Comment by Silhouette | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Silhouette | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Indeed.

One of the more dangerous potential outcomes of all this data recording and telemetry is that everyone winds up with a black box monitoring their driving full-time, which becomes de facto obligatory because you can't get something mandatory such as insurance without it.

Then, because there are exactly zero perfect drivers in the world, every driver becomes subject to effectively arbitrary fines and/or increases in their insurance premiums, providing a convenient revenue stream with a captive market for both big businesses and governments.

In an ideal world, such monitoring could instead lead to official recognition that no-one is perfect but interventions should be aimed at people with a sustained pattern of risky behaviour or deteriorating driving standards rather than immediately penalising a driver who made a small mistake and was unlucky to be in front of a camera at the time. But sadly I have little faith that anything so constructive would ever actually happen, given the track record of the government, the police, and the insurance industry in my country when it comes to abusing new technologies and outright lying about what they are doing/going to do. :-(

No, you should immediately punish bad driving but the punishments can be much lower.

A profit-driven insurance company will of course use every means at their disposal to get out of paying out. That includes using every piece of information that might compromise your claim. Like the telemetry your own card is supposed to be keeping.

And further, how on earth can we even know they aren't lying? If the telemetry is kept remotely by some Other profit-driven corporation, and delivered to their buddies at the insurance company.

Is it not connected, but every new car in the US is already required to have an event data recorder, that in a collision saves at minimum such information as speed, throttle position, whether the brakes were applied, and whether the driver was wearing a seatbelt.

The trouble with that argument is that every driver is guilty of "bad driving" at least momentarily from time to time. What good does it do to punish someone who is reasonably skilful, reasonably responsible, but only human?

The inconsistency and selective enforcement is part of the problem here. If our driving laws were routinely and universally enforced to the letter, with every infraction punished as the law provides, then there would be no-one left entitled to drive within a few weeks and the absurdity of the system would be clear for all to see.

As it stands, there seems to be an element of lottery: I know plenty of people who are basically responsible drivers but have picked up the odd ticket for doing 35 past a camera at the bottom of a hill or something, and I also know plenty of people who I literally won't ride with any more on account of their crazy driving yet who have completely clean licences. Evidently the system is not currently effective at promoting safer, more considerate driving, which in the end is what it should be doing.

> What good does it do to punish someone who is reasonably skilful, reasonably responsible, but only human?

The self-driving car industry will benefit from that.

I assume that you're a software guy so I would hope that you would naturally understand the benefit of simplicity. Let's assume that a speeding ticket currently costs $200. What percentage of speeding instances do you think are currently fined? I'm going to guess far less than 1%. That means you can lower the fine to $2 per instance or probably much less and still be meting out the same expected punishment for speeding.

The goal of this fine is not to partition drivers into good and bad drivers. It's to incentivize good driving. Yes, good drivers are going to get fined occasionally but it will be a very small fine. Why try to make a more complicated rule that never fines "good" drivers? That will sometimes lead to drivers who decide to speed this once because it's free.

> Yes, good drivers are going to get fined occasionally but it will be a very small fine. Why try to make a more complicated rule that never fines "good" drivers?

For one thing, any law that inherently penalises innocent people for a crime they did not commit is abhorrent to me. The scale does not matter. This is simply a basic principle of justice and fundamental to the state having any moral authority to enforce any law at all.

Even were that not the case, you have to deal with the practical problems of overheads. What are you going to do when someone inevitably disputes their $2 charge? Either you have a punishment without any due process at all, or you incur vastly disproportionate expenses prosecuting a case in court, or you cause the innocent person vastly disproportionate damage contesting their guilt. None of these is an attractive option.

You also have to deal with the practical problem that any such system will be cracked very quickly, and the worst drivers will be the ones most likely to get away with it.

My views have somewhat softened on technical driving offences over the years, in that I accept as a practical matter that having a black and white definition of what is permitted removes wriggle room for bad drivers who might otherwise tie the system up contending that their actions were not in fact dangerous or otherwise inappropriate. Nevertheless, the goal of road traffic laws should be to take the dangerous or inconsiderate off the road, and it is not always the case that things like exceeding a speed limit or driving through a red light necessarily have (or have any significant potential to have) actual negative consequences.

So while the laws prohibiting these actions are a pragmatic choice, it is not one that has any inherent moral basis to me and already one that sometimes prohibits perfectly reasonable actions that a responsible driver might otherwise perform. Abusing such laws so that even those who try to comply with them, while also driving safely and considerately, are still victimised is a big step too far in my book. And of course the systems we're talking about might not only be used to enforce technical laws to the letter, but could also be used to provide wriggle room for insurance companies after an incident.

The innocent until proven guilty approach to traffic violations is already a farce. If you have a job, it costs more to dispute a ticket than to pay it. I'm in favor of changes to the legal system that would allow rapid turn around in low stakes cases. Start with something very informal and quick and have an appeals process where the loser pays.

Cracking the local monitoring device can be disincentived just like speeding. If an officer sees you speeding and you're not self reporting it, bam. Bigger offense.

The thing about more effective enforcement in any setting is that it can increase justice (lower the lottery effects) but it makes it that much more important that you got the laws right to begin with.

The innocent until proven guilty approach to traffic violations is already a farce. If you have a job, it costs more to dispute a ticket than to pay it.

Yes, it is, and that situation is a real problem for some people, such as someone whose car registration has been cloned, resulting in a whole series of tickets about something like the London Congestion Charge even though they live in the north and haven't been as far south as London in years.

That is why I am personally in favour of courts defaulting to awarding realistic compensation to successful defendants in all prosecutions, combined with the abolition of automated fixed penalty notices generated by any sort of machine.

Basically, if something is serious enough to merit a criminal prosecution, I think the authorities should show up with real evidence and if necessary real police officers as witnesses, make a proper case in court, and suck it up if they bring too many cases that fail and it costs them a lot in compensation. I think there is considerable merit in the argument that anything where you don't feel such a comprehensive response is justified and instead resort to some sort of automated penalty regime and mass punishments shouldn't be dealt with through criminal proceedings at all. (Edit: The flip side of this is that if a police officer pulls you over and in court you really are then found guilty of, say, driving at dangerous speeds, don't expect to get away with 3 points on your licence and a token fine. Only prosecuting serious offences cuts both ways.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com