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Comment by Karrot_Kream | Hacker News Reader

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.

> 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.

> 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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