Colorado's New Speed Camera System Makes Waze Nearly Useless | Hacker News Reader

Colorado's New Speed Camera System Makes Waze Nearly Useless

motor1.com

20 pointsc42017 comments

Is the data publicly available?

I can think of a few roads near me where 90% of the vehicles do 20-25 mph over the limit all the time.

You occasionally see them out there writing tickets, but never seen an accident in that area.

I would think the data could show that the speed limit should be adjusted up.

Understanding that 2 weeks of the year they need to put out some markers about the holiday traffic creating a full stop.. but they need to do that anyway regardless if the limit is 45, 55 or 70.

What a waste of effort. Revenue generation disguised as safetyism. Most roads can be safely driven over the speed limit, especially in modern cars, where driving at 80 feels like driving at 55 in a thirty year old car.

And it is only a matter of time before states with problematic budgets end up selling surveillance data about all of us to data brokers or the federal government.

I don't understand how they can issue a ticket to the owner without proving they were driving

I think there is a case going to the supreme Court on this, for a red light camera.

The gist is that it shifts the burden to the accused to prove they were not the driver at the time, whereas when you are pulled over, the police are verifying it right there.

In Québec they solved it by issuing the ticket to the car owner that is considered responsible and it's up to the owner to contest it.

Nobody's considered guilty, it's an administrative ticket.

No points are removed from the owner's driver licence because they can't prove who was driving but the owner still has to pay the ticket.

Why not skip a few steps and just electronically limit the top speed of all new vehicles? Too much revenue lost??

A: they do already. Either electronically or via gearing and rev limiting. B: you may want to exceed the speed limit to escape danger. C: not everyone uses their vehicle on public roads and there are places you may want to do over 100 mph, like a race track. Side note, some vehicles know when you're at a track. Sometimes that feature doesn't work. D: it's not practical. What top speed would you set? In NY, it's 65. Montana is 80. Texas has a highway where it's 85. What about Germany? A maximum speed does not keep someone from doing 60 in a 30.

Dynamic restrictions would also be a problem, either by forcing location tracking into every vehicle or relying on (eventually) outdated database or flakey computer vision (cameras can get dirty). Then you need to consider what action to take when a vehicle is exceeding the speed limit. Are you going to disable the throttle or apply brakes? How soon and how hard? Keep in mind that older vehicles don't have this system, so braking may cause an accident. Disabling the throttle might also cause an accident either by upsetting the car with unexpected weight transfer or indirectly because the car could not get away from danger.

As an aside, what new cars don’t include location tracking?

My experience is they all have satellite connections and require some level of telemetry. My car throws a persistent check engine light and error message on the radio if you disconnect the telematics control unit.

I don't have this info unfortunately. I can say from personal experience that you can remove tracking from the 24 and older Subaru BRZ for about $50 usd, or less if you make your own passive adapter. I can also say the 24 and older low trim brz does NOT have tracking installed from the factory. From my research before buying the brz, many if not all Subarus of this era use the same hardware. There's an older version of this hardware as well that can also be deleted (and should be deleted because it's an older cellular tech that is no longer active and leads to battery drain while the car is unused).

The only problem my car has now is an occasional failure of Android Auto with a time sync error. There's an ota update for the head unit available that may or may not be related. I don't plan to install it. I only put 1000 miles on the car before removing the cellular connection so they could log the engine break in period as being done correctly for warranty purposes, so I'm not sure if it was an existing issue or related to removing cellular.

Afaik, having built in gps is not an issue since it's a receiver and doesn't transmit. The tracking issue is because of cellular.

I would check if the low trims exclude telematics before buying a car. If so, you can probably remove it from the higher trims but do your research.

Sure, but make fines proportionate with reported income

Income or total wealth?

Whichever Sweden uses, idc - because if not it’s just disproportionately hurting those that have less

So just lick the boot that keeps pressing down on you with more burdensome fees and taxes instead of doing anything about it.

Can we get this in my state? :-)

To figure out average speed of a vehicle between two known points, you need to find when that specific vehicle was at point a and point b. Likely this would be done by automated license plate readers and storing when that car was where in some database. Great, now we're tracking the movement and location of vehicles (and people) with no reasonable suspicion of a crime. Surely this information won't be misused this time.

Don’t all modern cars have an always on cellular connection anyway?

I’ve got as big a tinfoil hat as anyone, but I think this battle was lost a long time ago. Automobiles transportation will become closer to flights, where everything is logged.

The majority of new cars probably do have driver tracking (always on cellular), but not all of them. The 24 model of the Subaru BRZ in low trim does not have a cellular modem. The high trims do. Because it's an option, you can easily remove the DCM (driver control module). I did. Most Subarus I've seen since 2015 use the same style of removable dcm and only need a passive adapter to remove. In context, we should keep in mind that new cars may not be the majority of what's on the road.

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