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Comment by pmichaud | Hacker News Reader

Setting aside the obvious dystopian next steps, I think the main problem with automated traffic law enforcement is that our laws are quite bad in the sense that they rely on enforcement being loose and somewhat subjective to even work at all. The speeds on various roads, the timing of traffic lights, the places one can park and for how long, etc, are not carefully planned or thought out enough to actually work if everyone were to strictly adhere to them. It all works because lots of people can briefly park in illegal places, choose reasonable times to speed, or reasonable moments to use the shoulder to go around obstructions, etc.

Obviously you capture some craziness on the margin that you want to capture, but also on the margin is the fudging that makes the whole thing work at all.

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I would think that once enforcement becomes automated (and thus applies to those with resources, who currently get away with it), there would be a lot of pressure on the legislature (by those who currently get away with it) to make the rules better. Legislatures can move fast, but only when they're motivated. e.g. if every NYC taxi suddenly got a ticket every time they stopped in the street to pick up a passenger, those laws would be updated very quickly.

That seems optimistic. I would instead expect that those VIPs would be added to a table of folks who don't get tickets, codifying the current semi-formal process.

If we're looking at pas examples, the reverse happens a lot more: rules and environments are made stricter with stronger passive enforcement to get rid of the infractions.

Setting automated speed traps where drivers don't respect the limit, physically forcing lower speeds where traps didn't work or closing whole streets to regular cars to get rid of the problem altogether.

The main issue isn't just the rules, and if the infrastructure has to be adapted as well, it's often cheaper to get rid of traffic than to rethink a system that work better in adversarial situations.

> there would be a lot of pressure on the legislature (by those who currently get away with it) to make the rules better.

Making perfect rules is basically impossible, they'd be millions of pages long to fully capture all the caveats and exceptions. The world is fractals complex and so we rely on intelligent prosecutors and police not bothering to pursue things that are illegal but fine.

It's just not worth it to try and make perfect laws.

Wait, where are NYC taxis allowed to pickup people?

"Better" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. In my town they took down the automated red light ticket machines on many corners because people quit running the lights. So the machines weren't gathering monies in tickets yet they still cost the city to have them.

Better needs to mean something other than gather revenue. And it don't with automated things.

I’m struggling to understand your point, or to imagine many examples which support it.

I agree that brief minor parking infringements may occasionally make people’s lives more efficient; but I can’t think of any examples where traffic lights and speed limits need to be routinely disregarded?

From what I remember of my CA driver’s license test (had to re-take the written test when I moved to CA), there is no actual speed limit in CA. The speed limit is “whatever conditions deem safe”.

Maybe OP meant something like that?

As someone who got their first drivers license in California, I can say with certainty that there are in fact speed limits.

You might want to review the handbook again. What you’re referring to is the basic speed law, which never trumps the absolute speed limits posted (or the special restrictions like the 15 mph railroad track law). Think of it as a clamped function: the speed limit is min(posted limit, safe speed under current conditions).

No, that's not true (CA driver here too). The "whatever conditions deem safe" bit is something that can reduce the legal speed below the posted speed limit. It can never raise it above the posted limit.

Even with no posted speed limit, there is an implicit limit in CA (differs based on the type of road and surrounding locale), and "conditions" can again only reduce that.

It's sometimes safer to speed up 5mph over the limit to get through a yellow light, than to slam your brakes with someone behind you. It's frequently safer to speed to match people speeding around you then to match the stated speed limit (usually on freeways).

These are both problems caused by poor driving (other peoples' in this case). Maybe with a traffic law panopticon everyone would drive better and these would disappear

This is actually a problem with speed limits that don't match the road or alternatively, roads that aren't designed to incentivize people driving the intended speed.

In theory, the speed limit should be set to the 80th or 85th percentile speed of traffic, and the road should be engineered so that the 80th percentile speed is appropriate to the surroundings.

https://www.mikeontraffic.com/85th-percentile-speed-explaine...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_calming

I'm extremely skeptical of this idea of "speed limits which don't match the road" unless people are arguing them down. Because the whole point is that people reliably overestimate their driving ability, and thus overestimate the safe rate of travel on a road.

The road I live on displays this all the time, and that's just an advisory road: the speed limit going down the winding slope near my house is about 50 kmh...that is probably the absolute maximum you can navigate those turns at in perfect conditions, and in reality it's considerably slower - and there are steep embankments either side, so if you lose control your car is at the mercy as to whether or not a tree will stop it plunging over the edge.

Anyway, there's been a fair number of damaged cars and one near miss from said creek plunge in the 2 years I've lived here.

You live on an extreme road where road engineering can't do much due to the given environment and possibly low budget if the road is not that important. Though anything that slows vehicles before entering this stretch of road, or a much less harmful obstacle to heighten their awareness could improve the situation.

Roads where planners have a literal blank sheet is where roads need to be designed better to slow down drivers to the desired speed limit. Sometimes it's as simple as adding traffic islands for pedestrians, narrowing the road or planing trees next to the road.

"advisory" was ambiguous - I meant say, the lower speed limit is advisory - as in "45kmh an hour when wet".

I live in the middle of Sydney. This is an urban road. It is directly off a major highway in a suburban residential area.

It is a regular residential suburban street. No amount of "clever planning" will undo the natural topography of the region. It is a paved, well maintained road and that's the problem - people's judgement of what "feels right" depends on numerous factors they can't see and which don't matter.

They're in the middle of a recently resurfaced, asphalt road with a footpath down the side and what looks like trees and bush on side, and a cliff cut on the other. But it's relatively steep, winds a fair bit due to the climb, but also looks isolated when you're at the bottom because it runs through a state park area.

From street level you cannot tell how slippery it might be when wet (which people just plain suck at), how wet "wet" actually has to be (i.e. partially wet roads are more dangerous then when it's a hard downpour because the surface becomes slick), and unless you paid close attention to the area you can't know that there's no real protection along the side of the road (which shouldn't even be a factor: no one should be driving in a way where they depend on crash severity safety measures).

Observably, people's judgement of "feels right" sucks because as noted: there's been a fair few crashes basically caused by people taking corners too fast (which is to say, maybe they were speeding but that again is the point - they think they can safely go faster, and no, they actually can't and aren't good at judging that) - one of which was a car which very luckily ploughed into a very sturdy tree stump and didn't send it's occupants down the drop into the gulley.

You don't ever need to slam on your brakes or speed up for yellow lights, that's the entire point of the yellow light existing instead of just going straight to red.

Not if they're poorly timed.

What does this mean?

If you observe a yellow and can safely stop, then stop. If you can't safely stop, then don't stop.

Literally from today...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/08/31/how-lo...

Some yellows aren't too well timed, especially if on a downhill slope.

Again back to control of your vehicle. I would expect a first time driver to make your complaint. A driver for multiple years should be able to adapt their speed for their surroundings

If you’re speeding up for yellow lights, you are a terrible driver and you should seek out some better skills and practices.

I dunno. I’d rather speed up to make it through than slam on my brakes and have someone rear end me. That’s how I drive and I’ve never been in an accident in around 30 years of driving.

Speed cameras aren't installed at intersections though.

You are railing against an example which doesn't exist.

That is quite literally not true. Many states have speed cameras at intersections.

It's not just about efficiency, it's also about quality of life. There is a reason that a cop has permission to use his judgement when deciding to write a ticket or not. Because life is better when we don't live under the oppression of draconian rule keepers all the time. Rules are meant to protect people, and as such are often specified in terms of the lowest common denominator, with the understanding that the system doesn't enforce them when they can be reasonably ignored, using good judgement.

Life will be shittier for everyone if an army of self-empowered rule-loving busybodies get to expand their current powers beyond the realm of the HOA.

Frankly I'd rather just get a ticket when I speed by a traffic camera than rely on the discretion of a random police officer who might just be looking for a pretense to search my vehicle or hassle me in some other way.

Jaywalking, to my ear, is a similarly universal & easy example for this not being universally desirable.

It's probably not universally necessary to jaywalk. However, I am against this on the grounds of logistics. I understand and accept the need to have a license and display an identifier while operating a vehicle, but I think this would be an extreme requirement for people walking around (and possibly unconstitutional in the US?) And without this identifier, how will the system know where to send the citation?

All things being equal though this doesn't even sound inherently bad. If every jaywalking infraction was cited we might democratically re-decide how much we want that law to be on the books.

And indeed, California no longer has strong jaywalking laws on the books. A cop can only cite you for jaywalking if you're crossing dangerously. Crossing on a red light, do-not-walk sign, or at a place where there isn't a crosswalk is no longer automatically considered jaywalking.

Where I lived in Europe (as an American), jaywalking wasn’t illegal. They didn’t even really consider it weird. After all, you’re just walking.

In fact, if you were in the street and a car hit you, the car driver had to prove that it was unavoidable to miss you, otherwise the driver was at fault.

It was also illegal to intentionally block traffic as a pedestrian unless you were at a crosswalk. But there was no law that made it illegal to cross the street anywhere.

Seems like the best of all worlds. And it’s easy to fully enforce the whole “blocking traffic is illegal” part.

As of the beginning of 2023, jaywalking is no longer a thing in California. The only time a cop can cite you is if you're doing something dangerous. If it's safe for you to cross on a red light, or in the middle of a road not near an intersection, that's legally fine now.

Of course, the loophole is large enough to drive a truck through: if a cop wants to, they can decide you're walking "dangerously" as a pretense to hassle you. And most of the time it'll be the cop's word against yours as to whether or not you were being safe or not, and the courts will always side with the cops absent other evidence.

I always thought jaywalking laws were just stupid. The way I looked at it was always: my parents taught me when I was a kid to look both ways, and only cross if it's safe. To me, that suggests that I should always be allowed to cross if I determine it's safe, regardless of other considerations.

(The history of such laws are quite interesting and -- spoiler alert -- surprise, surprise, they were driven by automakers.)

As someone who walks around San Jose quite a lot, on many roads it is safer to cross in the middle of the block than at the intersections. You only have one or two directions to check, and incoming cars have better visibility than at an intersection. And you don't have the failure mode of the car not stopping for the red light.

Where?

You clearly haven’t received a letter in the mail for $250 because a camera saw you barely not fully stop for a red light right turn at 3am with zero traffic

A human in the loop needs to be the first line of defense, if an officer isn’t willing to be in the field to issue the ticket and show up in court to defend it then there shouldn’t be a ticket in the first place, full stop

Were you in that much of a hurry to not be able to wait 30 seconds for the traffic light?

That’s not the point, a surveillance state where the panopticon autonomously gives $250 tickets is the issue

Rules aren’t meant to be cold hard algorithms to blindly punish people with; we wouldn’t automate a judge with an algorithm why is it somehow different to automate a police officer with one?

> Rules aren’t meant to be cold hard algorithms to blindly punish people with; we wouldn’t automate a judge with an algorithm why is it somehow different to automate a police officer with one?

The role of enforcing certain laws can be easily fulfilled with simple algorithms as the logic required is on early grade school level. In this case it's something like: if "stoplight is red" and "car doesn't stop", then "driver gets ticket." That's all the algorithm has to do, super easy to automate. Automation allows for enforcement where it would otherwise not be cost effective, like when it's 3am and no one else is around.

The judiciary, however, has to interpret all kinds of crazy edge cases that people come up with to try and get out of tickets for rolling stops or whatever legal case, for all laws, because every now and then someone has a valid case. That's a bit harder to do with a couple lines of code and some low cost hardware.

Why is that not the point?

You violated a law and received a penalty. You're not disputing that you violated said law, but are instead trying to justify it with "barely didn't stop" and "it's 3am and there is no traffic".

Isn't the point that you got punished for doing something you would have gotten away with had no one been watching?

because maybe the point is "The basic premise of democracy is that the citizens/ordinary people are trusted as the ultimate source of the law, and the law is to serve them, not them to serve the law."

Nice twist to the premise at the end, but no, the point is that the person got punished for using sound and reasonable judgement in a situation where the regulation (not law) was ill thought out.

"Sound and reasonable judgement" to save a couple seconds?

That still just seems like rationalization of bad behavior.

You're right that the basic premise of democracy is that citizens can be trusted as the source of the law, but it seems to me that this particular citizen can't actually be trusted? I mean, they're demonstrating a lack of integrity, are they not?

You're talking about someone who, from their description, slowed down to something like 0.1mph instead of absolute zero. At 3am, in an empty road. How is that bad behaviour, lack of integrity, and a sign someone can't be trusted?

Integrity is commonly defined as "doing the right thing, even if no one is watching", is it not?

I highly doubt this person would have rolled through the light if a cop were sitting at the intersection watching them, and they knew they were being observed.

To several other posters' points, the specific regulation in question exists for safety reasons. Those safety reasons don't go away just because you don't think they apply in the moment. I'm sure every person who has hit (or been hit by) another person when rolling through a right turn like that thought their judgement in the moment was reasonable, too. I'm also sure not every one of those would have been prevented by coming to a complete stop and looking at the turn, but certainly some of them would have, which is a net positive for everyone. This comes at a cost of a handful of seconds, which seems like the most trivial of inconveniences, and wholly worth paying every time.

> That still just seems like rationalization of bad behavior.

I think the issue is that you're taking as fact that "in order to be safe, you must come to a full stop at a red light before turning right", and that not doing so is, indisputably, "bad behavior". I dispute that. I think in many situations it is just as safe to nearly-but-not-completely come to a full stop before continuing, and it's entirely fine behavior.

The law has some difficulty encoding that. (Not that it's impossible, but it's difficult, and enforcement perhaps gets weirder if you try.)

Let's take a related example: jaywalking. In many places, you can get a ticket for crossing the street somewhere where there isn't a crosswalk, or crossing against a red light or a don't-walk sign. I was taught as a child how to look both ways and only cross when and where it's safe to do so. I don't need a sign or stripes on the road to tell me that (though I do appreciate those things as hints and suggestions). Hell, in some places (Manhattan comes to mind), if you don't jaywalk, everyone around you will look at you funny and get annoyed with you.

California, recognizing this, finally eliminated most jaywalking laws a year and half ago[0]. You can only get cited here if you've failed to do what your parents told you, and you're crossing when it's not safe to do so.

Stopping fully at a red light before turning right is, IMO, similar enough. For many (most?) intersections, you're only going to be a teeny tiny fraction of a percent safer coming to a full stop. So why bother?

[0] Let's also remember that jaywalking laws exist only because car manufacturers wanted them. Walking in the street!? How absurd! Streets are only for our beautifully-produced cars! Not you grubby plebeian pedestrians. Away with you!

> I think in many situations it is just as safe to nearly-but-not-completely come to a full stop before continuing, and it's entirely fine behavior.

I'm sure the multiple people that would have hit me if I hadn't jumped out of the way because they were looking the ither way to see if cars where coming thought the same.

> Let's take a related example: jaywalking.

When walking one is not impaired in one's vision of the surroundings, and you're not operating heavy machinery. The worst you can do is get yourself killed. With a car, the most likely scenario is to kill someone else.

I don't actually disagree with some level of automated enforcement, but I do disagree with your phrasing/justification of it.

I just don't believe violating the law is always wrong, always bad, or always unsafe. While I would agree that most people are bad at risk assessment, and most people are not good drivers, the law should be flexible enough to deal with cases where breaking it is absolutely fine to do.

As a perhaps weird and imperfect analogy, killing another person is illegal... except when it isn't. The law recognizes that sometimes, even if in rare cases, killing another person is justified. This is why we have different words: "homicide" is sometimes not "murder" or even "manslaughter"; sometimes it's "self-defense".

Or sometimes it is the death sentence.

I agree with you, FWIW.

I wholly agree that violating some laws is entirely justified.

However, I don't think any violation is justified by what more or less amounts to laziness and the desire to save an inconsequential amount of time.

It’s hardly a surveillance state to say operators of heavy machinery should do so safely: there are many, many dead pedestrians and bicyclists who were hit by someone who _thought_ the road was empty, and American traffic laws are so lenient that it’s disturbing that people think they’re overbearing.

It’s estimated that we are effectively subsidizing drivers by close to a trillion dollars annually by not requiring adequate insurance to cover the full cost to victims. Just pay your ticket and drive better before you make a mistake you’ll never recover from.

https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/road-deaths-us-eu/

Seems to be more of an issue in the US.

Definitely: bigger vehicles, higher speeds, and because the alternatives to driving have been starved of funding or removed the entire system is loathe to punish bad drivers because taking away someone’s license largely removes their ability to function.

Unfortunately the state of public transportation is awful in the US, for sure.

America has tried to do this, famously, with the "3 strikes and you're out" laws of the past century.

At 3am? Bed presumably.

We're talking about a rolling right turn on red, not crossing the whole intersection on red. The turn is allowed but the camera took issue with how much of a stop came first.

I don't know very many drivers who wouldn't recognize that camera behavior at 3:00 in the morning as unreasonable.

Why not just come to a full stop? It's presumably dark out at 3am so you may have missed a pedestrian or a vehicle with no headlights. It only takes an extra second or two to stop and look around.

At the majority of signal-controlled intersections with city limits there's plenty of visibility even (or dare I say especially) at 3am and the scanning can happen as you approach.

(Also, the kind of rolling stop I'm talking about isn't a 5mph roll, it's a near-stop that feels like a stop to the driver but technically doesn't actually bring the tires to stationary. Odds are even you have done this kind of stop pretty regularly without realizing it, and even a cop wouldn't even notice it as incorrect unless they were actively looking for someone to ticket.)

Odds are I haven't since I'm always careful to stop twice when turning right on red. (Once before the crosswalk, and again at the far side of the crosswalk to check for cross traffic before executing the turn.)

Have you ever been rear-ended, stopping twice like that?

I have.

Never while turning right on red. I was rear ended once by a fellow who was looking at his phone and did not notice me and the line of stopped cars waiting at a red light. But sometimes what can you do?

The second stop is legally irrelevant—if your first stop is insufficient you've run the red as far as the camera is concerned.

The second stop may actually be illegal in its own right depending on the state.

It's what I was taught to do in driver's ed. I know of no state where turning right on a red light is compulsory so I don't see how coming to a complete stop at any point could possibly be considered illegal.

You're in the intersection at that point and blocking the crosswalk, so you're no longer behind the red light, you're in front of it. In every state I've lived in you can absolutely get pulled over for stopping in the road where there is no need and no signal.

The first stop is for the crosswalk. (I might do this even when the light is green if there is a pedestrian in the crosswalk since never hitting a pedestrian is a rule of mine.) If I see a pedestrian in or approaching the crosswalk I wait here until they are completely cleared. Then I slowly roll forward for the second stop. This is the stop I use to check for approaching motor traffic. I have better visibility now because there's no longer a lifted F150 blocking my view to the left. Assuming I do notice an approaching vehicle I'm supposed to what? Drive into it? I would love to be in court accused of failing to run a red light into active cross traffic.

Anyway, you can drive however you want. I've been driving like this for over 30 years all across the United States and I have never been pulled over, cited, rear ended, or even, as far as I can recall, honked at while pulling this particular maneuver so I think some of the risks you are imagining may be overblown.

I don't really find anything wrong with your approach (I do the double-stop sometimes too, if conditions warrant it). But coming to a complete stop (once or twice), for many intersections, for many road conditions, for many times of day, is not going to meaningfully increase anyone's level of safety (yours, another driver's, a cyclist's, a pedestrian's...) vs. a momentary pretty-much-but-not-really-stopped stop.

To use your phrasing, the risk of anything bad happening after a not-quite stop may be overblown.

Sure, I'll agree that there may be times when the "extra" caution is unwarranted by the situation at the intersection. But by doing this every time I ingrain it as an automatic habit which greatly reduces my ongoing risk of failing to use extra caution at some point where it is warranted!

Since the failure mode is an auto accident and the cost of the habit is marginal I feel comfortable promoting this behavior. I have definitely seen accidents and many near misses caused by people who failed to come to a complete stop and look around when conditions did warrant it.

Another lesson I learned in driver's ed is that traffic approaching from the left can be traveling at a speed that completely synchronizes with the A-pillar of your moving vehicle, causing it to be completely invisible to you right up until the moment it collides with your front driver's side fender. This is why I stop and move my head around while I look, to make sure I'm not missing anything. I'm just a stupid human after all.

You have a STOPPING line that is on YOUR side of the crosswalk. That is the line you stay behind during a red light, if you stop then cross the line and stop again in the eye of the law it's no different than if you hadn't stopped behind the line at all.

You are correct that it's not compulsory to turn right on a red, however, if you are going to turn right you can't just stop in the middle of the intersection you either stay back or you go.

Depends on your state. In my state we can take driving actions that violate the law as long as we can prove it was safe to do at the time. Your state may not be so lenient.

> Why not just come to a full stop?

Because people don't. That's just a fact of life, and we even have silly names (like "California stop") for the all-too-common behavior of barely or not completely stopping at a stop sign before continuing on.

I'm not excusing this behavior (even though I do it myself), but it's a widespread fact of life. The world is squishy, and I don't think it's reasonable to punish everyone for not coming to a full stop every single time, even if it's 0.01% safer to do so.

It's also kinda hard to define a "full stop". Well, obviously there are some states that are very obviously a car at rest. But if you were to, say, graph my car's speed at an intersection with a stop sign, you might see a curve that flattens out to where the slope is zero. Maybe that zero-slope point is a teeny tiny fraction of a second, though. Did I come to a full stop? Yes! Can a cop actually realize I did come to a full stop? Often not. Ok, so I did stop, but did I give enough time while at a full stop in order to assess that it was safe to continue moving? Do I even need to do that after I've come to a full stop, or can I start that assessment when my speed is 3mph, and know by the time I've fully stopped that it's immediately safe to continue? I think so, yes.

It's just fuzzy. Humans are fuzzy. The law is fuzzy. Safety is not a yes/no binary, it's fuzzy. Many many people don't always come to a full stop. That's just a fact; asking why is probably pointless.

I believe the commenter is in US where you are allowed to make a right turn on a red light but you must stop and make sure it's safe to do so.

There is old Woody Allen joke: The only advantage of LA over NYC is right turn on red light is allowed.

That is a discussion that can be had between the offender and the police officer, also depending what you are driving (ie a motorcycle) often traffic lights may not detect you and you can be sitting there forever.

Put it this way would you feel comfortable having your phone just passively watching you and anytime you break any law that is on the books it calls the cops on you? If you can see that as over reaching you can understand why others don't want automated enforcement done to them.

> That is a discussion that can be had between the offender and the police officer

Once you've been pulled over, a police officer is unlikely to change their course of action based on anything you say to them. Especially in this case, of not coming quite to a full stop at a red light before turning right. The cop knows it was safe to do so. They just want the ticket revenue or to fill up their quota for the month. Or they're just having a bad day and want to harass someone who can't fight back. Or, if I'm being charitable, they're an incessant rule-follower who doesn't understand how reality works.

Regardless of whether he can wait 30 seconds there is no good reason to impose that cost. Its just randomly making someone's life worse for literally no gain. Time is our most precious and finite commodity and should not be wasted.

Or the cases when you are on a motorcycle at 3am and the road sensors don't sense you so at the advise of a police officer, you carefully and safely run the red light. I think we know what's going to happen. I've come to the conclusion that most of the dystopian movies about robots and automation are just [spoilers].

Either way I moved to a very rural and remote location. One of my many hopes is that it will buy enough time for urban and suburban areas to duke it out in courts for a couple decades before I have to deal with the fallout.

I've had to do this with an electric scooter before. Sometimes the road sensors aren't tuned for very small things... probably because most cars aren't that small.

Just to be safe, you could push the bike, at least with bicycles you're a pedestrian as soon as you don't ride but push it.

Pushing a 500 pound motorcycle through an intersection in a time there may be drunk drivers sounds extra risky to me.

I think a solution would be to first implement this AI in a tech-only city. Tech billionaires were planning on building a tech city in California. That seems like a good test-bed to fail fast and fail often. The AI need first be installed around all the billionaires homes and the system must have full transparency. Or the system accidentally leak some interesting stats including to show if anyone was made exempt. The fines won't affect them but if their personal drivers get enough moving violations and lose their license it may affect their vendors or make them late for meetings. If they are confident in AI then they would agree to the concept of shared pain. If that tech city falls through then it should be implemented in San Fransisco for five years.

Hell, I've been pulled over (and given a ticket) in nearly that exact situation you describe (I think it was more like 1am for me). Reasonable human discretion didn't help me that time.

> if an officer isn’t willing to be in the field to issue the ticket and show up in court to defend it then there shouldn’t be a ticket in the first place

I'm torn on this in general. The idealist in me really really really wants to agree with your statement, but the sheer number of cars on the roads means that cops see a teeny tiny fraction of things that happen. Driving-related injuries and deaths are disgustingly high, and I expect most of them are related to speeding, and running red lights and stop signs. That is, stuff cops are supposed to be policing.

No human-powered enforcement mechanism can watch for all of those. Yes, the usual deterrent factor applies: even if you are a butthole who doesn't care about safety, you might follow the rules because of the (relatively small) possibility that there just might be a cop nearby that sees you doing something bad. But clearly it's not really working all that well; car-related injury and death statistics are still (IMO) unacceptably bad.

I feel like this is sort of unique. Like, for other illegal behaviors, you can usually reduce them through other things. Like, have a healthy economy, low unemployment, under-control inflation, and housing that's affordable enough for everyone who wants to live in a place, and you have an environment where it's rare that people feel the need to commit property crimes. But drivers who speed are gonna speed. Drivers who run red lights and stop signs are gonna run red lights and stop signs.

Maybe -- like for many things -- better enforcement isn't the answer. Better road/traffic engineering, stiffer penalties for when people do get caught doing unsafe things... I dunno, maybe that will get us there. Perhaps we'll have some sort of a transit renaissance, and so many fewer people will opt to drive, and that will naturally make things better. Or maybe self-driving will get good enough (and be used pervasively enough, or perhaps even mandated) that riding in a car will become a lot safer, on par with train or even air travel. Who knows.

Regardless, though, I think my personal level of comfort is somewhere in the middle. I certainly don't want dystopian 100% panopicon-style enforcement of every single thing, where everyone is recorded everywhere they go to make sure they aren't breaking the law. But I think a light sprinkling of automated enforcement here and there is probably not harmful privacy/freedom-wise, but can indeed be a societal good. But I don't exactly trust law enforcement to stay within the lines of their mandate when it comes to these sorts of things. And I don't trust elected officials and judges to actually do something when law enforcement gets out of control.

In my city (200k pop) a lot of traffic lights are turned off, or rather blinking orange during the night. The few exceptions keep operating normal for good reasons. We don't have a smart traffic control system in our city so I assume it's the bare minimum and if the light you talk about was red at 3am, then there's a good reason for it.

I was just discussing this with my wife while driving on the local expressway on a clear Saturday afternoon. The speed limit is 55 MPH but everyone was moving at 70 MPH without any issues. The road is wide and straight with limited on/off ramps and the faster speed felt very natural.

This is a common occurrence on this road and everyone seems to abide pretty well. Sure, there is the occasional "idiot" doing stupid things (weaving in out of traffic, speeding up / slowing down, etc.) but for the most part it just works.

The big problem is when a LEO is around. Everyone slows down to 55ish MPH and traffic backs up and people do weird things.

However, I don't know the solution. If we raise the speed limit to 70 MPH does that mean that people will then feel comfortable going 80 or 90 MPH? If we lower the speed limit to 30 MPH will that cause everyone to only go 55 MPH? This piece of road just feels right and natural at 70 MPH; everyone seems to think so, if unconsciously. Will changing the laws "fix" this piece of road?

The problem with speed limits in general is that they're not universally applicable. Darkness, fog, rain, snow, etc. can all change what the actual safe maximum speed is. So even with a posted 55mph speed limit, the maximum safe speed at a particular time might be lower (even considerably lower), and a LEO could cite you for going too fast even if you're driving under the posted limit. (I've been on the interstate in the snow where you'd be likely to get pulled over if you were going much over 25mph, even with a posted 65mph limit.)

Driver skill and reaction time also plays a factor, but of course people are not so great at judging what their own specific safe speed is all the time. And all other things being equal, you're more likely to get into a crash if you're driving faster rather than slower, and the injuries you sustain will be worse at a higher speed.

IIRC speed limits are often set at some percentile (85th?) of what all drivers would (theoretically) "naturally" drive if there was no posted limit. And, on highways, cops will often not pull people over for exceeding the speed limit by a moderate amount. Once, long ago, a cop told me that, absent adverse conditions or other unsafe behavior, he usually will not stop anyone unless they're going more than 10mph over the highway speed limit. And I expect if he were hiding in a speed trap that no one could actually see driving by, and everyone was going 70mph on your 55mph road, he'd probably just sit there and not bother anyone, unless they were doing something else that was unsafe.

I guess this is a long winded way to say that there really is no single safe speed that applies to everyone, in every road condition. The law acknowledges this, and police often let you do your thing unless they believe you're actually doing something unsafe. The discretion and judgment calls can be a problem (biases, etc.), but I don't think a society where unavoidably "fuzzy" laws were always prosecuted would be a great society either.

A lot of departments have policies about not interrupting thr normal flow of traffic.

When I was a kid, the argument for lower speeds on expressways was fuel efficiency.

Properly set speed limits would not need to be routinely disregarded. We don’t have those right now (IMO).

It's not laws that are bad, it's the infrastructure. Wide roads that give the driver the feeling that it is safe to drive a 60 mph when the sign says 45.

Often when they are meticulously designed it is for revenue generation and not safety.

The loose laws you describe are a problem that needs to be solved regardless, because they allow for selective enforcement against specific people or demographics by police departments acting in bad faith. A law that everyone is technically breaking but is generally not enforced can be used to target ethnic groups, or individuals that a particular police officer has a personal vendetta against. It essentially turns the police into judges, because it gives them the guaranteed ability to get a conviction somehow against anyone they want.

I assume a way for any civilian to activate those laws against any other civilian would result in the legal code being cleaned up quite quickly.

Insurance isn't the same as law enforcement, not even close.

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