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Therefore you can’t just scan the license plate and issue the ticket to the owner of the vehicle. You must identify the driver and a camera can’t do that. Therefore you must take a picture of the driver and match it to a known face, a hard problem that is costly. Moreover, in lots of places if you install a speeding camera, the proceeds must be split with the local school system. That means a police department has to pay a lot of money up front with a slow ROI. Pulling random cars over is better business.
The entire system is inefficient, unfair, and is full of backwards incentives.
The solution is: raise the speed limits to realistic levels but also enforce them strictly. Highway limits most places should be 75, not 65. But if you go 77 or above, ticket.
Moreover, we need multiple classes of driver’s licenses. Your basic license should allow you to go the speed limit and no more. But if you take an advanced test, have a car that won’t let you text while you drive, and have a clean driving history for the past N years, you can go 5 or 10 above the speed limit. You get a different license plate color to easily identify you. Again as a motorcyclist who is much more vulnerable on the road than a car driver enclosed in 3 tons of an SUV the guy doing 90 in his Civic worries me a lot less than a soccer mom with a latte and a cell phone in her hands doing 70 while seemingly unable to keep her vehicle in her lane. One of these is paying attention, the other isn’t. Speeding tickets issued by cops penalize the wrong behavior.
On a sample size of one, I can tell you there isn't zero enforcement. We probably ought to talk stats instead of impressions.
Personally, I'll never support profitizing the criminal justice system. Too much bad happens when you create a perverse incentive for the government to call everyone criminals. Law enforcement should cost money so we have to be selective about which laws we're creating and enforcing.
I see more and more reckless driving in San Francisco every day. Not just regular people speeding on their way to somewhere, but people driving cars and bikes specifically built to be as loud and fast as possible. Speeding and making noise is the activity. I’ve also started seeing cars blatantly running red lights which I never used to see.
So I actually find myself wanting them to install these, which is not how I’d have felt a few years ago.
My concern is that they’re not going to catch the people I’m worried about because people who disregard the laws like that often frequently obscure their license plates. I’ve seen tons of cars with intentionally bent plates or with these heavy tinted plastic covers over them that make them impossible to photograph accurately (ex: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1570625389/anti-photo-red-light...)
The wild part to me was that CA has some of the most strict car modification laws in the country. Even before covid though I was constantly having to cover my ears due to some kind of cat delete/straight pipe modifications. I hate nanny states but the recklessness really rubbed me the wrong way.
It’s clear that the criminal justice system and related financial penalties associated with traffic citations disproportionately harm people of color and people living on low incomes.
No validation, no proof, no "why", just "it's clear".
Low incomes makes some sense, in that, fines take up income! So $10 is not the same to one, as another. Yet most fines have points, and that means money is most assuredly not the only factor.
But I really dislike the idea that "people of colour" are apparently all miscreants, and therefore always doing wrong things, and thus are always being charged.
It's not true.
And... here's a shocker... I'm white, and I've had speeding tickets, red light tickets, parking tickets and so on. How is this even possible?! Apparently all those white cops that write me tickets, are just doing so to hide their true goal.
Getting that minority!
I know tje US has some problems with policing, but turning streets into death zones, due to non-policing isn't the solution.
Put another way, you're living in a poor, or minority neighbourhood. Recently, people are screeching up and down the street, driving drunk and mega-high, injuries are up, and some asshole almost killed your kid.
You call, and the cops say that for your own good, they won't go after the guy. Wow! A great win for minority rights!
> But I really dislike the idea that "people of colour" are apparently all miscreants, and therefore always doing wrong things, and thus are always being charged.
That's not the idea.
The idea is that people of color ar disproportionately targeted, compared to others in similar objective circumstances, for traffic stops, and this overlaps considerably with the use of certain minor traffic offenses as pretexts to look for excuses for arrest on other charges, so that bias in traffic stops is foundational to broader enforcement biases.
There's plenty of individual local jurisdictions and larger areas where this has been studied and proven out (and sonetimes been part of the basis of US DOJ action against the offending local jurisdiction), though I’m not familiar with evidence related to SF specifically.
The exaggeration is undermining your point. What actually happened according to the linked article:
> The vote to approve the proposal came after months of public scrutiny and changes to the plan that ultimately shrunk the proposed list of banned stops from 18 different types of offenses to nine, among them driving with an expired registration and driving with a broken taillight.
Spain has had them for a while, but they have disadvantages.
The main reason we want to wait for red lights isn't that it'll illegal: It's because it's indicating that not stopping is quite dangerous. Keep going, and you can get sideswiped, or you'll go over a pedestrian. Ignoring red lights in those situations, which are 90% of situations, is going to make you find out pretty soon.
But then there's red lights that aren't really telling you there's a clear and present danger. Red lights in one way streets, to one way streets, with great visibility. Crossings in streets designed for rush hour traffic that don't have very different timings for the middle of the night. Or maybe the time where a theater finishes their night production, and the traffic patterns have nothing to do with the lights. In those cases, people are often rewarded by ignoring the red light, because yes, it's not indicating risks accurately. And the more you train people that yes, there are red lights that are safe to ignore, the more they'll consider ignoring others that are unsafe.
So those red lights that just change when you are speeding, but don't indicate that a different direction is passing through are doing nothing but telling the speeding driver that if they are caught, they'll get a much bigger fine, because other than for the fine, speeding past that light is not really any more dangerous than the speeding they were doing already. So it works for some people, but it also makes others more dangerous drivers.
I love this idea. Traffic cameras are so sketchy in the US. It’s always contracted out on extremely favorable terms for the contractor. It’s often a very kick back bribery feeling.
That's horribly wrong to do because it's collective punishment. If I'm going the speed limit but the car in front of me is speeding, the red light will punish me too.
from my short stint in California I recall these red-light cameras are already widely used in places like Culver city, however they are all maintained and enforced by a private agency. Running a red light generally produces a "ticket" from a parking enforcement agency that, if unpaid, just winds up on your credit record.
this has the effect of keeping lazy rich people in $200,000 sports cars from drag racing the town as private companies routinely refer paying customers to credit agencies, but it has absolutely no effect on landscapers and housekeepers who might mistakenly run a red light in their 30 year old toyota because credit generally isnt as an extensive part of their life.
conversely, government enforced speed cameras have the opposite effect. the cloistered elite routinely dash through cameras and pay the fines online, and poor people generally wind up with a bench warrant and a payment plan that saps their modest savings for years.
all in all im for the cameras. given an open interstate, a california driver will pick the highest number on the speedometer. its outrageous.
Income based fines are used elsewhere [1] to try and counter some of these issues. Not sure of the barriers for this type of approach in the US but I think it would be more effective than flat fines with leniency for lower-income offenders which seem to be the approach often taken.
For the CA bill: "People who meet certain income or housing criteria can also receive deductions of these fines anywhere from 50 to 80%." [2] This seems much less effective than something that is based on income.
There are some potential constitutional barriers to income based fines in the US such as the excessive fines clause: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”
Of course we don’t know how courts will rule on this since it hasn’t been tried.
Interesting. Here in Sydney, Australia, they’re all run by the government, however speeding incurs a loss of points against your license (as well as hefty fines). Lose too many points and you lose your license. This system ensures the cloistered elite are incentivised to stick to the limits too.
There’s a totally separate discussion about what tolerances are used and what levels of punishment to hand out.. things here are far too strict on that front.
Speeding adds points to your license but red light camera violations don’t. It’s a pure cash grab hence why they shut it down in the first place because all the private companies were cheating their way into fines by shortening light cycles. If this was truly about safety concerns then it would add points.
Skimmed an article now claiming the primary concern is speeding. So why not deploy our officers with radar guns instead to add points? What’s a $50 fine for going 15mph over the speed limit gonna do? Nothing.
In Canada if speed excessively and get pulled over you get a fine and demerit points but if a camera catches you, it's just the fine. The logic being that they know your car was speeding but not who was driving it.
The only people who can force you to pay those automated tickets are the courts and they 100% have to prove who was driving the vehicle. Or, you can voluntarily pay, I suppose...
One of my old neighbors got a letter (complete with a picture of the "perp") kindly asking him who was driving his car and I told him to just ignore it unless they drag him into court since they obviously knew he wasn't driving. There's also the "spousal privilege" thing, his wife was driving, so they theoretically couldn't even force him to say who the offender was.
It probably depends on the state; in many states you can't get out of a parking ticket by saying you weren't the person driving and there's no reason to not use the same process for speeding and red-light cameras. Of course that requires changing the laws, and some states did not do so.
This story doesn’t hold water. Lower and middle income citizens are far more affected by and reliant on credit than the proverbial “guy in a sports car.”
I wonder if the end game is allowing citizens to basically report traffic violations in general.
I know some states struck down red light cameras, but other areas allow people to report idling cars. Interesting times.
Personally I’m very bitter about cars double parking in bike lanes, so if I could get a cut I would go way out of my way to record videos and report all of them, ha…
Korea once allowed people to report a certain kind of traffic violations. It caused a lot of abuses. Paparazzi style stuff... Intentionally making other drivers violate traffic rules... etc.
Yeah this feels like a bad idea. People usually associate a police state with the police vs the people but when the people are the police, you start to distrust everyone.
If I could get a small cut of the ticket revenue, I would just camp out on a highway overpass with a good zoom camera and take pictures of people on the highway playing with their phones. From a recent bus ride, sitting high up and looking down into people’s cars, I’d say 80-90% were scrolling social media or texts while driving. I’d have a nice steady income an be doing an actual public service, unlike the cops (wherever they are these days).
> From a recent bus ride, sitting high up and looking down into people’s cars, I’d say 80-90% were scrolling social media or texts while driving
Are you talking about drivers sat stopped at red lights or drivers actually driving along. I'd struggle to believe either.
An AI powered operation a few months ago in the UK showed that those not wearing seatbelts outnumbered phones 4:1, which would suggest a maximum of 25% on social media.
The key factor would be that it would require video proof of the offense. And it would be things that the people felt were wrong, not merely the state felt was wrong.
I would think a system could be made. A specialized dashcam that signs the video, you submit a chunk showing the offense and say 30 seconds on either side so the police can see if it was provoked.
I hope that one day, our cars are equipped with outward facing cameras, and the feature to auto-report speeding and dangerous driving behaviors on the road to the authorities and/or the insurers.
I drive in Miami proper and EVERY TIME I'm on the road (especially when heading into/out of Miami), I would encounter at least two cars that drives very dangerously (not just speeding, but like cutting across you--driving in the center lane--very closely from the right lane; not signaling and making a sudden right turn into a street in a crowded street; etc. I had to buy up a front and rear facing dashcams, and I sometimes wish I had a button on my steering wheel that would send the last 10 seconds or so of the dashcam recording to the insurance companies or the traffic police.
Not confirmation bias. I have lived in NYC and NJ (right across NYC); Philadelphia; and SF (that was 15 years ago, so maybe things have changed?). I have also driven in Boston, Houston, and LA. The most difficult (nerve-wrecking) places to drive were Miami and LA. At least in LA, you see traffic police cars every now and then, so people are a bit wary of speeding. Here in Miami, it is lawless (literally almost no traffic police car on the highway leading to Miami), which emboldens rule breakers.
I always drive defensively and I am sick of having to pay rising-significantly-faster-than-inflation-rate (part of it is greedflation by insurers, I think, and part of it is because I live in Miami, one of the most natural disaster prone places in the US) premiums for the last two years. It's worse when insurers claim that after COVID, people drive more recklessly and thus, they are paying out more (again, not sure if it is entirely true, but if it's solely based on my Miami driving experience, it likely has some sliver of truth).
I truly wish insurers have better information on driving behaviors to really punish reckless drivers, but I know that the reality would be that insurers will punish both reckless and defensive drivers because more profit.
We're cities in California explicitly not allowed to have speeding cameras? Many cities here used to have them, and I could swear I was somewhere recently (Culver City?) that still had a few. My home town used to have cameras all over the place but ultimately got rid of them for a variety of reasons, one of which being that they were caught shortening the yellow light duration so as to ticket more drivers.
Many folks here describe this as a solution to what they see as inadequate traffic enforcement, especially post-COVID. But does this mean we're going to claw back the traffic enforcement headcount from police departments? If they're not doing traffic enforcement and aren't too keen at going after property crime, what are the taxpayers really paying for?
Agreed in principle. One of the prior objections to automated enforcement is that it enables the police not to do their jobs. This part of their jobs is now already not being done. The system sucks, and automating enforcement doesn't feel like a good long-term fix—but as a band-aid, it could reduce folks getting run over at intersections.
As for your direct question, the rot starts at the head. Look at US Congress.
Countries like Australia already use speed cameras liberally. Frankly it’s probably unavoidable given how labor is becoming more scarce and higher productivity is the only way forward. Police departments are going to shrink in headcount, tech will have to fill in the gaps, especially for obvious things like speeding and red light running.
I chuckled at this. Where I live in Canada I don't think its anywhere on the list of priorities for the police to enforce road safety laws in the first place.
It’s like a low priority, but drivers begin to get feral when they realize there is no punishment for bad behavior. Traffic monitoring is low hanging fruit for tech, the barriers being primarily cultural which should fade away as the roads get more dangerous without enough cops to do traffic duty.
Eh, agreed. I think the USA has gone off the rails a bit using private companies rather than developing and deploying tech in house. The incentives aren’t really aligned to the public good ATM.
Quite a bit of speed enforcement in Europe is using average speed enforcement (SPECS, section control, safety tutor etc.). There is absolutely no way you can evade it and at least in Austria where it's in force, nobody speeds. The moment the section ends, people go back to driving above the limit.
You can avoid it quite easily by removing your plates. In the UK this is a nominal fine if you are ever caught (which given how few police there are is quite rare).
However because everyone else is doing the limit it won't get you far.
I'd like to see cameras for work zones. Those are places where it's very challenging to set up a speed trap, and in California, people completely ignore the reduced speed signs.
They had these speed cameras in Phoenix (which is pretty high on the "people would just shoot them out" scale) on the AZ-51 and people resorted to merely voting them out -- after a few high-profile incidents like this one guy who would put on a gorilla mask and intentionally get tickets while the police couldn't do anything until they actually caught them wearing the mask while speeding through a camera. Oh, and another case I remember from when the warning period just ended, this lady got tickets every day on her way to/from work until the first violation hit her mailbox, 46 speeding tickets in total IIRC.
Red light camera, OTOH, are all over the place and people don't seem to mind them as red light running (especially for left turns) is quite common.
I wonder what are the actual fines going to look like.
We also have these “$50” HOV lane violation fines in Texas. And the “$50 fine” turns into $275 out of the door.
Just to clarify, I’m purely curious about if $50=$50 in Cali or not.
I doubt it. My guess is there will be fees and what not attached to it. My gut says all states are like that.
Source: the 5 speeding tickets I got in different states when I was young and super dumb. The tickets were for 75-100, but each cost at least 250 after fees.
For most people the actual fine is peanuts but the insurance premium hike is debilitating (you'll be paying 4-5 digits extra from T0 to Tinfinity depending on circumstances)
How are things like this ever allowed given the "right to face your accuser" and "presumption of innocence until proven guilty" that we're supposed to have?
I don't know the details of California's system, but generally in places that use these kind of systems you can dispute the ticket. That gets you a hearing where the government that sent the ticket has to prove the violation under the appropriate standard of proof.
Your accuser is not the camera and associated systems that automatically mailed you the ticket. Your accuser is the government that sent you the ticket, and you can face them at the hearing.
The camera is just evidence that your accuser will use at the hearing to establish the violation.
Red light cameras are just a profit center that do not increase safety and usually cause more accidents.
On the other hand I am all in for things like speeding cameras. Growing up 15 years ago it felt like cops across the country would generally be patrolling and stopping people speeding or driving recklessly on a frequent enough basis that you felt it prudent to at least drive safely. Now it feels like across the country traffic violations are an after thought. I have noticed this across states. Lots of reckless driving, everyone is constantly on their phone on the interstate. Rarely see police or police pulling people over.
Lots of info from NHTSA [1]. Like many complex things, it's tricky. "While the presence of a red light camera system has reflected increased numbers of lower impact rear end crashes at intersections where the systems are installed resulting from drivers stopping for the red light, research has also found a reduction in more dangerous offset and right angle crashes at intersections with red light cameras".
In general it seems like a win to me but if you get into technicalities then yes, some research has shown more low-impact rear end collisions. They go on to say "Additional studies may provide greater insight into whether or not such crashes persist where the technology is in place for longer periods of time. The effect of warning signs, public education, and familiarity with the presence of the system in the fullness of time is not clear."
1) It replaces intersection crashes with crashes approaching the intersection when people slam on the brakes because of a yellow. Net harm increases.
2) *Most* red light tickets are people turning right on red in a safe fashion.
The reality (at least in the US) is that cameras are only economic where there's a problem with the situation that causes reasonable behavior to be illegal.
> It replaces intersection crashes with crashes approaching the intersection when people slam on the brakes because of a yellow. Net harm increases.
Again, no sources but even if it was true, and it very well may be, I'd actually prefer someone driving too close rear ending someone driving too fast to someone driving too fast hitting someone who's likely not done anything wrong.
Saw that someone already posted some of the data which is correct. When implemented correctly it’s complicated. Rear collisions tend to increase and a reductions in red light running.
Unfortunately there were a number of cases where the third party who implemented the system, reduced the yellow light to below the legal minimum.
I am a fan of this channel and he has good background on LA removing them.
This is not rhetorical at all - I am genuinely confused by the statement. Unless you run a lot of red lights, or read the mail of your neighbors, how would you know about enforcement from these cameras? What outward sign would appear?
All that remains true, but it's _less bad_ than the zero-enforcement era we've been in since Covid. Rare is the un-blown red light in front of a bicycle crossing, or an un-rolled stop sign in front of an elementary school, or an un-exceeded speed limit on residential streets. I'm not super concerned about speeding on freeways, but in the absence of police doing any traffic enforcement work in cities, these seem like the least-bad solution for now.
I'm open to being convinced otherwise.