This states that there are many variables they were not able to control for, such as the yellow light timing, as I previously mentioned. Warning signs were another major factor. There doesn't appear to be enough investigation into the protected left issue.
This is pretty damning, in my opinion. AKA we did some cheap analysis on a small dataset, without confidence or effect size, and just agree with the people running the programs.
"The intent of the multivariate regression analysis was to confirm the direction of the
effect, not to establish effects with statistical significance or to assess the size of the
effect. To undertake analyses for these purer purposes would have required a
substantially larger database, much more precision in the estimate of economic effect at
each site, and more accurate specification and measurement of the independent variables.
For the purposes of this current investigation, it suffices that both the univariate and
multivariate analyses are reasonably in accord with the perceptions that are commonly
held by those involved in red-light-camera programs."
Sometimes an intersection simply has bad luck, draws more accidents than anything about it would cause. Put a camera there, you'll see an "improvement".
One might argue the intersection itself is the problem and should be redesigned, as well as adjoining roadways feeding into the offending intersection.
If it's consistently high something needs fixing. But accidents are random, there will always be some intersections that by pure chance have more accidents. Put cameras on those, presto, cameras "work".
California's new speed camera pilot (AB 645) explicitly solves for this.
Tickets issued by these cameras are civil penalties issued to the owner of the vehicle, like parking tickets, rather than a criminal moving violation. This means the tickets are just as constitutional as parking tickets. It also means penalties are limited to fines and can't impact your driving privilege or insurance.
Hopefully other states can follow this pattern. Consistent, low-impact enforcement is better at preventing unwanted behavior than the rare and severe but also capricious enforcement performed by human police.
Consistent, low-impact enforcement is better at preventing unwanted behavior than the rare and severe but also capricious enforcement performed by human police.
It can also give permission for unwanted behavior. Cf. the Haifa study, where the rate of late pickups increased when daycares added a fine. One explanation is the fine turned a complex moral obligation into an ordinary financial transaction.
The Haifa daycare study can’t be used to extrapolate much.
They fined parents (IIRC) ~$3 per late pickup. Rerun the study with a $300 fine and let’s see how it pans out. It’s an interesting finding, but that then people take it to mean that fines don’t work (no matter their size) is insane.
Well, If the staff got stiffed on the fee "many times", and the parents were allowed to bring their kid back.. the place didn't charge $1 per minute late. They just bluffed and got called on it.
(apologies for the immediate edit, changed my wording)
I understand that you could not keep the child till you were paid (kidnapping and ransom shouldn't be a business plan!), but you could refuse them future service until they paid.
The nursery has clear times that it is "open". I must drop off my child between A and B O'clock in the morning, and I must collect them between X and Y O'clock in the afternoon. Like a shop - they are allowed to have opening hours.
The issue is that they can't just close when they want if there's a child still there. So they have to have some way of enforcing these rules on parents. A "per minute" fine seems appropriate, so that it's more the later you are. And you need the fine to be enough that it is punitive enough, when considered against the income of your parents. Otherwise it provides no incentive. Ours is not $300 (more like $30), but it seems fair.
That's largely in line with unplanned or off-hours work for many professionals in the area of a city. If you want for example, plumbing done after normal business hours $300 per hour is a typical rate. In at least one case I paid $50 just to get a supply shop to open their doors after hours to get the needed parts to repair my own home.
It's too late to edit my other comment, but it's shocking to me how the people downvoting that comment can have such a lack of empathy and respect for people working in daycare.
I can't understand how one can treat people like servants, forcing them into unpaid overtime, to wait until I'm good and ready to show up. And to be upset and call it "unacceptable" to compensate people when you mistreat them.
Let's say you have a job interview. You're 5min late, so they either don't hire you, or the receptionist says the interviewer is now not available. Are you now due the salary, because you being this late 5min cost you a lot of money?
If you in a private contract reject the terms of paying $5 per minute late, well then the other party now knows you plan to be late a lot, so they'll be glad if you take your business elsewhere.
Keeping people from being able to go home after their workday, effectively forced overtime, is incredibly disrespectful. And even if "it's not your fault", you are the only one that could have prevented it. So incentives should be in place that you don't. $5 per minute sounds fair.
If you force me to stay late for a full hour you'd BETTER pay me triple digits. But in this case the $300 for an hour may have to be shared among several people.
A $3 fine is a good portion of someone's disposable income
and a $300 fine is not much of someone else's.. A civil
penalty of that nature almost guarantees some part of
the population will view it like the $3 fee.
This is exactly why license points (leading to suspension) are better than fines.
If the ticketing decision made by an automated camera system is deemed acceptable when issuing mere fines akin to parking tickets, but deemed unacceptable when issuing other penalties (which don't have this wealth inequity issue we are discussing now, at least not exclusively), that's effectively a poor tax.
More broadly, I think it's important to distinguish (more than we do) what aspect of justice a fine is supposed to be for, particularly between restorative versus punitive. The first is what it costs to fix measurable damage-done, the second is what we need to ensure the person cares to change their behavior.
The government operating automatic camera citation systems, almost never is interested in improving safety or even minimizing undesirable behavior- often the placement of such cameras is done to maximize revenue (as when red light cameras are placed at long-cycle-time intersections vs intersections with a history of accidents). And it’s been documented that some cities have reduced yellow light times (which almost always leads to more citations) rather than increasing yellow light times (which usually leads to fewer people running the yellow, because people are less likely to take a chance after the light has been yellow a long time).
There’s a lot of compelling evidence that these systems are just revenue machines.
I don't like paltry sums like this. $300 is a significant financial impact to someone who's barely making ends meet, and absolutely nothing at all to a billionaire. "If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the poor."
Make it a tiny % of net worth, with a modest minimum and watch EVERYONE obey. Or at least something meaningful to everyone, or don't make it a fine. Use some other carrot or stick.
> I don't like paltry sums like this. $300 is a significant financial impact to someone who's barely making ends meet, and absolutely nothing at all to a billionaire.
One thing about daycares is that you will essentially never find "someone who's barely making ends meet" and "a billionaire" with kids at the same daycare, so a surcharge for out-of-normal-expectations service does not need to be designed to address both cases.
(In fact, you'll probably not find a billionaire with kids at any daycare, their hired childcare workers won't be shared with other people, and will probably be adequately compensated up front in a way which anticipates a fair degree of schedule variability.)
OTOH, with red light cameras, you also don't need to scale the fine to work with both, because the entire purpose is to bind the lower classes while exempting the upper from any substantial burden. (The least cynical explanation is that it is to discourage behavior which might incur liability grossly exceeding the mandatory level of insurance company by those least able to cover the cost of that liability, thereby avoiding uncompensated harms, but the realistic explanation is...not so generous.)
X% of net worth is still a bigger deal to someone with a net worth of $20 than to someone with a net worth of $20M, even though the latter may get some sticker shock. And it's possible (if rare) to have a reasonably middle-class lifestyle and an actually negative net worth. Presumably you would not make it possible to pay off student loans by repeatedly violating a red light, although it would be very funny.
You’d be surprised at the numbers of people living middle-class lifestyles with negative net worth. Credit card debt, car loans (with a too-small down payment, a car purchase can easily cause one’s net worth to decline the second you take delivery on the car), underwater mortgages, not to mention student loans.
But that makes wildly different incentives to enforce, depending on the target. We all know this stuff is all about revenue enhancement, and in that capacity, the targets will become the whales.
Or how about the curb weight of the car? Higher mass means you're doing a lot more damage in an accident. People might think twice about buying an F250 for their grocery getter.
I mean as a much greater "study", look at the UK - government introduced fines for parents of kids missing school, and the rate of absenced increased - because parents see it more as a cost that you just have to pay to go on holiday during school year.
I get your point, but I doubt the fine could have been ethically higher. Domino's drivers killed dozens of people in speed-related accidents before they ended their 30-minute guarantee.
I don't think our society is ready for the combination of automatic enforcement and truly punitive penalties. We readily demonize the accused; just having your mugshot taken can end your employability. Yet many of us break laws daily -- speeding, jaywalking, watering the lawn during the day, even plugging in a microwave oven without a building permit in some jurisdictions -- and society still works because we don't expect much enforcement. We are heading toward a future where everyone will have marks on their permanent record, but today our society tut-tuts, or much worse, at anyone who does.
It is understandable that someone who only lived in the United States or a low-enforcement place would have this world view. I'm more sanguine about the trajectory of our society.
Australia, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, etc, have well-enforced traffic laws. Speeding is the exception rather than the rule, unlike the United States, where one can expect the flow of traffic to be 10-20 miles per hour over the posted limit. Yet these societies don't suffer from an excess of enforcement or consequences in other areas. For example, it is legal to walk around in public with a bottle of beer in virtually all of Europe.
What we have seen in the United States is a reduction of many hardly-enforced laws. Jaywalking and minor drug possession have been decriminalized in several US states. This is due to voter interest. It will continue to be up to the public to decide what do to when enforcement can catch up to excessive laws.
In the Netherlands fines are insane. If you pick up your garbage bin two hours too late from the street corner, you pay 210 euros.
On the other side, if you sell drugs to kids and have a weapon, nobody touches you.
Yes, you can sometimes walk around legally with a beer bottle here.
I don't think you did get my point (my fault perhaps), as my only point is that if you take away from the Haifa study that fines will automatically increase the prevalence the targeted behavior in all situations, that's an insane conclusion to draw. There are lots of variables at play: the size of the fine, how consistently and strictly it is enforced, the ability of the finer to collect the fine, the social context, and so on. The Haifa study examines none of these. It does does highlight an interesting phenomenon, but without further studies that control for these variables, I don't think we can just blindly assume that the outcome in the Haifa day cares will apply to all situations where a fine is levied.
I see all the time on the Internet (and even IRL once) people make claims like, "oh, carbon taxes will just increase CO2 output, you know like in that Israeli daycare study." Drives me nuts.
Are fines the best possible solution to this particularly traffic problem? I have no idea. I'm not an expert in this area. But I am highly confident that whatever relation it has to the Haifa daycare study is so incredibly tenuous that it is not worth mentioning.
We might be talking past each other. Call Haifa a parable, if you will. I understand why you find fault with the study, but I invoked it to call out (quoting myself) that a fine can also give permission for unwanted behavior. That point adds to yours and doesn't contradict it.
The reason I said anything in the first place is that I object to automatically administered punishment. Either separately can be OK. Automatically administered? No problem, that's called a tax (including use taxes like tolls). Punishment? Then we'd better have due process, and yeah, it's going to be expensive and labor-intensive to administer, but that's critical in a free country. That's why I called out the "is better than" quote. I think it's strictly worse.
"Domino’s confirmed it knew of 20 people who died in crashes involving its drivers in 1988 (the National Safe Workplace Institute would later claim Domino’s delivery drivers had about the same death rate as miners, who had a fatality rate of ~35 per 100k)."
Sure. Then the bill requires that all those fines you pay go towards street calming infrastructure, eventually making it physically impossible (or at least very uncomfortable) for you to continue speeding.
Kind of like if enough parents paid the late pickup fee, eventually the daycare could afford a van for dropoffs.
I've seen quite a few roundabout projects over the years that seemed to work out well... Although I really detest any that have multiple concentric lanes.
There are multiple well-researched and practical interventions that can be done to make driving safer for drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists. Implementation in the US is regularly scuttled by insane self-styled experts who "audacity" their way to public trust and influence, inexplicably.
It seems like this rarely happens. The fines become another stream of income, and reliance on that income kills any incentive to fully eliminate the behavior the fines are ostensibly meant to discourage.
Given the many restrictions on how the income can be used in this bill, I find it unlikely that will apply here. Feel free to check back in at the end of the pilot.
Random thought: this also accurately describes the financialization of home ownership. It was supposed to provide stability in shelter, and instead created a market that's completely unaffordable to the prime home-buying generations, in favor of protecting those who've come to depend on unconscionable valuations.
No one, gun to their head and hand on a Bible, should defend a status quo where the only way to afford a median house is to have twice the median income.
I grew up in Fremont, CA, which pioneered the use of red-light cameras and terrible red-light camera practices (e.g. shortening yellow light times to increase revenue and giving a cut of the fines to the companies installing cameras). I hated cameras, the idea of speed cameras felt like big brother, and the basic principal of attributing a violation to a car and not a person (and thus requiring a person to rat out the driver) felt like a huge civil rights issue.
I then moved to Amsterdam and became the biggest fan of continuous, always-on ANPR speed cameras. On some freeways, your car is recorded at certain checkpoints and EVERYONE driving over the speed limit ALWAYS gets a fine.
Why? Because they are properly implemented (only high-risk areas), very well communicated (tons of signage), consistently applied (no crying your way out of a ticket, no racial profiling), purpose targeted (you get a speeding ticket, not a bunch of other fines at the whim of a cop), and correctly incentivized (ticket revenue does not immediately go to the local police or city).
The best thing about the average speed cameras is that between the checkpoints all cars drive at almost exactly the same speed. No one trying to overtake, just 5 lanes of traffic at 1km/h below the speed limit
How about you prove your claim by providing some evidence that the richer you are the more speeding tickets you get. Otherwise you're solving for a problem that doesn’t exist.
I read the grandparent comment's point as being about suggesting %-based fines.
> prove your claim by providing some evidence that the richer you are the more speeding tickets you get.
How/where did the grandparent comment claim that the rich get more speeding tickets? Even if the rich speed at a lower rate, would that make %-based fines a negative improvement?
> a problem that doesn’t exist
My assumption was the speeding is a problem no matter whether rich or poor, and that both exist. Is there disagreement there?
Instead, I think their point was that even a $100 fine for a poor person may impact their ability to pay for groceries, childcare, etc, whereas for someone who has $10 million, etc., even a $1,000 fine will not impact their ability to pay for groceries, childcare, etc as they still have $9,999,000.
Expensive cars tend to accelerate faster, and it can be vastly harder to feel the speed. It would be unsurprising if up until some limit there was a correlation between wealth and the frequency of getting speeding tickets.
> One explanation is the fine turned a complex moral obligation into an ordinary financial transaction.
Income proportional fines solve the problem. The fine should be a deterrent, but not create crippling debt. That is impossible without taking into account the income of the infractor.
> It can also give permission for unwanted behavior. Cf. the Haifa study, where the rate of late pickups increased when daycares added a fine. One explanation is the fine turned a complex moral obligation into an ordinary financial transaction.
You know what they say: a fine makes something legal for an amount of money.
And for daycares, I think a lot of parents saw it just like that: a cheap way to keep the kid away from them for longer.
You raise an interesting counterpoint. What if the red light violation ticket issued by an automated camera remains a civil penalty, but it is very large, like 1,500 USD? At some point, the number gets so high that it effectively impacts your driving privilege. Of course, I would expect these new civil penalties to be challenged in court as being "dual purpose".
Hopefully other states don't follow this pattern; I don't think the government should be installing surveillance arrays, even if it's "for the children" or public safety.
Trading a little liberty for a little safety and all that.
Maybe it exists but I wish there was more heavy hitting articles/research on this. I feel like an absolute grumpy old man but it feels drastically different compared to my younger years driving and I am only 40. These days I rarely see police on the side of the road ticketing and when I do it’s usually on a highway. Never do I see people getting pulled over in city streets.
My thesis has been an uptick on BS calls. Said differently the bad neighborhoods have gotten worse and funding for police is mismanaged.
Absolutely. They shut down for COVID and never came back.
A big part of traffic stops was to find weed and trade up for an arrest. With legalization, they’ve shifted to camera work, which has gotten even bigger with Flock.
I am constantly amazed at how many people blatantly run red lights now. It used to be that people would sometimes press their luck on a yellow a little bit, but now it'll be red for several seconds and people will still just drive right on through.
I'd love if the police enforced this insanely dangerous behavior instead of trying to catch people going 10 over on the highway.
I see this a lot too here in Australia now, and yes it used to be pretty unusual but now I see it every day. I've sometimes wondered if it's just a frequency illusion but I'm sure it has got much worse, maybe since the COVID times?
It depends. Traffic lights are just mutexes. They are there to stop traffic so that other traffic may pass safely. There's no point if there aren't any other cars.
Obviously anyone running a light on a busy intersection deserves to get fined but if you know the terrain, have good visibility into the road where the other traffic comes from and can clearly see there are no vehicles present, running the red light is utterly harmless.
In my city, certain traffic lights literally turn off at night. There's not enough traffic flowing to justify them.
Use your eyes, your situational awareness and your best judgement. The traffic light is not god's word.
In my neighborhood there used to be a traffic light that would be red for a long time despite not usefully regulating any traffic whatsoever. It stopped traffic despite the fact no other traffic could possibly conflict with it. People realized this and routinely ran that light with zero consequences. At some point the city realized it too and redesigned the traffic controls so that the light would be green in this situation.
I understand the desire to act holier than thou and pretend that going through a red light with no traffic is murder in the making, but the situation they advocate for (running when clear) is even written into law in some states (at least for motorcycles/bicycles). Some vehicles don't trigger the sensors and the lights never change, so you are allowed to go after a full stop. I would not be surprised in the least if there were some states where the wording of the law applied to cars as well.
The correct action is to understand why certain barriers were erected in your way before attempting to demolish them. If you don't understand, just respect the barrier. If you understand, you know if, when and under which conditions it can be safely bypassed. Use your judgement.
Jaywalking laws were also written in blood. People break them every single day regardless because they have eyes and can look both ways to determine if it is safe to cross the street before actually doing it.
And yet, jaywalking pedestrians get killed daily, despite their best attempts at determining whether it's safe to cross. The problem with allowing drivers to use their best judgment as to whether it's safe to continue through a red light (after stopping) is that a non-zero percent of those drivers will fail to judge the situation correctly, especially during an edge case they rarely encounter.
It's impossible to get hit by cars if there are no cars around you. Vehicles are not going to materialize out of nowhere and crash into you. They are going to be funneled into your path by the roads. If you look at the road and see zero traffic, then you cannot be hit by traffic. Even if you run a red light.
Obviously, if you can't see the road where the cars will come from, then you cannot know if there are any cars coming towards you in a potentially intersecting trajectory.
>A vehicle will materialize out of nowhere and crash into you.
God I hate these sort of responsibility shirking opinions and their peddlers.
I do this several times a day in a major US city for close to a decade now and I've never had a close call closer than the "two people trying to pass each other in the hallway" routine with a driver trying to take a right on red.
Vehicles and everything else on this rock flying through space obey the same laws of physics.
If the traffic on a road goes X miles per hour, then simply don't cross it where you don't have a sufficiently long line of sight. If crossing where the lines of sight are sufficient is not tractable due to traffic volumes or road construction then cross at a marked crossing, intersection that interrupts traffic flow or use proper body language and someone will stop for you.
Sure, you might get exceptionally unlucky and choose to cross at the exact minute some car that's a few standard deviations above the norm but you might also get hit by lightening.
> I do this several times a day in a major US city for close to a decade now and I
I, I, I
> Vehicles and everything else on this rock flying through space obey the same laws of physics.
Yes. Yes they do.
That's why some countries (e.g. Sweden) actually have this in drivers ed: how fast a vehicle travels, how long it takes for the driver to react, what the stopping distance is for a vehicle etc.
They even teach things like "parked cars are a double problem because you can have people especially kids suddenly appear from behind them".
Or things like "at night you only see this far, and judging distance to things becomes harder".
But all that, including laws of physics, is invalidated by a litany of "I, I, mine, my, me".
I have noticed a severe uptick in bad semi-truck drivers on the interstate since COVID, I'll agree at least with that part.
The local cops here have always just run plates for stolen vehicles. Getting a ticket is almost unheard of. I don't know what their deal is, but you can speed right past them in the other lane, or if they're just parked on the corner.
I'm guessing you still can't pass them on a two-lane road without poking their ego.
Pre, post and during COVID, you rarely see someone pulled over for running a red because you rarely see it happen. When you do, a cop it is even more rare to be present. These rare events stick out, yes.
Depending on the situation, it might be dangerous for a cop to also run a red to give chase, so consider it might be their job to let it go.
I’m not sure if it was COVID or the social movements around the same time like defund the police. Here in Seattle when defunding the police was suggested the police department threatened to close the precinct in a large residential area. Basically they attempted to extort the voters. I think the police have realized that crime is good for them because the more of it voters see the more they think police are needed.
Vilify them, defund them, restrict them, reduce the number of officers to the lowest level in 30 years, and then when crime increases in the next few years .. was it maybe because of everything that was just done? No, that's not it, it's a grand conspiracy across every police officer in Seattle who coordinated/decided to be evil together and intentionally let crime spread. Yup, that all checks out.
Oftentimes comically lower. I remember in Chicago the interstates having posted speed limits of 45mph... the average flow of traffic outside of rush hour was easily north of 70mph.
Looking even at normal arterial streets, many streets in Seattle are marked 25, but you'd be hard-pressed to find even a cop going under 30 most of the time.
I truly don't understand US road design. The construction of the road and the posted speed limit almost never are even gently correlated other than on a few select residential side streets in a few select cities who have rebuilt streets based on safety studies.
> I remember in Chicago the interstates having posted speed limits of 45mph... the average flow of traffic outside of rush hour was easily north of 70mph.
This comment seems a bit odd to me. I Google about it and learned (from various sources):
> 45 mph (72 km/h) in downtown Chicago, where all the major interstates merge
This excludes construction or work zones.
That seems pretty reasonable. I've seen a few places in the US where several major interstates merge and the post speed limit is quite low -- 45-55 mph.
These cameras are by definition still cameras triggered by radar or laser systems, they're inactive unless a speeding vehicle is present. Hardly the surveillance array you're imagining.
Noooo. Most cameras retain 30 days of video. That allows officers to review the violation.
These camera systems have always been about surveillance. Flock adds the Silicon Valley software process, while the older tech is “law enforcement tech”.
This. You say "but we're gonna catch people who speed" or "terrorists" or something like that and all the people who would be against your surveillance suddenly can't get enough of it.
It absolutely is a surveillance array. It is trivial to record the time and license plates of every vehicle captured by the camera and fully map out their movements.
In the UK, speeding fines are also backed by "points" added to your license - get enough of them and you lose your license altogether for a while. It's similar in at least some other European countries.
That is a definite punishment for anyone that cares enough about driving that they were doing it in the first place, while also clearly not being revenue generating (in fact it prevents future fine revenue). I'm not sure that would wash in the car-centric States though (but it would make it an even juicier punishment). But since you don't get banned immediately, it's potentially low-impact on a per-ticket basis.
Australia has this too. It helps with the problem that a fine alone is negligible enough for the wealthy that the road rules would effectively not apply to them.
PA did this with construction zone cameras. I'm not sure where that landed because its been a while since I've seen one. I successfully appealed my ticket to the magistrate. It initially started as a pilot program and the law requires signage which during the pilot was quite inconspicuous. After the launch the sign was changed to a tiny little thing, about 1/5 the size of the pilot program.
I was going 5 over the reduced speed limit, in the slow lane with rush hour traffic. That thing must've issued thousands of tickets.
But AB 645 is designed to punish and deter rather than compensate, which creates a genuine constitutional vulnerability under California's Article I, Section 16 jury trial guarantee.
The structural problem is that revenue goes to program costs and traffic calming, not to anyone harmed by speeding, which makes the fines punitive in character under any substance-over-label analysis.
The lack of DMV points and criminal record weakens the argument somewhat, but under California's substance-over-label approach those omissions aren't dispositive. They merely show the legislature knew how to stay on the civil side of the line, not necessarily that it succeeded.
If a court finds the penalties punitive in character, the owner-liability structure becomes a compounding problem: California's state due process protections are arguably more robust than federal, and imposing a punitive fine on a registered owner without proof they were driving, while burden-shifting exculpation to them looks increasingly difficult to sustain.
Everything you've said applies to parking tickets too. You can't prove that the owner parked the vehicle.
Tha owner is ultimately civily liable if the vehicle is parked in a way that it shouldn't be. Extending that same civil liability to the active operation, as opposed to only the consequences of active operation, seems perfectly reasonable.
> Tha owner is ultimately civily liable if the vehicle is parked in a way that it shouldn't be. Extending that same civil liability to the active operation, as opposed to only the consequences of active operation, seems perfectly reasonable.
As this judgement reveals, such a suggestion is patently unreasonable, for the reasons listed in the judgement
> California's new speed camera pilot (AB 645) explicitly solves for this... like parking tickets
That makes the Florida judge's framing of red light cameras as a revenue generating scheme even more applicable. More than that, it ambiguates the crime.
>It also means penalties are limited to fines and can't impact your driving privilege or insurance.
If this is the case, what are the consequences of not paying the fine? I interpret your statement to mean that they can't prevent registration of your car. Can they tow you in SF for unpaid fines?
I assume they meant you can't lose your license (or get "points" that your insurance company can use to charge you more). I would fully expect that any unpaid fines would be added to next year's registration, and if you don't register and pay, you're driving an unregistered vehicle.
Is there a non-automatic light enforcement other than placing a policemen at every light - which makes the light useless?
Revenu generation is a bonus point: in my country taxes that incentive smokers to quit are directed to healthcare and most of the speeding tickets revenue goes to road maintenance and safety.
I’d prefer a public handling but the trend is privatization with everything : from health to education to water treatment. Even military assets! IMHO red light tickets enforcement is as much important.
> While I agree with your sarcasm, this proposal is a least bad scenario: no enforcement is worse as there’s less incentive to respect the lights.
I disagree. This is acknowledging that these are revenue products rather than safety enhancement.
If you want safety enforcement, put a damn cop there. It WILL work. This isn't hard. People are creatures of habit and you don't need to adjust the behavior of very many of them to make the whole group change.
If you don't want to put a cop there, you don't want safety enforcement.
Yea, I think the chance of death will encourage them not to run every red light making mass surveillance unnecessary. The money is a noop for the rich in thus case.
If that is the argument, then we should just drop enforcement of traffic rules alltogether.
Because people don't want to have an accident?
But driving reckless and having a big well protected car helps of course, so everyone speeding would want even bigger and better armored cars.
Those daring to drive light vecicles or even bicycles, screw them?
Here in germany we managed to have automated red light tickets, without saving video at all btw. Just a picture (or multiple) of the incident. The picture is tied to the traffuc lights logic so knows when red light was on.
Now I am not really a fan of them, but they do work without mass surveillance.
Privacy protections in US are horrid compared to Germany. Grounded in reality, not going to happen uniformly in all states.
Also, I bike often and driver right turn on green without looking has nearly gotten me a few times. Dont get me started on lack of bicycle infra in most us cities :0
There's the timing aspect of it as well. As it stands, you only find out about your 'offense' weeks after the fact. If it were a human interaction (eg speeding/police stop) you'd know right away and still have the relevant information in mind to understand the charge and maybe defend. The ability to know and defend should be critical to any charge. K
That sounds fine except the part where private companies have cameras everywhere surveilling us, directly tied into dmv records to identify us, and then do whatever they want with that data. And not on a random store front or a persons front door but the major roads we all must use.
Even forgetting that, all this means is people that don't care about getting a ticket, either because they won't pay or it's a such a small amount to them that they don't care. just do what they want. Nothing is being "enforced", just taxed.
I don't this is is as cut and dry as you're making it seem. See SEC v. Jarkesy. The Supreme Court decided that, when the SEC seeks civil penalties for securities fraud, the defendant has the right to a trial by jury pursuant to the Seventh Amendment.
So to work around civil protections in law, California now does not consider speeding to be an offense that should impact one's driving privilege or insurance? Just so they could collect that sweet fine money?
These systems are still often too expensive to operate safely. Over and over again these systems have been seen as needing to break even rather than being treated as a public service. But if they actually work then incidence of red light violations should go down, and hopefully substantially. So whatever fines you expect to receive in the first months before drivers adapt are more revenue than you should see at one year or more.
So when you start worrying about it as a cost center, then there is a perverse incentive to do things like shorten yellow lights. Short yellows have been proven to create more vehicular fatalities than people running red lights intentionally. And so the person who makes that decision to shorten yellows to boost tickets is effectively committing murder to keep the system “working”. Which is disgusting. Ghoulish, even.
It is literally better in such situations to simply dismantle the system than keep it running.
That said, the bill addresses this category of abuse directly: if a speed camera fails to reduce 85th percentile speeds or violation volumes within 18 months it must be removed.
Good call. I consider the precedent set here to apply equally to both cases, and the stop light cases tend to be much more egregious, as I've telegraphed in my top-level comment.
Yup. Cameras "improve" safety in intersections--but not overall. It's just displaced. I would have thought the displacement reduced the severity but the injury data says otherwise. It's a case of removing the top and bottom stair.
As you say, it encourages short yellows. I am aware of having "run" one red light in my life--got ticketed for it. The yellow timing was set as short as legally permitted--a driver had a narrow window to decide go or stop. Unfortunately, what happens when neither is an option? I was in the left turn lane and past the decision point. I was already slowing when the light went yellow, I saw it and knew there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.
There's also the problem that a huge number of red light tickets are issued to people who "run" red lights in a completely normal and safe manner: making a right turn on red. Car #1 stands as far forward as they can without being in the cross traffic path, the other cars line up behind. First car goes, the rest move forward. Nobody pays attention to the stop line--but the camera does.
In the real world, neither speed nor red light cameras pay for themselves except when something about the situation causes a problem--and it would be better addressed by fixing the true problem. Likewise, I have never seen a cop watching a situation for offenders unless there was something out of sync between the law and the road. Half of the traps I've seen over the years have disappeared when the root cause was fixed.
Interesting that your use of "solves for this" is with regards to the end result of being able to write more red light tickets. In my view, the courts solved this by deeming at least certain uses of red light cameras illegal.
Automated traffic control is objectively one of the most pro-social things we could possibly ever create. Yes it is good if more red light cameras exist and face fewer legal challenges.
> the courts solved this by deeming at least certain uses of red light cameras illegal.
This is incorrect. The court in Florida said certain arrangement of the statutory basis (a different one than in CA) for red light cameras is illegal.
You're coming with the assumption that pro-social is a universal goal, and that it is objectively good.
I'm not even disagreeing with you here, but that's a huge assumption yo make and you are granting pretty broad authority to the state in the name of that goal. Where do you draw the line of power the state shouldn't have despite it using the authority today towards pro-social goals?
Yes I do think things that are good for society are objectively good insofar as "objectively good" has any meaning at all.
Automated traffic enforcement isn't "granting" any new authority whatsoever to the state. The state already has the authority, it just uses it unfairly and imperfectly enough to fail to produce meaningful deterrence.
> Where do you draw the line of power the state shouldn't have despite it using the authority today towards pro-social goals?
I draw the line at the point where their power becomes not-pro-social, of course.
You and I can argue about what's pro-social or not (which this clearly is), but not whether pro-social things are good or not (which they clearly are).
No, their use of “solves for this” is with regards to disincentivizing an incredibly dangerous habit that randomly kills the most vulnerable bystanders in the vicinity at the rate of many thousands per year
You're misrepresenting. The article is about red light camera tickets and the GP is specifically describing how California got around this legal issue in the way they write tickets in their new camera pilot. They mention nothing of bystanders or their vulnerability.
I understand your criticism and it is fair, but this represents and improvement over the current state which is effectively no enforcement.
They're speed cameras, not red light cameras, and the revenues go towards street improvements to reduce speeding. So you could speed as much as you can afford, but eventually you'll have bought enough traffic calming infrastructure it'll be prohibitively difficult to keep getting tickets.
What's the alternative? No rules at all? Immediate death penalty for anyone who runs a red in front of a cop? Seizing and auctioning off the car? Deporting the offender to Texas? Something else? Revoke their license?
>Tickets issued by these cameras are civil penalties issued to the owner of the vehicle, like parking tickets, rather than a criminal moving violation. This means the tickets are just as constitutional as parking tickets. It also means penalties are limited to fines and can't impact your driving privilege or insurance.
So what does this say about the legitimacy of having those fines affect your license and insurance when issues by a real flesh and blood cop?
Sounds to me like that by default they shouldn't be affecting squat because there's an implicit "the cops will mostly only pull people over if it's unconscionably bad" filter going on.
Or maybe not have automated surveillance robonannies playing gotcha games and pocketing money, often impacting those who can least afford it, over technicalities and arbitrary rules made up to benefit the people doing the collecting.
The idea that AI enforcement won't be just as corrupt and capricious as any other form of government run extortion is bonkers. You're talking systems with less oversight than openclaw being run by people whose entire goal is to make as much money as possible, no matter the source. Private, unaccountable companies with effectively no oversight with the legal right to send you invoices for things you might or might not have done, and the cost for disputing it might well exceed the cost of just paying it and getting it over with.
Why are Californians so hellbent on giving their money to the government, given the absolute shitshow that is their budget and track record? The only good things that have happened in California for decades comes out of private enterprise, but all the crazy nonsense is fostered and maintained, apparently quite vigorously, by elected governments.
I'm furious that 10% of my federal income taxes end up going to California's bullshit, I can't imagine what it would be like having to live there.
Seriously, it's bordering on levels of insanity right up there with thinking that Jefferey Epstein would make a great babysitter. Do people just not pay attention? Does the weather just make everyone complacent and docile?
Speed cams and automated gotchas allowing the government to raid your pocketbook are a bad thing. There's no framing or circumstances where that's good.
> The idea that AI enforcement won't be just as corrupt and capricious as any other form of government run extortion is bonkers. [...] Private, unaccountable companies with effectively no oversight
In the specific case this thread is about - that of red light cameras - presumably the camera produces a photograph showing a red light, a vehicle going through it, and the vehicle's license plate. Plus a video, showing the light was orange for the legally required amount of time, and showing the absence of any exceptional circumstances (e.g. ambulances).
As law enforcement goes, that really seems like the least capricious, highest oversight law enforcement I can imagine.
Some cameras only produce a photograph. Some produce a video with the light status showing on it--but there have been cases that's wrong, the camera recording what it was programmed to do which didn't match the real lights.
You need actual video of the scene that can be examined and which is of sufficiently good quality that the identity of the car can be confirmed. Very often it does not exist.
Likewise, speed cameras should record enough that one can do a time/distance calculation to confirm the speed--because the system can be miscalibrated or can be fooled by large, flat surfaces.
Or look what has happened with breathalyzers. Last I heard if a judge grants the discovery request for the source code the case gets dropped. And the whole thing is based on a flawed principle in the first place: the ratio of breath alcohol to blood alcohol varies substantially between people--setting it for average isn't accurate. As a screening test for doing a blood draw, fine, but it should not be allowed anywhere near the courtroom. (Some states get this right, some do not.)
And, yes, ambulances. I forgot about another time I know I ran a red light. Something with lights/sirens was coming up behind, no lane was empty, I was in the only lane with one car. Lots of space at the intersection, I pulled forward and turned hard right, clearing my lane without actually entering the cross path.
I'm furious that 10% of my federal income taxes end up going to California's bullshit, I can't imagine what it would be like having to live there.
Your taxes getting evenly distributed is one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that removing California from the US would either increase your taxes or require reductions in federal spending.
Yes, California has long been a "donor state", ie one that pays substantially more federal tax revenue than gets spent there. This shouldn't be too surprising as it's much richer than average and the tax system is approximately progressive.
Abusing the flag button by reporting LLM generated posts and comments (which are not breaking any current guidelines) seems like a good way to get your flags ignored.
"Not belonging on HN" is an open invitation to flag anything someone disagrees with. Many posts are flagged simply because they express an unpopular opinion.
Community moderation won't fix this problem. It can only be mitigated if the site owners invest significant resources in addressing it. And judging by how little YC actually invests in HN, I wouldn't hold my breath. This website will succumb to this problem just like most others.
They removed it because they lost money on every console sold unless you also bought some games. When governments/universities started buying thousands to use in compute clusters without buying a single game, it stopped being worth it.
They added it to avoid game console specific tariffs, so they must have run the numbers and realized paying those would cost less than subsidizing a bunch of clusters.
My recollection / impression was that Sony was quite happy to lose game sales on thousands of PS3s because "used to make super computers" was a marketting win for them. They were used in this role for several years until Sony started trying to roll it back immediately following the publication of game piracy related developments that in part used OtherOS vulnerabilities.
That’s an assumption, jumping to a conclusion. It is true for some people, since some people say it out loud, but it is not true for everybody, and calling it “unambiguous” is an unsupportable claim.
To the degree some non-voters say they don’t care, that’s still deeply complicated, enough that even taking someone’s word for it is a bad idea. Non-voters in the U.S. are not uniformly distributed, and thus there is evidence suggesting that not caring is already a function of class, race, education, gender, and age, among other things.
If you actually care about voting and about the truth, it does yourself a disservice to jump to a assumed conclusion that all non-voters are saying something unambiguous, that they’re all saying the same thing, that they all have informed choice, that they understand all the tradeoffs and implications, and that they really are fine with any outcome regardless of what they say.
After hearing Palmer Luckey's argument for the name change[0], I tend to think it's good change.
Some of his arguments:
It used to be called the department of war, and it had a better track record with regard to foreign conflict, under that name then it did under the DoD name.
Department of war is a more honest name, department of defense is a somewhat newspeak term, although "Department of Peace" would be worse.
It's harder to seek funding for "war", then it is to seek funding for "defense".
If you ask someone, "Do you want to spend money on education or war?", you will get a different answer asking, "Do you want to spend money on education or defense?".
> It used to be called the department of war, and it had a better track record with regard to foreign conflict, under that name then it did under the DoD name.
The problem with this argument is that the _original_ Department of War is now called the Department of the Army, which existed alongside the Department of the Navy. Besides, it’s a moot point unless Congress actually changes the name.
Regarding Luckey's other statements, I can almost assure you that the administration did not think as much about it as Luckey has. Insecure Pete just thought the title "Secretary of Defense" was too wussy so he wanted to be Secretary of War.
Also, I think people mainly have issue with the fact that Trump is just randomly and unilaterally renaming random stuff and demolishing buildings without congressional approval. If he had gone through the correct alleys then maybe people could ignore it. Maybe. We'd probably still have qualms about it, but at least we'd know that our representatives had a say.
It’s a good change in that it discourages unwarranted funding. Bad for the DoD’s budget, good for the country.
It’s analogous to why `React.__SECRET_INTERNALS_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED` is a pretty good name.
(But even if it's a decent name in isolation, it isn't actually the name of the department, and using it is a tacit submission to the power of the executive over congress. So… bad overall.)
Good point. Yeah it's an accurate description of the department; I'd want to rename a bunch of other departments to be more accurate too, since apparently names are arbitrary now!
That may be true but changing the department's name can only be done with an act of congress, which has not been done yet. Thus, the name is still officially and legally Dept of Defense.
Just because a name is more accurate doesn't mean that it's its new name. Otherwise we wouldn't be the United States of America (we are literally not united bc Hawaii and Alaska are not contiguous, and we are figuratively not united because... Well, you know)
As a recap, my reply to your reply was that DoD is the actual newspeak, and your reply to that evolution of the discussion is that you were not discussing newspeak.
In trying to understand if I'm missing something, I looked up what newspeak means. I (as well as probably a few other commenters based on the contents of their comments) was under the assumption it meant "new speak" meaning it's something new.
In case anyone else reading this was not aware of this, this is what I discovered.
It's a term from George Orwell's 1984, describing a language used to make thoughts unthinkable by removing words from the language. It has nothing to do with "age of the term."
Hence, Dept of Defense is indeed newspeak. Dept of War, while being a new name for the dept, is too literal to be newspeak.
Thanks for the opportunity for me to learn something!
Department of Defense has historically been a prime example of newspeak.
I think Department of War is also newspeak. Or at least, they didn't change the name just to get the name in line with the amount of war the department does.
They changed it because they wanted to do more even more war. The amount of war the department does under the name "Defense" has been status quo for a long time, and my take is they wanted us to think of them differently so they could do even more war, which they have since been doing.
The person you're responding to probably hasn't read the book and is just parroting the word. That's kinda where we're at right now in society. I see the comments by malfist and abustamam are similar. No idea what newspeak means, just parroting and saying "that's not its name".
The problem will get worse as we have a generation raised by LLMs.
I went to a military high school up until 2011 and never remember hearing it. My dad and grandpa were military for 20 years each and I've never heard either say it. It definitely hasn't been used broadly in the US for very long (maybe in very specific circles). Even my friends who work as engineers for defense contractors now have never called people "war fighters" around me.
Idk, it might've been used on stuff in the past. My point was that it wasn't a thing that normal people (even normal people in the military) would say. The person I'm responding to described it as "common use" for the last couple decades and that just doesn't match up with my experience at all.
No, they didn't. The name of the department at issue is “the Department of Defense” and of its head the “Secretary of Defense” — these are set in statute (the latter for slightly longer time than the former) and the relevant statutes has not been changed, since the office of the Secretary of Defense was created in 1947 and the Department of Defense was created in 1949. The executive branch has just decided to use a nickname for a government department (which is the historical name for a prior department which was split to form two of what are now the three main direct subordinate elements within that department.)
Well, I’m in the US and have been following politics closely for the entire time window you mention, and this year marks the first time I’ve heard it. It is very jarring and a notable rhetorical shift from the concept of “service”.
Oh good, I've always had respect for soldiers, but never the govt. I'm glad to hear that soldiers are not buying into this name BS.
Edit: not sure if you're talking about the term warfighters or dept of war. Either way, warfighters just sounds silly, regardless of how long its been in use, and dept of war also sounds silly. It's like what my 5 year old nephew would call his fictitious military agency.
Warfighter - it’s basically “oh we got a badass over here.” People who take things and themselves too seriously and chest pound about their service too much.
It’s exactly the kind of language people like Hegseth love.
Jellyfin supports it, but the resulting quality is noticeably poor compared to Intel QuickSync or software transcoding. Perhaps the newer chips are better, but if you're building a media server from scratch you'd probably build around an Intel CPU or ARC GPU anyway.
The biggest recording artist in the world right now had to re-record her early albums because she didn't own the copyright, imagine how many artists don't get that big and never have that opportunity.
That individual artists are still defending this system is baffling to me.
> The biggest recording artist in the world right now had to re-record her early albums because she didn't own the copyright, imagine how many artists don't get that big and never have that opportunity.
Not only that, but Taylor Swift only could do so because she wrote the songs herself, and therefore had the composition copyright to her songs.
Most artists that were put together by the label don't have such a luxury.
Council et al., 2005 -- https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/05048/...
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