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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

I'm not complaining, but like..maybe also do this for the vast majority of human drivers who also flout these rules.

I mean, we do. The problem is that you need to be physically present to catch and deal with those people, and you can only really deal with one party (others will do their thing while a police officer is dealing with the first driver they stop). Not to mention that drivers change their behavior if they see the police around, so it's harder to catch them in the act. So for a variety of reasons it's harder to solve the human driver problem.

With how cheap high definition cameras are, I don’t see why society needs a person to be physically present.

“Wasn’t me in the car”

Hence high definition camera. Most states have tints on windshield and dark tints on front windows as illegal. Also, the license plate is all that is needed, ticket the owner and they will readily give up the driver.

Other countries have no issues with camera based traffic law enforcement.

At least in socal with the way camera based traffic enforcement it has basically no teeth and plenty of ways like my quote to weasel out. You can actually ignore the ticket that is mailed to you. I’m not even sure HD cameras would help here. You even have options built into the ticket to say it wasn’t you driving or that it was someone else you know of in a sort of check a couple boxes and mail it back fashion. However if you actually look up the status of your ticket with the ticket number on the web portal, then it counts as being served a ticket and you do have to pay or show up in court.

Seems the way the law works is it needs some piece of two way communication. It doesn’t seem to work on a one way basis like it might in other countries. Maybe it is because most of our laws concerning technology are very much still structured for an analog world. E.g how in this case the old ritual of you being identified to have acknowledged the ticket by the cop writing it and handing it to you is preserved by you having to show you’ve actually received the ticket and consent to its validity viewing its status online.

"Don't care, car is registered to you, pay up"

This is only an issue because traffic code violations are treated like criminal acts instead of... code violations. We don't have this issue with parking tickets, there's no reason we should have it with automated red light and school bus cameras.

> "Don't care, car is registered to you, pay up"

Answers like this are what drives the populace to support domestic terrorism.

I prefer the risk of death over constant surveillance

If you're want to operate a deadly vehicle in public you need to compromise, sorry.

Sounds like you're the one who needs to compromise because most people agree with me, or we would already have such a system.

Sounds like you're confused about the world you live in if you believe there aren't millions of cameras, many with ALPR capabilities, pointed at the street already.

I propose they be made actually useful instead of merely surveillance for surveillance sake, but I can see how that would feel oppressive to drivers accustomed to getting away with murder.

A) everyone is already constantly surveilled via mobile networks and license plate readers, so surveillance is a moot point. We might as well get something out of it.

B) the system can be setup to purge and/or record only at relevant times or during infractions

That's kind of like justifying invading a country by saying "we have this big military so we might as well get something out of it."

"If you have a big gun, shoot it." (a.k.a. how the Great War started)

probably the minority on HN, but i don't. i think traffic enforcement cameras are good and should be expanded

I agree. People are welcome to go live "off-grid" if they want to live like we don't have 8.1 billion people on the planet. The rest of us are going to try to find ways to make it work.

If only we could live in completely separate jurisdictions.

The child you hit might not share the same opinion.

I dont get why cities dont just put up a couple of drones

Yea so as someone who lives on a busy road with daily visibility into how many people flaunt the law I basically did this to force the city to make changes to the street. There really isn’t much you can do to the folks who break the law and drive away but high def video of daily shenanigans is great ammo for other types of solutions that force drivers into making better decisions.

They already have ticketing cameras on school busses in some areas, at least around Syracuse, New York. Google "school bus camera ticket" for details.

Unsurprisingly, the rollout was quickly followed by news of 40+ false tickets from busses that were parked at a school. My understanding is that they were not loading or unloading kids, did not have their stop sign extended or blinking lights on, but just happened to be close enough to the adjacent street for the ticket cameras think the bus was stopped on the street and issue tickets to the innocently passing cars.

Those tickets were dropped and they're apparently fixing that, but not a confidence-inducing start to say the least.

I'm going to call bullshit on this. Most human drivers do not flout these rules.

No kidding. Try doing this once or twice and the driver will record your information and you’ll get a nice visit from the police.

Out here in rural nowhere it doesn’t — it just gets the sheriff on the local news begging people to stop instead of solving the actual problem at hand by placing patrols on the routes.

[1] https://www.wwnytv.com/2025/02/12/absolutely-terrifying-grow...

Out here in rural nowhere it most certainly does. The school bus driver will record your number plate, and school buses have the equivalent of dashcams now.

I think maybe they meant that the majority of vehicles that flout the rules are human-driven.

Yeah fair treatment for billion dollar corporations and robots and all. Who could forget. Waymo is such a lovely person, why would anyone ask them to do better?

Human drivers can be seen and stopped by police and given an appropriate punishment. Self-driving cars have nobody to take accountability like that so you need to go back to the source.

Yeah but in many cases they're not, traffic enforcement went way down during Covid and it's still down.

Most large cities I've lived in, general traffic enforcement essentially only exists on that month's/quarter's designated ticket-writing day. i.e., when highway patrol and city police just write speeding tickets all day to juice revenue

I don't know what large cities you've lived in, but that's not what any experts seems to be saying in any piece I've ever read. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/07/29/upshot/traffi...

Their license to operate can be taken away, which is what happened to Cruise.

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