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Comment by spankalee | Hacker News Reader

Enforcing traffic laws is good, actually. Automated enforcement is even better so that we don't need to use armed police and can enforce consistently.

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.

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> So I strongly support red light and speed cameras, traffic calming, and physical pedestrian and bike barriers.

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...

Why is the solution to the abuse "don't use traffic cameras" instead of "hold people accountable for shortening yellow lights"?

because people don’t disclose when they’re acting nefariously, and there are no automated systems monitoring that, so you’ve got an uphill battle to prove that it even exists as a problem let alone that someone did it intentionally, etc.

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)

Enforcing traffic laws are good. Automating that is bad. Who is to say what the sure limit is? My car has sign recognition. There is some construction and the freeway drops to 35 mph. There is a sign that says that. But at the exact same place is an off ramp to another freeway. Speedlimit is greater then 35 mph, but my car thought it was 35 because it saw the sign. Sure it is an edge case, but there are a lot of edge cases. Automatic law enforcement is a bane on society. It is there to increase revenue, not to make the roads safer.

For one thing, automatic enforcement is imperfect, and people who can't afford to miss work to go to court will be disproportionately impacted by false positives.

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.

I don't personally know of false-positive rates, but I know you can contest automated tickets, and I wouldn't assume that the false-positive rate for cameras is actually worse than for human police.

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.

> and I wouldn't assume that the false-positive rate for cameras is actually worse than for human police.

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.

Would that be aleph-null infinite or higher?

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 to implement a robust system that allows for and streamlines appeals.

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.

There is no such solution that doesn't in the process eliminate free will, given the ability to speed (or drive the wrong way, turn against signal, etc) some will speed (or otherwise infract) to some degree or another.

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.

The best way I can describe the courts setup around automated red light cameras is as a kangaroo court. They have very little oversight, the owner of the vehicle gets ticketed regardless of the driver, and the fines are fairly high (depending on where you live). The fine tends to be some kind of civil penalty, but it also has the ability to block your drivers license renewal. Yes, it takes the cop out of the equation, but it also takes accountability out of the equation as well. There's also the fact that red light cameras just flat out don't improve safety, but they do increase municipal profits. The only reason they ever got installed over bumps and road barriers is due to lobbying: https://web.archive.org/web/20110526113001/http://www.motori...

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.

>The best way I can describe the courts setup around automated red light cameras is as a kangaroo court. They have very little oversight, the owner of the vehicle gets ticketed regardless of the driver, and the fines are fairly high (depending on where you live).

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?

Not sure what you are arguing here, people should be penalized without justice and there shouldn’t be accountability on the part of the blaming party because these people will block the court if they have a chance? Are you reinventing the law?

I'm not sure where the "penalized without justice and there shouldn’t be accountability on the part of the blaming party " is coming from. At least where I live if you get such a ticket you can always dispute the ticket in court, although you'll be rarely successful because the cops/government has done this enough times that the usual excuses (eg. "the machine isn't reliable!") doesn't work.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangaroo_court

> 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.

>This is generally how all of them work

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.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40910776

I would suggest you experience the process. Go run an automated red light and see how it works, all the way up to trying to appeal before you boldly claim the process works and is fair.

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.

>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?

por que no los dos?

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.

It's interesting how much more concerned Americans are about winds of change in enforcement than European countries who have had speed cameras for decades; It (and local speed trap laws based on bad actor precedent) really reveal the perversions of, it seems, local government implementations.

Maybe a better middle ground is that other people can record and report you instead of being forced to report yourself. This way, people can freely drive how they want so long as they are respectful of others around them.

> better middle ground is that other people can record and report you instead of being forced to report yourself

That’s what this is. The patent is about reporting other cars. The title is clickbait.

Do you want to live an a semi-automated panopticon of your peers? I really don’t!

> Do you want to live an a semi-automated panopticon of your peers?

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.

If it’s manually reviewed, then that sounds much more palatable. Basically a dash cam with a submit the cops button, sure. Automation of this is very dystopian however.

The safety gains for minor speeding are very small, and if it's under driver control then it will very often be targeted maliciously.

I just got a super annoying ticket for going a reasonable speed (30) in a spot with an unreasonable limit (20mph) pretty sure the automatic enforcement is about revenue not safety.

The solution to bad rules isn't to not enforce rules, but to change the bad rules.

"if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about."

People like you are why we have the current post 9/11 police state.

Sorry, you shouldn't get to endanger everyone around you with impunity.

You use an encrypted chat app? "Sorry, you shouldn't get to endanger everyone around you with impunity."

40,000 people a year aren't dying from chat apps, and driving is a public activity done on public roads, unlike chatting. The analogy doesn't hold at all.

>40,000 people a year aren't dying from chat apps

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

> Enforcing traffic laws is good, actually. Automated enforcement is even better so that we don't need to use armed police and can enforce consistently.

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.

> We don't use armed police to enforce traffic laws.

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

They are all armed in the US at least.

Do they really stop you at gun-point to get you to pull over? Didn't think so. Of course police are armed. You're taking the comment to literally.

I took it exactly as anyone who understands English would take it. Try communicating better next time.

Nah. Stop taking everything you read on the internet so literally.

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