This kind of automated ticket (or beyond, think apple on devices scanning) enforcement is straight up police state/Fascism - do you want to live in a world where your existence is at every second scanned for illegal acts?
Speeding, reckless driving, running red lights and stop signs is absolutely rampant where I live and people really do die because of it.
I'm tired of entitled assholes thinking that they can drive however they want, endanger everyone around them, and that they just have the right to do that. Even if they don't value their own lives, we value ours.
So I strongly support red light and speed cameras, traffic calming, and physical pedestrian and bike barriers. Not sure sure about cars self-reporting, only because you could just buy a different car. There is a pretty strong argument that cars have no need to be able go 50+ mph over the speed limit like they can now.
That’s what this is. The patent is about reporting other cars. The title is clickbait.
Within the context of speeding and the driver having control over when the report is sent in, I think the safety gains are worth the trade-off.
We don't use armed police to enforce traffic laws. Police mainly monitor traffic as a revenue device. It's already been proven that monitoring traffic and automating fines in fact promotes reckless driving and causes more accidents than it stops.
In what world? In the US "manual" traffic enforcement is almost exclusively done by armed police and sheriffs. Unarmed civilian traffic enforcement is only done in Berkeley, CA, and a town in Minnesota, afaik.
> It's already been proven that monitoring traffic and automating fines in fact promotes reckless driving and causes more accidents than it stops.
Do you have a citation for that? There are numerous studies that show significant drops in accident rates in areas with red light cameras. On the order of 10-23%!
- https://tti.tamu.edu/researcher/tti-study-underscores-safety... - https://information.auditor.ca.gov/pdfs/reports/2001-125.pdf
More importantly, this kind of infrastructure as a whole is dangerous to put in the hands of the government. Next election cycle it could be put to use for purposes you certainly don't agree with. The government rarely gives any power back that it's given.
One thing that is true though, is that traffic fatalities are higher in poorer communities that tend to have less enforcement. Putting red light and speeding cameras in those areas will disproportionately save lives.
Regarding the danger of it all - I think armed police are more dangerous.
Additionally, you got the point and missed the mark about traffic fatalities and poorer communities: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259019822...
The highlights, if you don't want to read the whole thing:
Car ownership
Lower-income households may be more likely to drive older cars with fewer safety features.
Road design
Poorer neighborhoods may have more high-speed roads, and fewer basic traffic safety measures like streetlights, crosswalks, and sidewalks.
Systemic patterns
Disinvestment and displacement may favor car owners and road expansions over community safety.
I'm not sure how this is a kangaroo court. If the machines are generally known to be working correctly, and have an up to date calibration certificate, it makes sense that you can't dispute the validity of the evidence. It's not any different than limiting the avenues of appeal for breathalyzer results in DUI cases. Otherwise, the courts would swamped with people trying to drag out the case by doing the same appeal process over and over again. The fact that the owner gets penalized rather than the driver is more sketchy, but if the owner authorized someone else to use his car, why shouldn't he be on the hook for infractions? For instance, you lent your car to someone else and it got towed, do you think it's acceptable to use the "you can't prove I did the parking/driving" excuse to get off of it?
> A kangaroo court may ignore due process and come to a predetermined conclusion.
Ref: https://www.cnet.com/science/tickets-issued-due-to-red-light...
> The City is not authorized to delegate police power by entering into a contract that allows a private vendor to screen data and decide whether a violation has occurred before sending that data to a traffic infraction enforcement officer to use as the basis for authorizing a citation.
This is generally how all of them work and that is why you go to civil court to fight a civil penalty if you appeal the ticket. That is a de facto kangaroo court when the consequence can overlap with drivers license revocation for a civil matter.
Source? At least in my jurisdiction they're reviewed by police officers. A recent story[1] about red light cameras work in a town in Florida also describes something similar. Moreover, while delegating ticket issuing powers to a private company might come with procedural issues and raise questions about impartiality, it's hardly enough reason to call it a "kangaroo court" if you're able to dispute it in court. That's the case for both my local jurisdiction and the florida town mentioned in the story. That's not to say that there aren't any red light camera kangaroo courts out there, or even that most of them aren't, but there's no reason why red light cameras are "kangaroo courts" in and of themselves.
There is now usually a police officer in the mix, but they're not actually doing much if anything other than clicking a button. They just believe whatever the machine and video paints and use the existing assumptions about car owners being responsible over drivers.
Which part do you think is unfair? The police/courts blindly trusting the machine, or the owner being fined rather than the driver?
The whole shabang is a big, abrupt departure from how we enforce traffic laws. Normally you had the option to face your accuser, there was room for interpretation and discernment, and the law was sufficiently nuanced.
Seems like a strange assumption. A 24/7 camera system automating tickets will produce infinitely more infractions than any human, leading to infinitely more false positives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph_number
Regardless, the challenge is to implement a robust system that allows for and streamlines appeals.
Here in our jurisdiction traffic infringements are issued with a clear good resolution image of an alleged infraction, a link to view raw data on police servers, and fast means to pay and a choice to lodge an appeal.
To appeal means full raw evidence can be viewed in person, frames before and after event can be seen, and individuals can challenge equipment calibration or assert they were not driving or that the plates were on wrong vehicle (stolen vehicle ID), etc.
Appeals have been won on the grounds that "other events" caused infraction making it reasonable, that vehicle was incorrectly ID'd, that another person was driving at time, etc. Technical nerds have even won appeals by arguing that radar gear wasn't calibrated and angle of setup made accurate reading impossible with the margin of error claimed.
The challenge is how do we get people to not commit infractions. Any other goal creates perverse outcomes. Automating those other goals creates even worse outcomes.
A well implemented and fair system that catches a proportion of speeders will result in fewer speeders overall. The more that pressure to catch them all increases the more unrest and pushback is provoked. At some point there's an acceptable comprimise between the public and the system employed by the public to improve order on public assets.
Or you can go full autocracy if you wish. Most prefer not to.
That's because you (naively) don't think it will be abused. You can easily find articles and news reports where they report shortening the yellow lights so that the cameras were profitable.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=shortened+yellow+light+to+p...
in short: because of the presumption of good faith and innocence on the part of the ticketing authority (and especially their agents, once it’s inevitably privatized etc)
People like you are why we have the current post 9/11 police state.
I'm sure you can get somewhere close to that amount of you include all the violence committed by gangs/organized criminals, and include indirect deaths like drug overdose or whatever.
>and driving is a public activity done on public roads, unlike chatting.
Fine, how about having your movements in public published for all to see
Are traffic cameras a slippery slope to cameras in your house to make sure your aren’t doing drugs or building an unpermitted additon?
I don’t think slope is nearly as slippery as you claim. There are miles of high friction slope between enforcing traffic laws on public roads and totalitarianism.
People exist in public. There should be very little tracking as a baseline.
Not by themselves, but public roads are a huge portion of everywhere when you look at person-hours spent in public.
Street corner cameras are also neither unlimited nor everywhere. But the combination of those two gets extremely oppressive.
Even just one is enough to track almost all your movements. Everyone's movements are not supposed to be in a database somewhere just because they moved through public spaces. And sure lots of those cameras are not centrally connected today, but the "it's public" argument allows it just fine.
Unfortunately this seems to be the cause of a lot of debates... just differences in opinion over terminology basically, but I think people all too often don't look at it that way.
0 - https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/06/07/everyones-turning-i...