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Comment by triceratops | Hacker News Reader

Red light camera fines, like all sin taxes, should be made revenue neutral.

By that you mean the fines should be made much higher, right? Because traffic crashes have a huge economic cost.

Set the fines to any level, it doesn't matter.

I only mean that all revenues collected from the fines must be distributed to the public at large. They must never be treated as a revenue source for the government.

Sin taxes are meant to reduce bad behavior - or incentivize good behavior. Ideally you'd collect $0 in red-light fines because everyone's following the law. If some politician's budget or private company's revenue stream depends on traffic fines they have adverse incentives. I don't want my city council member voting against traffic safety initiatives because it makes people better drivers and that means less money for some other city program.

Where does the fine money go? Building more red-light cameras?

Back to taxpayers. Subtract only the cost of installing and maintaining the cameras and aggressively audit that annually. Cut everyone a check at the end of the year. Buy each household a pony. Have a really good 4th of July fireworks display. It doesn't matter, as long as the government can't spend it for any government program. (And actually the pony and fireworks programs might be susceptible to corruption - just send a check)

Or in the case of a private company contracted to run the cameras, don't give a private company a contract to run the cameras. At least not a contract where they get paid in proportion to the fines collected.

No one should profit off bad behavior. No government program's funding should have to depend on people driving badly.

bike lanes, pedestrianized streets, and public transit

That sounds like an easy obvious win. But see then you've made bike lanes and public transit depend on funding from car drivers, specifically ones who run red lights. When what you want as a bicyclist are safer drivers. And what you want as a bus rider is fewer cars.

You're putting those public services and their sources of funding in conflict with each other.

Real world, sin taxes lead to sin.

Explain. Is this like "guys walking with rifles in the woods cause deer"?

I mean, thats also a thing in abstract.

We have this issue with imported deer, that the local hunters will gladly reduce their population, but not to zero. And baits and other methods are prohibited. Deer were likely imported for hunting, and hunters effectively protect the species from eradication by killing off their competition (roos mostly), and permitting them to breed within limits. Not to mention trying to protect them politically.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-05/hunters-call-for-end-...

So yeah, guys walking with rifles in the woods cause deer.

Right we were talking about introduced invasive species in Australia. That was absolutely the point I was making /s

When you have a sin tax the government benefits from the sin. Thus it does not take effective measures to reduce the sin.

So you only read the first part of my sentence and not the second part. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47314756 here you can read it again.

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