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Comment by xutopia | Hacker News Reader

He's probably right about being a scheme... goes about it entirely the wrong way to stop the scheme.

The ability / desire / necessity to break laws where those laws are dysfunctional is, at the very least, important, if not essential to a healthy society.

We call this civil disobedience. The article draws attention to this.

From the article: The shortened duration times at the traffic lights generate $32 million for Suffolk County, which is why the county allows the practice to continue despite their own study showing they lead to an increase in accidents with injuries.

The wrong people have been arrested here.

If you can't offer a comprehensive alternative to his actions then your comment lacks substance.

You sue. You don't go destroying property.

A private middle class citizen suing a $7B company... Yeah, right...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_action

lol, Yea...

You do know the government has sovereign immunity right, and a cause of action around Traffic Management would be tossed almost instantly

"You" don't have standing to sue unless you have been harmed. He got a traffic citation, which is an extremely small harm. No lawyer would pick that up on contingency. Small claims court would throw it right out as frivolous without even considering the larger issues.

Now what?

Well if this is such a large problem, you go set up a class action lawsuit. If any law firm saw this and thought, wow, there's actually significant damage going on here, there'd be a dozen at the gate waiting to represent the thousands of people affected.

Yeah, I won't be shocked if that happens eventually, but in the meantime wouldn't it be nice if the people who are paid by the public to serve the public interest and have also sworn on bibles to do that would actually just do that without being forced to do that? Besides this is yet another example of private profit and public risk. None of the judges, prosecutors, city managers, and cops who receive consideration from Xerox will ever answer for their corruption. Xerox execs will never answer for their corruption. Instead the families of some poor bastards who died of T-boning will just bankrupt a few counties and municipalities. That's not really going to fix the problem. Eventually, Xerox itself will go out of business whether they get sued or not. Nothing says "no innovation here" like the trivially venal schemes described in TFA.

Meanwhile, we seem to have drifted a bit here. Re-aiming cameras and cutting wires is still a much more available remedy for the average human being than running a successful class action lawsuit against a corrupt conspiracy of huge corporations and unaccountable civil servants. The difference between those two alternatives is so vast...

Actually, civil disobedience is simply knowingly breaking the law and sucking up the consequences to make a point. It does not stop at refusing to go to the back of the bus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience#Violent_vs....

Sibling comments nail the issue as to why he doesn't just sue. So now he's doing something with much more bang for the buck, and is shouldering the risk entirely on his own.

The man's a hero in my book.

The Cato Institute has been pushing for class action suits for exactly this type of situation

https://www.cato.org/multimedia/cato-daily-podcast/libertari...

What if the actions are perfectly legal?

Civil disobedience is sometimes necessary. Good on him. I hope he brings more attention to this story so that action may be taken to change the system.

What approach can a normal, non wealthy, non connected citizen take?

Get the local news to make a stink.

Seems like he tried that, and other venues and was ignored.

In America? hahahahahahahahaha

Idk. Also, a bit crazy, but maybe called to say he was going to do it with news coverage, but not actually do it?

Any way to get a law in the books that specifies a minimum yellow light duration for a given speed limit?

www.shortyellowlights.com/standards/ has a formula.

I know there is a state wide rules in California. And because of complaints about red light cameras, they even increased some of the limits by 0.5s. I'm not sure of the exact numbers right now. I know my own city was caught doing some of these games but after the changes were made, they saw a 77% drop in red light tickets at some locations.

Seems like he would have gotten away with snipping the wires if he didn't ask the news to report on it...

Going through proper channels failed completely, so all he can do at this point is try to bring attention to it. He's certainly succeeded at that, since this article is the first I've heard of it.

This is classic civil disobedience. He actually did it in public and asked to be arrested. That's the way it's supposed to be done.

what way would you suggest? keep in mind that the longer it takes the more people will die/be injured.

I may not understand how these cameras work but how does cutting the power to these prevent those people from being injured/dying? Sure people aren't going to get tickets from them but the yellow light is still going to be shortened. So even if they take the cameras out, unless they put the yellow light back to 5 seconds, the injury/fatality rate is still going to be elevated.

Sometimes, civil disobedience can be the right way to solve a systemic problem

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