Hacker News Reader

Comment by egorfine | Hacker News Reader

> Another example is road traffic law. Even just speeding offences, I think you probably catch everyone who actually drives in the UK, often enough that after a month the only people left allowed to drive would be people like me who don't even own a car.

You don't have to strip the driving licenses. You should impose a fine and not an extremely painful one for starters.

And then probably within less than a year the whole population will drive properly.

I think I'm in favor of indiscriminately fining everyone speeding at every camera, but I realize there is no privacy-preserving way to do it today thus I will be against it.

(I'm a driver and car lover who is never speeding)

View on HN

That's covered by "system has to be radically changed". UK driving licences give you room for 12 "penalty points" worth of mistakes before you risk being banned from the road, of which speeding costs you at least 3: https://www.gov.uk/penalty-points-endorsements/endorsement-c...

Indeed. 4 strikes and you are out seems fine to me (as a UK driver). You can also opt to take a speed awareness course in leu of the points, I believe

4 strikes today with current speed enforcement is fine; 4 strikes in a hypothetical where 100% of infractions are caught, I aver will catch (almost) everyone who actually drives within a month.

If notice of the infractions is a envelope delivered days later and sitting on on end table for a week, typical drivers are going to rack up 4 strikes before seeing the first one!

Perfect enforcement has to come with immediate feedback

I remember a case from decades ago when someone went from clean license to a ban within 3 miles

Agreed.

You may be amused/horrified to know that the UK police managed to send me a speeding ticket letter for a car I'd sold 6 months before the offence.

I only owned the car for a week, to sell on behalf of my partner who had moved abroad.

Where I live almost every main road now has average speed cameras, leaving only the small residential streets without, and they are generally short enough that few people are speeding anyway. In general I approve, especially in residential areas, although the surrounding area has gone through a process of downgrading speed limits for no obvious reason, such that it seems their only intent is to annoy drivers so that they want to stop driving. Almost all the country roads in the county I live adjacent to were downgraded from national speed limit to 50mph about 10 years ago. It didn't seem to be anything to do with safety, just seemingly out of spite. I heard rumours that they were also trialing drones to spot offenders (and presumably with sufficiently good cameras to read the plate from up high). Recently, many residential places have dropped from 30mph to 20mph pretty uniformly, again seeming nothing to do with safety as it's entire suburbs (but not all suburbs in the city), even on long straight roads with excellent visibility that would have been safe with limits above the original 30. Doing 20 on these seems completely unnecessary and it's hard to see it as anything other than a revenue generation tactic.

I think what he is trying to say though is that people will start to drive slower, especially if they need to drive to function/get to their job.

I dunno. We got car insurance once that had a "put this spy device in your car for a couple weeks for a lower rate" deal and I felt like I was driving a lot less-safely when I was constantly worried about looking like I was driving safely.

Like, to pick an example that's specifically speed-limit related, if more people really tried hard to do 25MPH (the marked speed limit on many of them) or under for the entire length of an interstate off-ramp, I think we'd be spending more money on brake pads and there'd be a lot more cars getting rear-ended. Sticking to that speed the entire length is silly and not very safe, and things work just fine without people doing that. Tons of other edge cases like that where you're technically breaking some law or another for a little while, but things work way better if you do. Plus practically every one of these laws has some kind of judgement-call clause that applies to modify it, and I don't want the people making those judgement calls to know that if they do what seems right to them in the moment, there's a very high likelihood they'll be hassled for it.

I have to kind of agree with you on all points here.

I've never seen an interstate off-ramp in the US with a 25MPH speed limit (white sign). I've seen 25MPH advisories (yellow sign), but those aren't a legal limit. Advisory signs are the maximum safe speed for the worst possible conditions (road covered in ice).

I otherwise agree.

Interstate, no, and actual speed limit, no, but the one I always think of is this, on US 101, near Steamboat Island in Olympia where you come off a 60mph two lane state highway to an off-ramp that is 430' long and has an advisory 10mph speed for a very unforgiving 90/180 degree turn (160' diameter circle) - with the ability to rear-end people joining the highway if you miss the first part of the turn or the ability to t-bone people if you miss the second. ChatGPT describes the braking required as being at the high end of moderate, almost hard braking, for a sustained 9 seconds to slow sufficiently to make the turn, assuming you start braking the moment you are in the exit lane (and there's no advanced warning, just a single "10mph" yellow sign as you enter that lane): https://imgur.com/a/uns86kp

If speeding is not something that happens constantly, then a radar could detect the instances of speeding, and only turn on a camera when a speeding car is nearby. This would keep the majority of passing cars from being recorded, and would record the fewer cars the fewer drivers would be speeding.

This is exactly how non-AI assisted speed cameras [1] have worked for almost four decades. You don’t even need video for it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatso

How long until the AI estimates how fast you were going based on the time you were tagged at 2 cameras? The system says travel between these cameras should take 3 minutes. You made it in 2:45. No review, just a ticket in the mail.

Several months later, the state changes the speed limit on the street without changing the ticket check. Some time after, traffic authorities add a bypass road or a fast lane to deal with the new traffic problems and forget to update the timings. Then it's reported that a rural municipality set timing thresholds just below the speed limit to cover budgetary shortfalls.

Eventually the camera manufacturers offer "easy setup" systems that dynamically adjust based on actual journey times. This works fine until the first office holiday, when the routine congestion is gone.

If their clocks are actually synchronized and can show that in court then unless you've got a warp drive and can bend space time it can be pretty definitive that one was speeding between those two points. Especially if you're on something like a toll road which utilizes transponders for billing. I'm almost surprised this isn't already done in those situations.

You don't even need AI for this. Its pretty basic.

It is similar to how air enforced speed limits are done. They just paint two lines on the highway. A plane overhead times your car between the lines.

That's how it actually works in some places (https://www.carwow.co.uk/blog/average-speed-cameras-how-do-t...). You don't need AI because we already know that distance = speed * time. We can calculate to a high degree of certainty - with high school math - that you had to have 1. been speeding or 2. bent space time if you cover the distance between them in too short of time.

If speeding is not something that happens constantly, then a radar could detect the instances of speeding

And if it is, which it generally is, it means the speed limits are not set appropriately. But that point always seems to be overlooked.

The point he’s making that people violate the letter of the law in many, many small ways, and to prosecute people for all of them would be a crippling burden on both individuals and the economy.

One obvious response is that if 100% enforcement of laws is causing social problems, maybe you just have bad laws and need to change them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com