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Comment by pkaye | Hacker News Reader

Selective enforcement of laws in very common in many countries. If they enforce is too harshly then people will protest. For example exceeding the speed limit while driving.

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"selective enforcement" is an interesting concept...

I have a neighbor (lives across the lake from me) who is a retired police officer...23 years on the job...

I asked him once if there was any truth to the rumor that traffic cops had to meet a quota...

He said, "Not in so many words...every now and then the Captain, during the shift briefing would say, "Boys, I need to see some paper" and we all knew what he meant."

Selective enforcement has a very different meaning in my country. I mean they force us to pay debilitating bills for electricity but they don't care that 11 years ago's 24/7 availability is now as random as rolling dice. We have to pay taxes for the city when we have been suffering of garbage filling our roads, only to end with them to recollect the waste and throw it in our city historic river. They patch things just for the corruption councils to get another day to play or be played with like a broken pawn. It is still the coolest place if you do not mind assassinations, bombings, mafias, world powers, nightclubs you need to reserve a table at for 10 grands to get in, we protest about everything, we speak words from 3 languages in every other sentence, and have the best food. We can easily hit the beach and 20 minutes ski on awesome slopes this time of the year. We love each other but I hate hearing my neighbor complain about getting 1/200 of my bill when I am sure they steal electricity illegally. But with their background, connections, and stares, I am good.

where do you live?

I am guessing Spain/Italy/Greece

It depends on the department. I small town America the police are under more pressure to act as revenue generators.

Harsh enforcement also causes their revenue to drop.

Several of the towns which depended upon speed traps for their funding found out that the Internet is a good resource for letting people know to avoid an area.

This will be interesting when self-driving cars don't ever disobey traffic laws.

This happened near where I live. There was a small bridge under construction in an otherwise unremarkable county where it is common practice to speed 10 over on the highway, so 65 mph actual speed.

They dragged on the construction for more than a year making barely any progress so that they could keep the construction zone open. (2x fines) The bridge was crossing a ravine at the bottom of a hill so they just kept a couple cops parked there every day and pulled over everyone with an out of state license plate all day and the county made millions. Eventually people caught on and sued. Bridge was finished nearly immediately after that.

This was a problem in Texas, so they passed a law to curb the abuse. The small towns affected got smart and worked around the law anyways:

http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-613081

"This will be interesting when self-driving cars don't ever disobey traffic laws."

It will be even more interesting when the passed laws and administrative acts will be automatically checked and validated (by something other than humans) so that fining won't be for addressing some revenue deficit but for actually preventing harmful phenomena!

Not just Internet. When I first saw this AAA billboard in FL, I thought it's a prank. But it is not, and it warns about one of the America's worst speed traps.

Google Street view: https://goo.gl/VwIadH

Hadn't thought about this before your comment, but this could be a reason for continuing to drive themselves. If they are willing to exceed the speed limit, they can get to their destination faster than a self driving car with speed limit enforced by software.

Say you are driving 10 mph over the speed limit on a 60 mph highway for an hour, the maximum time savings is less than 10 minutes out of an hour. If the trip is shorter or you have stop, turns, traffic, the savings are even less. So in most cases except long distance drives, the savings are minimal. It is just that we are all impatient.

Riding my motorcycle to work, I might bend a few laws - especially as London increasingly becomes 20mph throughout. But it reduces my commute from ~35 minutes (flow of traffic) to ~17 (filtering and exercising discretion when there's good visibility on an clear road, as is frequently the case since that's what traffic lights do - clear the road).

The twenty minutes or so morning and evening, 35-40 minutes overall is not to be sniffed at. The round trip on public transport would be well over 90 minutes.

10 minutes seems like a pretty substantial amount of time to me.

Actually you are wasting 50 minutes in this scenario as you could have used the time not driving yourself to do something productive/enjoyable.

Kind of. I mean theoretically you could say the same about a train, but I still see most of the time I spend on a train as wasted even though I don't have to drive the thing.

Sure but it that is the best case. In my own experience, traffic can impact those numbers substantially. And just some bad luck with traffic signals can eliminate most of those savings as the slow/fast cars tend to get synchronized.

Just the other day I was driving down the narrow roads of a nearby hill and there is a section with single lanes with lots of traffic moving at 35 mph. One lady comes weaving down the traffic on both sides to get in front of the crowd with a net savings until when the lanes opened up of 30 seconds. So much risk to everyone for what little benefit.

Unless I was under some big time crunch, I would gladly trade that amount of time for the luxury of being driven on a long roadtrip.

Not speeding, but breaking a similarly stupid law to split lanes on my motorcycle can save 50%+ of my commuting time.

Self-driving cars can go faster more safely; presumably speed limits would eventually increase.

Kill the self-driving car to scare the robot

It's more common in countries where rule of law has broken down, for exactly the reason dageshi is talking about: you can make the laws harsh and as long as they are broadly not enforced people will not care, but it gives you cover to go after your domestic enemies.

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