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Comment by snozolli | Hacker News Reader

As someone who commuted by motorcycle in SF for several years, I have a hard time imagining any barely-competent self-driving car being worse than those maniacs in the Yellow Cabs.

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In SF/Oakland, so many non-cabs run red lights all the time. While cabs are typically the most aggressive drivers anywhere in the world, we have a problem of lawlessness in SF. This is becoming a culture. An accepted culture, precisely because of lack of enforcement by police and lack of will to enforce laws, voted in by the population that is enamored by ostensible "kindness".

The whole thing is bizarre. No red light cameras. Not many cops interested in pursuing speeders. Not enough cops, actually.

Don't ride a motorcycle here.

Even the red light cameras and automated speeding detectors are mostly being held back by unpopularity.

I'll bite. Fines and fees are a difficult topic. Fines and fees should never be used to fund the government. They are a perverse incentive. We have seen over the years how horrible politicians try to "lower taxes" by shifting the cost of running a town to people who can't fight back.

For traffic management, I like the idea of roundabouts and twists to control speed better. Red lights and stop signs have inherent deficiencies and we should phase them out. I'd argue that drivers should feel they are going to fast and need to slow down by cues like narrow streets with no onstreet parking, not four lane stroads with 30mph plastered on a five mile perfectly straight stretch.

Most importantly though, we need better public transit or any public transit. Ideally free of cost for the riders and paid for by taxes.

Roundabouts and public transit improvements cost millions or billions and take years or decades to roll out. They’re great, and we should build them, but there’s a lot to be said for quicker, cheaper solutions in the mean time.

It is a pathetic commentary on our society that we can't implement roundabouts without spending millions of dollars and a decade of time. I feel that an intersection could be replaced with a roundabout in a single weekend if people cared enough. Didn't the Japanese recently reroute tracks and reconfigure a train station overnight, before the 7 AM train arrived?

At some point this attitude has to be given up. There's no reason traffic circles should cost millions to billions. I'd be willing to wager that this short sighted, quick and dirty meantime fix strategy has been employed too much and now we've arrived at this reality.

It’s not an “attitude”, it’s an objective fact about how capital project go in the US right now.

I’ve got theories, but I don’t really know what the best way is to fix that. We probably need to try a bunch of things, and I’m all for that.

But drivers running red lights kill people. I’m for for the ideal, elegant solutions, and also for the imperfect incremental ones. I really don’t think worse-is-better, if that’s what you’re advocating, is appropriate.

> Fines and fees are a difficult topic. Fines and fees should never be used to fund the government. They are a perverse incentive.

Perhaps it would be better if all of the fines went into a social wealth fund that every citizen has a share in?

> I'll bite. Fines and fees are a difficult topic. Fines and fees should never be used to fund the government.

Fines should be used to fund insurance for victims of lawless drivers, or to improve road infrastructure, build bicycle roads, etc.

Strange. Traffic tickets are one of the best ways to diverge money from the elite to the poor. How can any self proclaimed leftist be against it? There are tons of rich douchebags in California with supercars.

And even more if you moved to income based tickets. That is ticket would be fraction of your income. For red light let's say 1 week. Minus some value that is sufficient for poverty level living.

Because the leftists with a brain have enough space in there to recall that it doesn't work that way in practice and just becomes another avenue for the .gov to screw a few more bucks out of whoever can't fight back.

Traffic laws if enforced uniformly would be massively unpopular and get changed. You might be able to get people to bend over and take it like they do in Europe but you'd have to boil the frog for a couple hundred years to get to a state where that's culturally acceptable in the US. Traffic laws enforced discretionarily just become an expensive wheeled version of stop and frisk but with a pretext that makes them constitutional which is not good for society. The status quo of having traffic laws be mostly unenforced except in the case of egregious violations and with occasional spot enforcement is closer to optimal than the jackboot fantasy. Of course there are places where improvement can be made but such opportunity is mostly incremental.

> The status quo of having traffic laws be mostly unenforced except in the case of egregious violations and with occasional spot enforcement is closer to optimal than the jackboot fantasy.

This allows for oppression via selective enforcement and is absolutely a jackboot fantasy.

Which is better than the same thing but with bigger teeth and in more places, which is exactly what happens when you take the jackboot fantasy and try and implement it anywhere other than textbook magic land.

The solution to the fact that minor civil infractions are potentially ruinous to the poor and that the cops prowl the neighborhoods of the powerless looking for revenue for the state isn't to implement those things everywhere.

How do traffic tickets help the poor? They are more useful for punishing the poor significantly while being fairly inconsequential to the rich. They don't scale to your income level.

The truly poor don't even own a car. They're desperately trying to cross the street before getting run over. They're relying on public transit if it even exists to get anywhere.

You know where the truly poor come from? They come from the "slightly better off poor".

Creating a potentially ruinous expense that will occasionally be used to occasionally knock people in the latter group down to the former is anything but progressive and probably not good from a societal POV.

You can use this argument to justify any form of extant infrastructure that an upper class uses. It's such a broad argument as to be meaningless

The difference here is that a great many of all the other classes use the same damn infrastructure.

I once had to defend myself against an automated red light ticket from a car I did not own, with a driver of a different ethnicity and race than me on a day when I could prove I was not in the country. I've never lived in SF.

From what I can tell, that wing of the SF court house is administered by crooks.

My experiences with SFPD have been mostly fine, but I'd pop open some bubbly if I heard the court house was razed by a frustrated real estate developer.

A red light ticket is $500. At that price point, the value prop is really poor. It does not improve safety or improve compliance proportional to the ticket price. It just makes everyone mad.

It's a well known phenomenon that when cops don't like the people in the office of prosecutor, DA, or other similar positions the police will cease enforcing laws so they can shout about how crime is on the rise in order to get their way.

That may be so, but SF in particular did decriminalize A LOT of things. Most notable is theft under $950, for example, where is not hard to find videos and news items, e.g: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/us/san-francisco-shoplift...

Due to inflation, this will soon be irrelevant.

If you follow the Prop link, the article says that the state of california reduced theft under that amount to a misdemeanour because there wasn't enough room in prisons to keep people arrested for it.

Quite a different motivation than SF decriminalizing things

It was a ballot proposition. That was the stated reasoning of its proponents but assigning motivation for why a referendum came out the way it did is a fools errand. The actual reasons why millions of people voted the way they did will invariably be multi-causal and include things no one in their right mind would consider condensed down to one “Yes” vote.

I remember that vote, and crowding in the prisons wasn’t even a consideration for how I voted because if we wanted to resolve that issue we would build more prisons; therefore it was a useless justification in either direction. In truth, the sum of our choices in California does not make it look like we care about crowding in the prisons, only that we care about looking like we care. It’s been more than 15 years since the first time I read an article about how our prisons are overcrowded, and they’re still overcrowded.

We already have the highest prison population of any country on earth, why would you think the solution is building more prisons?

Because you either stop prosecuting people or you build more prisons, or you stop pretending to care one way or the other about how crowded the existing prisons are.

Even if you think there’s some measure of criminal justice reform that could be done to reduce the headcount in the future in the State of California’s prison system, you build the damn prisons now to address specifically: overcrowding in the prisons, and then if some future opportunity arises to raze some of the older prisons because they are no longer needed because the prison population has been reduced, then you do that. Or you don’t, and we haven’t, so that’s clearly what our choice is: not caring in the abstract. Given that, I have no patience for the people that pretend otherwise.

I hear this one a lot, but it's not "decriminalization". Prop 47 reduced theft under $950 to a misdemeanor from a felony. A misdemeanor is not decriminalization! Not even close. You can go to jail for a misdemeanor.

This is actually pretty normal nationwide (and also a rather conservatively low dollar number.) Fun fact: Did you know Texas' limit, yes texas, is $2500?

I don't think that reduction is the reason for an increase in crime and is more of a red herring and distraction. The real reason is a mix of ineffective policing (which is a product of both police being bad at their job and police being afraid to do their job because of ill will towards them) and ineffective prosecution.

Those problems have led to what feels like a "decriminalization" of theft, but that's not the law's problem. I promise you, SF would still be having these problems if this law didn't exist. (Hell, the highly publicized daylight ransacking of the Louis Vutton in Union Square shows how this law is irrelevant. Very few things in that store are under $950!)

>> I don't think that reduction is the reason for an increase in crime

I don't have anything empirical but in my experience the frequency and brazenness of the shoplifting (in SF) increased in a very noticeable way soon after the passage of Prop 47.

I know, I feel the same way, but the data doesn't indicate this. Be careful with "ancedata".

http://www.cjcj.org/uploads/cjcj/images/screen_shot_2021-06-...

The one place you do see a dramatic impact is car break ins. But even that is a result of a broken relationship between the DA's office and the SFPD. The fact is, the SFPD is shitty at it's job (close rates are comically low, its understaffed, heaving demoralized) and the DA doesn't have people to prosecute.

This is really a problem as well in Barcelona with theft under €400 not being criminalized.

Pickpocketing has just become a job. There are still fines but the gangs just write them off as business expenses. It's ridiculous.

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