Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

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Discussions on this topic generally degenerate into

"If you don't want to pay fines, stop driving through red light" (i.e., cameras are cost-efficient law enforcement)

vs.

"Cities shouldn't use robots to extract huge dollar amounts from their citizens and travelers without having to look them in the eye" (i.e., massive income is prima facie evidence that the decision to install cameras is driven by revenue rather than justice)

There is a simple change we could make that should have broad bi-partisan support that can cleanly make both sides happy: Local governments shouldn't be able to keep the revenue from automated enforcement cameras; instead, it has to be sent to another part of the government (e.g., to charity, or the federal parks department, or basically anywhere that isn't under the control of the city council making the decision). This removes the incentive for cities to treat violators of minor traffic laws like piggie banks, but they are still free to use cameras to economically enforce laws protecting public safety if they deem it prudent. Importantly, it also reduces the appearance of corruption, restoring some faith in local government. We all lose when citizens view the justice system as an extortion racket.

(You could, and in my opinion should, extend this to all fines levied by local governments, but we could start with traffic cameras as a baby step.)

Agreed about where the funds should go, and I'd also add that all intersections with cameras should have signs telling people of those cameras to get them to slow down and stop running red lights. The goal of these cameras should be to reduce traffic infractions, not to profit from their proliferation.

When I was in Charlotte, North Carolina, some years ago (20?) I saw signs at certain intersections announcing how many dollars had been collected from red-light cameras there.

> signs telling people of those cameras to get them to slow down and stop running

This is why there’s a red light?

I initially agreed, but then I had the thought that this would lead to people just knowing which lights have camera and being extra careful around those, while freely running the lights elsewhere.

Imagine if we had a problem where a bunch of people were burglarizing houses, so we decided to declare specific enforcement zones where the cops were really on top of preventing burglaries. Would people be less likely to burgle, or would they just do their burglaries elsewhere?

Instead, town-wide, it should be made known with prominent signs that traffic enforcement is in use, and ideally the cameras should move around, so that people can't simply adjust their behavior to compensate. In other words, your idea, but put that sign on every intersection.

> I initially agreed, but then I had the thought that this would lead to people just knowing which lights have camera and being extra careful around those, while freely running the lights elsewhere.

That’s exactly what I’ve witnessed in places that have cameras, regardless of if there are signs.

I worry that as long as the money remains in government hands at all there would still be abuse.

I had two ideas in this regard.

-----------------------

All fines (and proceeds from auctioning off seized assets) collected by all levels of government should be broken down into two categories:

- Traffic

- Criminal

If you have a drivers license and make it a whole calendar year without getting a traffic citation, you should get an equal slice of the traffic citation money from the feds and the city/county/state that has jurisdiction over the address on your DL.

If you have government ID and make it a whole calendar year without getting cited/arrested (let alone convicted), you should get an equal slice of the criminal seizure/fine money from the feds and the city/county/state that has jurisdiction over the address on your ID.

The funding for the distribution infrastructure should NOT come from the fines/citations/seizures.

In short, redistribute the fine money from those who broke the law to those who didn't (or at least didn't get caught).

-----------------------

The other far simpler option is that all fines/penalties automatically get applied to paying down debt owed by the collecting government.

If somehow a government has no debt (shocked face here) it would kicked upward to pay down debt at a higher level (e.g. city has no debt, so it gets sent to the state...and if somehow the state has no debt, it goes to the US Treasury's donation office).

> If you have a drivers license and make it a whole calendar year without getting a traffic citation, you should get an equal slice of the traffic citation money from the feds and the city/county/state that has jurisdiction over the address on your DL.

I like the idea. It sounds similar to these charge-and-refund systems:

* Canada's carbon tax. This adds a fee to fuels per ton (so the more you purchase, the more tax you pay). Every resident gets the same monetary amount of refund per year.

* Quadratic voting. You pay n^2 dollars to have n votes. All the collected money is divided equally and refunded to every citizen at the end.

> If you have government ID and make it a whole calendar year without getting cited/arrested (let alone convicted), you should get an equal slice of the criminal seizure/fine money from the feds and the city/county/state that has jurisdiction over the address on your ID.

Wouldn’t this just encourage law enforcement to cite everyone for every little infraction?

> In short, redistribute the fine money from those who broke the law to those who didn't (or at least didn't get caught).

Everyone breaks law the eventually. The article mentions the “Miami right” as an example.

> The other far simpler option is that all fines/penalties automatically get applied to paying down debt owed by the collecting government.

So the government can purposefully take on more debt and then find infractions to pay it off?

> Wouldn’t this just encourage law enforcement to cite everyone for every little infraction?

Hmm, potentially...if they thought that would secure a much larger slice for themselves by knocking people out of the running...so maybe they'd have to be ineligible. However, in most cases that would require citing a hell of a lot of people (Jacksonville, FL has ~3000 cops for ~1.2m people, so they'd have to each cite several locals a day all 365 days of the year to make a dent in who's getting any money)

Since some criminals would be non-locals, you could also hand out the fines equally to all locals regardless of whether they got busted for anything or not.

> Everyone breaks law the eventually. The article mentions the “Miami right” as an example.

Yes, there is a randomness to it all (breaking the law vs breaking and getting caught) but I'm not going to try to compensate for or control it.

> So the government can purposefully take on more debt and then find infractions to pay it off?

Yeah, I realized this oversight 5 minutes after I clicked submit. However, perhaps it could be pooled and redistributed equally to pay down equal amounts of debt for all the governments in a region.

The point is that fines/seizures should not be a line item in a government budget EVER because then somehow the government will become dependent on criminal activity to an extent and go looking for it just for the money. It should be a completely unexpected windfall and thus either returned to the people or used to pay down debt. That's my hope, the details could probably take months to hammer out.

> However, in most cases that would require citing a hell of a lot of people

How about in the tiny cities discussed in the article that have the current problem?

It’s also easy to make it a year without an infraction: just don’t drive. Use Uber or get a friend/family to drive you. This gets easier in the cities. I know several people who have drivers licenses that never drive because they don’t have to. Do they deserve money at the end of the cycle?

I don't know how I feel about all this, but I came up with an amusing idea I wanted to share.

What if we refund the money to everyone, but only those who didn't get a ticket in the past year? Creates even more incentives to drive safely.

Apparently you and I think somewhat alike!

It's like crossing social credit score with a tontine!

...as one who doesn't run red lights and hates profiteering governments -- I'm not opposed :D

Actually, don't most of the revenues from automated cameras go to vendors?

I also remember some states tackled some of it by saying you couldn't get a speeding ticket for just 0-5 mph or maybe 0-9 mph over.

> you couldn't get a speeding ticket for just 0-5 mph or maybe 0-9 mph over

I assume it’s just psychology and people want to feel like they’re getting away with something but this is just the same effect as increasing the speed limit.

But it makes me wonder if the point is to have lower posted limits and therefore lower above-the-limit-but-legally cruising speeds. It’s very ass backwards but I’ll take whatever works.

> Actually, don't most of the revenues from automated cameras go to vendors?

Often yes. (I can't easily dig up broad data, but there are certainly individual examples where this is the case.)

My proposal still helps here though. These cities are willing to pay a bunch to the vendors because the remainder of revenue that they keep is "free". (It seems the cities often sign a sweetheart deal where the cities have their admin costs recouped first and then the vendors keep the vast majority of the revenue thereafter.) But if the cities can't keep any money, they don't have much incentive to send all this money to the vendors; it just pisses off their citizens.

One more advantage of this proposal: it would give some insight into who was right in this debate. If traffic camera roll out continues at the same pace after this measure is passed, we could conclude the cities are mostly motivated by public safety. But if, as I suspect, traffic cameras installation stalled, we've have good (though not incontrovertible) evidence that they are really just motivated as a revenue source.

They tried to do this with lotteries. Like all the revenue from lotteries goes to the schools. What happens is the government funds schools less as lottery revenue grows so the schools get the same (or even less) but the overall government funds grow. So they still effectively get the revenue. Ultimately all money into the government is controlled by them so there really isn't a way to just move money around that wouldn't incentivize the scheme. Then they start doing shadey things like decreasing yellow light time to cause more violations (and sometimes accidents).

This is exactly why the parent suggested that the funds have to go to another part of government that isn't being funded by the city. A city cannot cut their funding of federal parks to effectively reassign money from red-light cameras because they aren't funding federal parks in the first place. The federal government is probably going to cut park funding and reassign the money somewhere else, but the people deciding to install the red light cameras are still not directly incentivized to generate revenue with them.

I think government fines should be destroyed once collected. There’s no other way around the perverse incentives.

You could send it to the federal reserve balance sheet, or withdraw the funds and shred the cash. Or maybe apply it to the national debt since it’s so massive nobody would feel any benefit from the fine. Whatever, I don’t care.

But no benefit should befall anyone - the only goal should be to prevent bad behavior.

I think literally destroying the cash would be a good solution except that the normal voter doesn't understand that this doesn't destroy value. So it would have serious rhetorical challenges. (Also, the value accrues to current holders of cash; not sure whether this might be too regressive/progressive relative to the "default" way that transfers are made.)

How do you propose bad behavior is punished without fines?

I do think the fine should be collected but the resulting cash should be destroyed by the federal reserve.

The goal should be safety and that’s it. Not a quick buck for local governments and traffic camera vendors.

Oh I misunderstood your original comment. What incentive do the towns/vendors have to setup these systems in that case?

The incentive is to make their streets safer. If they don't think the systems do that, then clearly they shouldn't be setting up the systems?

I don't know if you've noticed but governments rarely do the right thing for the sake of it.

The towns can still pay vendors, just as they pay vendors for lots of things. They just can't keep any of the ticket revenue generated.

The vendors can now just tip the town officials for choosing them.

Very good suggestion. Including "extend this to all fines levied by local governments". I would go even further than "the local governments"

But I also think "hell freezes over" is way more likely event

> But I also think "hell freezes over" is way more likely event

Maybe. There is precedent for state governments constraining their local governments. I think automated traffic cameras are a promising place where this might happen again because (1) they are still relatively new, so people are less likely to fall into status quo bias ("we've always had X, so it must be good/necessary/inevitable"); and (2) traffic cameras are uniquely irritating and salient to the average citizen in a way that, say, NIMBY regulations are not.

Came here to say exactly this. Revenues from cameras should go to the general fund at the state level. At the local level, cameras should be used to improve safety and for no other purpose. Government should not profit from the bad behavior of its citizens.

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