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Comment by 0_____0 | Hacker News Reader

In Massachusetts, USA, red light cameras were illegal until very recently, due to a 70s era law specifying that a live policeman had to issue a citation for something like that. From well before traffic cameras were common.

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Put a single live policeman in front of 100 camera screens

Before they were common, yes, but they existed in active use back in the 1960s in the Netherlands: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_enforcement_camera

We had a pilot program in NJ for them, they were universally hated. People would slam brakes on and be hanging over the edge into intersection and throw their car into reverse panicking to avoid the ticket, ended up causing a ton of new accidents so the program was never continued. In newark people shot at the cameras: https://www.nj.com/news/2012/08/shoot_out_the_red_lights_2_t...

That's an insufficient yellow phase rather than a camera problem. Not sure why NJ would think their population are special snowflakes that can't deal with red light cameras otherwise.

Italians?

Hitting the brakes and getting rear ended is barely even a crash compared to T-boning someone or plowing over pedestrians

I didn't say that. I said they'd panic and throw their vehicle into reverse. Cars/trucks can take the hit, motorcycles/bicycles not so much.

Huge skepticism that bicycles and motorcycles were getting backed into in any appreciable quantities.

If not that then rear-ended, here's the state's report on how red light cameras increased accidents: https://dot.nj.gov/transportation/about/publicat/lmreports/p...

How many people you willing to put in the hospital to prevent people from technically running reds on the yellow-red transition?

> in 2023, 1,086 people were killed in crashes that involved red light running

https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/red-light-running

So let's use that as an upper bound.

How many people were killed by these backups you're talking about?

Sounds like NJ has some terrible drivers

Thankfully sawzalls are cheap and plentiful so people can use much safer practices to disable/remove them:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/parkside-drive-speed-...

The comments is written as if you specifically advocate for this. Why?

I bet if you come back after they've removed the old one but before they install the new one you can wreck the threads on the threaded anchors by impacting the wrong size higher grade nut on.

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