Californian Roads Could Soon Have Speed Cameras Issuing Tickets | Hacker News Reader

Californian Roads Could Soon Have Speed Cameras Issuing Tickets

nytimes.com

23 pointsresalisbury66 comments

Of all the places I'd expect negative reactions to this, I'm shocked HN is one of them.

This is automation of a dangerous job that is expensive to pay the labor costs of. That's our thing, folks! That's what tech is all about!

If you think the speed limits should be higher so you can drive faster, fine, but that's completely orthogonal to the point here.

Better enforcement of road laws, fewer police deaths from road accidents, lower cost to achieve these goals. I see this as entirely beneficial.

The only people complaining are the ones who want to disregard road laws because they don't care about the danger they pose to others, and like that there's barely any enforcement.

>The only people complaining are the ones who want to disregard road laws because they don't care about the danger they pose to others, and like that there's barely any enforcement.

This assumes that speeding laws are mainly there to prevent danger to others.

That's not true.

Surprisingly, law enforcement without compromise and expansion of the surveillance state aren't universal engineering values.

I have to disagree. If the goal is to reduce pedestrian deaths… just make it harder to drive fast. Narrow lanes, speed bumps, continuous sidewalks… all the technology is there and CA is insanely wealthy. Why wire up a surveillance panopticon?

I like traffic calming too, but sometimes people really do go faster than is safe, even on narrow, windy roads with obstacles. Also if they are used on the highway then traffic calming isn't that applicable.

I don't think you have a reasonable expectation of privacy when you're driving your licensed car on a public road anyways.

you have never dealt with crooked local law enforcement, it seems; or a local District Attorney who has an ex-wife; or the mysteriously calm, cool and collected insurance inspectors with perfect records.

money outside of the big city can make very unlikely partnerships

I am not sure what you're getting at.

> The only people complaining are the ones who want to disregard road laws because they don't care about the danger they pose to others, and like that there's barely any enforcement.

I question whether or not this will lead to safer roads. It doesn't stop people from getting where they want to go at unsafe speeds, it just adds a toll that many will be happy to pay. It doesn't and can't always impact the actual driver, either, because the system can only fine the owner. There ya go, someone not interested in disregarding road laws.

It will lead to a reduction of speeding. And the people who do speed will at least pay for some of their negative externalities.

Unfortunately I cannot read the article -- do the fines really go towards the victims of excessive speed (the negative externalities, like in a trust fund) or to the state general fund + company providing the hardware and software?

I doubt that they go to the specific victims because that would require a ton of bureaucracy. But giving back to society at large is better than nothing.

The way it works in Germany is that the fine will go to the owner. The owner can then accept the fine or identify who was actually driving when the offence was committed. In case this ends in the dispute the owner can be made to keep a record of all rides - with hefty fines should they not be accurate when a later offence occurs.

> This is automation of a dangerous job that is expensive to pay the labor costs of. That's our thing, folks! That's what tech is all about!

Automation can't solve what good government and good civil engineering can. This didn't roll all the way over to us because anyone sane actually thinks we're going to solve jack shit.

Enforcement is part of good government and good civil engineering.

Good civil engineering is invisible deterrence. Cities insist on putting overbuilt 4+ lane stroads in neighborhoods with speed limits set far lower than they're designed for. This is what causes people to speed. Speeding seems safe and ok until they run over a pedestrian and/or miss a stop or yield sign that is far out of the field of view of the driver. Stroads are also bad for pedestrian safety in general even if nobody is speeding because of the long crosswalks. A proper street would feel narrow for the driver and discourage speeding. Neither cameras nor speed bumps work as well as just reducing the lanes. One solution is road dividers, but they look ugly and are frequently damaged.

Good government shouldn't backseat drive civil engineers to make dumb decisions that hurt public safety.

I agree that we shouldn't build stroads, but all of California is not going to remove their stroads overnight. In the meantime, enforcing the speed limit would be nice.

> The only people complaining are the ones who want to disregard road laws because they don't care about the danger they pose to others, and like that there's barely any enforcement.

It takes away my discretion. If I drive 60 in dense traffic and weave between lanes this system would mark me as legal but I would be putting other people in incredible danger. If I drive 75 on empty roads I would be marked as illegal and dangerous.

Sure people are irresponsible but these black and white automated solutions are scary and not smart enough to be throwing out $500+ fines. Plus with the insurance adjustment going 75 on an empty road could end up costing you $2000+ over a few years.

> If you think the speed limits should be higher so you can drive faster, fine, but that's completely orthogonal to the point here.

But putting in place a system which distorts incentives around setting speed limits, seems like a bad idea.

Just like how yellow/caution light times were shortened where there were red light cameras. The financial incentives made intersections less safe.

Same with cameras. People learn where they are and engage in unexpected breaking to avoid fines.

And, btw, same argument could be made for cameras on sidewalks to do facial recognition and drug use.

Friction in law enforcement is a feature, not a bug.

I wish they took the French and German (and elsewhere approach) where they use some of the revenue to identify the driver and fine them + penalize their license.

If you just send the ticket to whomever is the easiest to target (regardless of guilt), then it’s more about revenue than safety.

> I wish they took the French and German (and elsewhere approach) where they use some of the revenue to identify the driver and fine them + penalize their license.

I don't think this is really necessary if implemented in california. Here, with the driving culture we have, the driver is going to be 99.9% the owner of the vehicle or their spouse.

If it's a rental car, just charge the rental company and they'll pass it to whoever was renting at the time.

No need to have some kind of investigation that ends the same way each time.

> If you just send the ticket to whomever is the easiest to target (regardless of guilt), then it’s more about revenue than safety.

If you lend your car to someone, you are taking responsibility for the way they drive that car. If you can't do that, you shouldn't lend them your car.

> If you lend your ____ to someone, you are taking responsibility

No I’m not, they are.

You should not lend a car to somebody that you cannot trust to act responsibly with it.

> I wish they took the French and German (and elsewhere approach) where they use some of the revenue to identify the driver and fine them + penalize their license.

I also hope California takes the French and German approach (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46822472) (http://thenewspaper.com/news/29/2975.asp)

Heh, yellow vests in every car accessible to the driver. When I heard that was a requirement in Europe, I bought one for my trip there and keep one in my American car now.

What a fantastic idea I thought. Should be a requirement in North America too, given our unreliable vehicles and expanses of unlit roads.

But thanks to the French making it a protest tool, I don’t see it ever happening.

Not a terrible idea at all to have a high vis jacket in your car in the US. They can be non-yellow if we want to avoid the association. If we're picking up good ideas from other countries I think North America could benefit from requiring Koreisha marks ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kōreisha_mark) too.

It would be amazing if speeding was enforced 100%, and then the official limits were pushed up where needed. This business where everyone drives above the limit and cops enforce when they feel like it is annoying and is a big enabler of bias in policing.

Their selective enforcement in SoCal is annoying. Majority of us are speeding above the limit and they don't even bat an eye. I got a ticket for going above the limit when I was following the flow of the traffic. I guess they are more interested in exercising their power when they felt like it.

100% agreed. Speed limits in their current state are infuriating. They are there, so you're _supposed_ to follow them, but nobody does, not even off-duty police, until someone is patrolling, at which point everyone drives ten under the limit at the checkpoint, only to go 15-30 over seconds later.

Of course, if YOU try following the limits, even on the rightmost lane, lots of drivers will drive aggressively around you as if you're the one in the wrong!

https://web.archive.org/web/20230815131255/https://www.nytim...

I have long believed that speed cameras are for revenue generation, not safety.

California keeps finding more reasons for me to never live there.

Cameras issuing tickets to people driving 11 miles over the speed limit "on streets that are hot spots for street racing, or are in school zones, or have a high number of collisions" is where you draw the line?

Yes.

One problem is who defines hot spot. The speed camera companies will gin up data showing that one road section at the bottom of a hill with a with speed limit of 30 is definetly a hot spot. Also politicians will get involved and speed cameras will be put in an area for consituent placation instead of for traffic safety.

Dont let the camels nose under the tent.

Seconding this. If you are a private company that makes cameras for this specific use case, it is in your best interest to pull numbers out of your ass to place more cameras, therefore making more sales and money on maintenance and/or service fees.

This is how it's pitched.

Then in a few years you likely will find it outsourced to a third party contractor, who has helpfully worked with the city or county to place the cameras in convenient spots that just happen to generate a ton of revenue.

I'm not totally against the idea, but at least where I live these red light and speeding cameras have devolved into ways to gain revenue vs. safety just by taking note of where they happen to be placed (and not).

There also has been an overall push to slowly reduce the threshold for activation of the cameras. Started as egregious speeding, now it's 6 over. The outcome is of course exactly what you would predict: everyone figures out where the cameras are and slams on the brakes for that block only. Super safe!

According to the law, all cameras must be explicitly marked with a sign. So if its designed to increase revenue it's not going to be very effective.

Sounds like you would love China.

You like driving recklessly and endangering others that much?

I'm pretty sure all states have speed limits, where do you live?

Too old-fashioned. Too passive. Too half-assed.

1.) Make any private or commercial car going over 80mph illegal. No exceptions except law enforcement and emergency services, no grandfathering in, no aftermarket upgrades.

2.) Enforce lower limits by geofencing and active beacons, to be strictly observed by mandatory driver assistance systems. Issue immediate death penalty for circumvention by automated rocket launchers at the next possible free spot.

3.) Also limit the maximal acceleration, no matter if ICE supercar or EV, don't want to have unnecessesary microplastics by needlessly burnt rubber, aren't we?

4.) Do the same for acoustics.

5.) Enjoy.

6.) Move all opposers by force to live in the fenced reservations of the race tracks.

From the article:

It would make California the 19th state to install cameras that would automatically issue tickets to the owners of vehicles that are spotted exceeding the speed limit by at least 11 miles an hour.

[...]

The fines could be reduced if the vehicle owner is unable to pay.

[...]

“We’re out to change behavior. We’re not out to be punitive.”

---

So:

1. The unintended consequence is that more people may feel comfortable going 8-10 mph over the limit.

2. Those who can afford the $50 fine (which, knowing CA, is a big part of the population) without any other consequences will end up ignoring it and just paying the fee or using their significant wealth to fight the fees.

3. The rest of the people just won't pay it because they cannot afford it.

and companies who install the cameras win big, while people who don't have their sh*t together enough to fill out the required I'm-poor forms correctly get screwed.

there is a company near UC Berkeley campus filled with people speaking some east slavic language, that has been making red-light cameras for at least ten years. They have expensive office space and no public signage.

I don't follow, does being poor give you a right to ignore the speed limit?

The fine article says that the fines will be reduced based on the speeder's ability to pay, comrade.

I'm dubious of schemes that have disparate impact based on the target's ability to bring about change-- good at politics and paperwork? reduced fine. Not so good? continued death by 1000 bureaucratic cuts.

I'm also dubious of schemes that have low to zero enforcement costs, since the allocation of enforcement resources is one of the most important protections to assure that state intrusion is being directed to matters of actual public consequence.

I'm all for ticketing drivers who are putting the public at risk, but if the risk they're creating isn't worth deploying a citing officer is it really worth the imposition on the recipient of the citation?

and I'm also pretty dubious of schemes with latency and ones where you'll get tripped up without random local knowledge. Go to visit a friend in another city then end up with a dozen fines and a suspended license before you know what hit you.

... and lets not even get into the latent surveillance potential, mass monitoring people's movements on an industrial scale at low marginal cost.

> Those who can afford the $50 fine (which, knowing CA, is a big part of the population)

That's why fines should always be proportional to income. They are not the price of a product, they are the price that should make a behaviour equally unaffordable for everyone.

By that reasoning, if you don't have a job, so being put in jail won't make you lose your job, you should be jailed longer to make up for the fact that jail harms you less. Likewise if you don't have children.

> if you don't have a job, so being put in jail won't make you lose your job, you should be jailed longer to make up for the fact that jail harms you less.

I know you were being facetious but, due to how the US legal system works, if you don't have a job/income, you likely have worse legal representation, which means you get a worse plea deal, and do go to jail longer.

And having children/family to care for usually does affect sentencing.

So you inadvertently described the current system in the US.

The objection that perfecting something beyond what's practical would be unfeasible is not a good one against making it better within reasonable limits, right?

It's very difficult to quantify the harm that jail does to you. It depends on a lot of factors, some of which are entirely personal, and besides, jail has multiple functions (in short: dissuasion, retribution, prevention and re-education). A fine exists mostly for dissuasion, and has a very precise economical value that is easy to gauge on the income/ wealth of the person fined.

This is precisely how it works in the US when it comes to most low level sentences.

Impact on career and family (kids, mostly) is a major consideration when it comes to sentencing. For better or worse.

I’d like to add a vehicle weight co-factor to the fines.

It would be really nice to see the fines scale up with income, but as long as the tickets are valid for insurance pricing then racking up a couple tickets is still going to cost a lot more than $50 each. It will also make insurance pricing more fair as currently unsafe drivers mostly speed with impunity in cities like sf where traffic enforcement is nonexistent.

They don't typically count as a moving violation, since you have the right to face your accuser in court. As far as I understand the situation.

They are more like parking tickets than a speeding ticket.

I imagine this varies some by state, but I believe it to be a fundamental constitutional issue at play.

The real impact of traffic tickets has always been the increased insurance rates, and after enough points you lose your license.

The fine is practically meaningless compared to what it does to your insurance rates.

> more people may feel comfortable going 8-10 mph over the limit.

Is that more or less than the current status quo? I'm not in California but it sounds like everyone feels comfortable doing that anyways.

Also you can still enforce 1-10 mph over the old fashioned way.

> Those who can afford the $50 fine (which, knowing CA, is a big part of the population) without any other consequences will end up ignoring it and just paying the fee or using their significant wealth to fight the fees.

Doing this every time you speed would add up very quickly. Also if you're talking about middle class people $50 is not amount that feels like nothing to them.

> The rest of the people just won't pay it because they cannot afford it.

Like you said, this is a very small number of people that we probably don't need to be punished any more by society.

One of my work projects was developing a system for managing the deployment locations of speed cameras. (Don't want to give away the state.) The speed cameras are rotated around to different locations each day. The vendor that supplies the speed camera systems is called RedFlex. It issues a couple thousand violations a day. Maybe around 1-2% of the total traffic. The legislation makes it lack teeth. There must be a warning sign before the camera. (so if you are paying attention, you simply slow down.) First offense is a warning, must be going 11 mph over, no points, etc.

https://youtu.be/pH9dnJ8BmY0

Didn't LA get rid of their cameras recently? Linked a YouTube video about this from an engineer.

Interesting for me is that for such common thing:

1. they do not have it yet

2. it is in the news

I don't know why we spend so much time and resources on speeding when it is not the biggest issue facing the motoring public.

this should allow for fewer net resources to be used to combat speeding thanks to automation. police can be used elsewhere.

There are more people than just the "motoring public".

You've probably internalized the talking point that "speeding doesn't cause accidents". While not completely true, the correlation isn't high.

However, speeding does have a significant impact on the severity of the accidents, making it an important issue. A little bit of speeding can be the difference between a fatal and non-fatal accident. Speeding is estimated to cause 30,000 deaths a year in the US.

https://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/speedmgt/ref_mats/fhwasa1304/Res...

its not only speeding tickets

can they do something about the dangerous segments of the homeless pop or illegal sideshows or the Asian elders getting assaulted?

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