I wonder how this all relates to license plate readers. As a frequent cyclist/pedestrian, I've felt for some time that a low, consistently-applied automatic fine would go a long ways toward eliminating traffic behaviours which are mostly low-incident at present because vulnerable road users have trained themselves into hyper-defensiveness and basically know to jump out of the way. To some extent, this is even in the official messaging, with campaigns about how road safety is a "shared responsibility" and so on.

Basically, things like speeding in neighbourhoods, entering a crosswalk before all peds are off the roadway, running red lights and stop signs, right turn on red without coming to a full stop first, etc.

Currently in my city these things are all pretty much completely unenforced— the fines are in the hundreds of dollars are and only applied when someone is actually hit. This breeds a driver mentality of "well, it doesn't matter what I do as long as I don't hit anyone" which in turn makes the roads a less safe place to be for everyone. The fines are where they are partly as a deterrent, but also because the cost of enforcement is so astronomical when it requires multiple personnel on a special operation.

I feel that if the fine was in the $10-30 range, but it was applied consistently on every single offense, drivers would quickly train themselves out of doing these things. (This is the swift-certain-fair philosophy, see: https://nnscommunities.org/strategies/swift-certain-fair/)

Anyhow, I know that plate != driver, and there's a bunch of existing case law around protecting drivers' "right" to get away with endangering themselves and others by disregarding traffic rules. But given how much of a step beyond plate-recognition a facial-recognition system would be, I'm interested to speculate if there might be more of an appetite for this kind of thing down the road.