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Comment by 8f2ab37a-ed6c | Hacker News Reader

The US is strangely staunchly opposed to traffic cameras, whereas you barely ever see cops on the roads in many EU countries, and yet traffic tickets flow abundantly.

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If you eliminate the need for traffic cops, you need to accept that the "important" police work of criminal investigation and civil protection requires specialized training and skills (and probably more pay). American police departments aren't that; they're jobs programs with badges and guns.

It's not strange at all.

Driving is dangerous enough as it is. Adding the extra anxiety of getting lit up by a speed-limit camera for accidentally exceeding the speed limit does not make it safer.

Plus, we Americans are inventive. If there were no traffic cops, the wealthy and mischievous would simply modify their cars to hide their license plates when driving past speeding cameras on their normal route.

> the wealthy and mischievous would simply modify their cars to hide their license plates when driving past speeding cameras on their normal route

This is a good way to meet the local police in any jurisdiction with cameras.

We hate speed cameras because Americans like to speed. There is a minority that is privacy focussed. But the majority hate it because most we drive unsafely [1].

[1] https://newsroom.aaa.com/2016/02/87-percent-of-drivers-engag...

We "speed" because speed limits are used not as a tool for defining normative behavior and policing rare outliers, but rather as feel good social engineering - similar to the war on drug users. Note how that AAA's article definition of unsafe wholly depends on what roads have been signed.

There's a stretch of through road around me that had been signed a low 30 my whole life - straight with perfect visibility, sidewalks, decent house setbacks, backyards for most activities, etc. The prevailing speed is 40 (adding 10 is standard and accepted around here). I've never seen or heard of any kind of crash on it.

I tended to keep it to 35 because my parents were always complaining about getting tickets on it [0], and as I got older I decided it wasn't worth worrying about (I would generally end up being tailgated for this). But recently, the city ratcheted it down further to a ridiculous 25 [1]. Since the customary speed is now so far over the sign I've just given up and go 40-45 now while spending the effort to scan for cops.

[0] in retrospect I think they were just unobservant, since there's nowhere really for a cop to hide. I've only ever seen cops sit in one place, and it might as well have a big red arrow pointing at it

[1] along with a lot of other roads, I think they must have gotten a quantity break on the signs. Or maybe just a bad case of affluenza.

If DOTs really cared about safety, they would label persistent dangers explicitly rather than attempt to encapsulate the signaling of dangers by a single variable.

That "minority" has noticed that if it's there, it will be abused. No if or when. No prize for guessing by whom.

They already do that. Seattle at least is populated by expensive cars with rounded semi-transparent plastic covers over the plate that are intended to block camera capture.

this is a good thing, I think. Traffic safety is about feedback that changes behaviour - immediate feedback. Traffic cameras and photo radar are about revenue generation.

Imagine if you pull aside your toddler tonight and take away their ice cream cone, because they sad a bad word 2 weeks ago.

I like how you compared car drivers to toddlers in terms of behaviour change

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