California Allows Cities to Catch Speeding Drivers with Automated Cameras

Totally agree and I generally hate this kind of enforcement too but it does indeed feel like their is zero enforcement now over much of the US.

On a sample size of one, I can tell you there isn't zero enforcement. We probably ought to talk stats instead of impressions.

Personally, I'll never support profitizing the criminal justice system. Too much bad happens when you create a perverse incentive for the government to call everyone criminals. Law enforcement should cost money so we have to be selective about which laws we're creating and enforcing.

Running red lights to me is way worse than doing 75 mph in a 65 zone. However, red light violations aren’t enforced where I am and indeed every single day I see someone running a very red light. As a motorcyclist this is terrifying.

Here is what happens in the US: police departments derive a non-trivial amount of money from speeding tickets. Everyone speeds because our roads have poor quality control (you can have pristine pavement or potholes and bumps that will send your head through your sunroof) and speed limits haven’t been updated. Actually going the speed limit will cause huge traffic jams. However, if you are caught going over the speed limit you’ll be issued a fine of a few hundred dollars. Who gets caught? Mostly people going faster than average but generally it is a lottery. A cop on the side of the road decides that your car today looks like it deserves a ticket so he takes off after you.

Oh and you can fight tickets by simply requesting a second review and get a 50% or so discount unless it was more than a routine speeding ticket.

Also in the US a speeding ticket is a criminal thing. You are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Therefore you can’t just scan the license plate and issue the ticket to the owner of the vehicle. You must identify the driver and a camera can’t do that. Therefore you must take a picture of the driver and match it to a known face, a hard problem that is costly. Moreover, in lots of places if you install a speeding camera, the proceeds must be split with the local school system. That means a police department has to pay a lot of money up front with a slow ROI. Pulling random cars over is better business.

The entire system is inefficient, unfair, and is full of backwards incentives.

The solution is: raise the speed limits to realistic levels but also enforce them strictly. Highway limits most places should be 75, not 65. But if you go 77 or above, ticket.

Moreover, we need multiple classes of driver’s licenses. Your basic license should allow you to go the speed limit and no more. But if you take an advanced test, have a car that won’t let you text while you drive, and have a clean driving history for the past N years, you can go 5 or 10 above the speed limit. You get a different license plate color to easily identify you. Again as a motorcyclist who is much more vulnerable on the road than a car driver enclosed in 3 tons of an SUV the guy doing 90 in his Civic worries me a lot less than a soccer mom with a latte and a cell phone in her hands doing 70 while seemingly unable to keep her vehicle in her lane. One of these is paying attention, the other isn’t. Speeding tickets issued by cops penalize the wrong behavior.

The wild part to me was that CA has some of the most strict car modification laws in the country. Even before covid though I was constantly having to cover my ears due to some kind of cat delete/straight pipe modifications. I hate nanny states but the recklessness really rubbed me the wrong way.

Most traffic laws in SF are not being enforced due to, not kidding at all, equity:

https://sfstandard.com/2023/01/11/sf-police-watchdogs-set-to...

https://www.visionzerosf.org/equity/

https://visionzeronetwork.org/addressing-unjust-financial-pe...

I love this idea. Traffic cameras are so sketchy in the US. It’s always contracted out on extremely favorable terms for the contractor. It’s often a very kick back bribery feeling.

Spain has had them for a while, but they have disadvantages.

The main reason we want to wait for red lights isn't that it'll illegal: It's because it's indicating that not stopping is quite dangerous. Keep going, and you can get sideswiped, or you'll go over a pedestrian. Ignoring red lights in those situations, which are 90% of situations, is going to make you find out pretty soon.

But then there's red lights that aren't really telling you there's a clear and present danger. Red lights in one way streets, to one way streets, with great visibility. Crossings in streets designed for rush hour traffic that don't have very different timings for the middle of the night. Or maybe the time where a theater finishes their night production, and the traffic patterns have nothing to do with the lights. In those cases, people are often rewarded by ignoring the red light, because yes, it's not indicating risks accurately. And the more you train people that yes, there are red lights that are safe to ignore, the more they'll consider ignoring others that are unsafe.

So those red lights that just change when you are speeding, but don't indicate that a different direction is passing through are doing nothing but telling the speeding driver that if they are caught, they'll get a much bigger fine, because other than for the fine, speeding past that light is not really any more dangerous than the speeding they were doing already. So it works for some people, but it also makes others more dangerous drivers.

That's horribly wrong to do because it's collective punishment. If I'm going the speed limit but the car in front of me is speeding, the red light will punish me too.

Interesting. Here in Sydney, Australia, they’re all run by the government, however speeding incurs a loss of points against your license (as well as hefty fines). Lose too many points and you lose your license. This system ensures the cloistered elite are incentivised to stick to the limits too.

There’s a totally separate discussion about what tolerances are used and what levels of punishment to hand out.. things here are far too strict on that front.

This story doesn’t hold water. Lower and middle income citizens are far more affected by and reliant on credit than the proverbial “guy in a sports car.”

Income based fines are used elsewhere [1] to try and counter some of these issues. Not sure of the barriers for this type of approach in the US but I think it would be more effective than flat fines with leniency for lower-income offenders which seem to be the approach often taken.

For the CA bill: "People who meet certain income or housing criteria can also receive deductions of these fines anywhere from 50 to 80%." [2] This seems much less effective than something that is based on income.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland...

[2] https://ktla.com/news/local-news/if-speed-cameras-are-instal...

In Europe it would eventually result in the loss of your driving licence.

Korea once allowed people to report a certain kind of traffic violations. It caused a lot of abuses. Paparazzi style stuff... Intentionally making other drivers violate traffic rules... etc.

I hope that one day, our cars are equipped with outward facing cameras, and the feature to auto-report speeding and dangerous driving behaviors on the road to the authorities and/or the insurers.

I drive in Miami proper and EVERY TIME I'm on the road (especially when heading into/out of Miami), I would encounter at least two cars that drives very dangerously (not just speeding, but like cutting across you--driving in the center lane--very closely from the right lane; not signaling and making a sudden right turn into a street in a crowded street; etc. I had to buy up a front and rear facing dashcams, and I sometimes wish I had a button on my steering wheel that would send the last 10 seconds or so of the dashcam recording to the insurance companies or the traffic police.

My dumb self just realized that the reason those cameras existed is because they are red light cameras, not for speeding.

Agreed in principle. One of the prior objections to automated enforcement is that it enables the police not to do their jobs. This part of their jobs is now already not being done. The system sucks, and automating enforcement doesn't feel like a good long-term fix—but as a band-aid, it could reduce folks getting run over at intersections.

As for your direct question, the rot starts at the head. Look at US Congress.

I chuckled at this. Where I live in Canada I don't think its anywhere on the list of priorities for the police to enforce road safety laws in the first place.

You can avoid it quite easily by removing your plates. In the UK this is a nominal fine if you are ever caught (which given how few police there are is quite rare).

However because everyone else is doing the limit it won't get you far.

They had these speed cameras in Phoenix (which is pretty high on the "people would just shoot them out" scale) on the AZ-51 and people resorted to merely voting them out -- after a few high-profile incidents like this one guy who would put on a gorilla mask and intentionally get tickets while the police couldn't do anything until they actually caught them wearing the mask while speeding through a camera. Oh, and another case I remember from when the warning period just ended, this lady got tickets every day on her way to/from work until the first violation hit her mailbox, 46 speeding tickets in total IIRC.

Red light camera, OTOH, are all over the place and people don't seem to mind them as red light running (especially for left turns) is quite common.

I doubt it. My guess is there will be fees and what not attached to it. My gut says all states are like that.

Source: the 5 speeding tickets I got in different states when I was young and super dumb. The tickets were for 75-100, but each cost at least 250 after fees.

For most people the actual fine is peanuts but the insurance premium hike is debilitating (you'll be paying 4-5 digits extra from T0 to Tinfinity depending on circumstances)

I don't know the details of California's system, but generally in places that use these kind of systems you can dispute the ticket. That gets you a hearing where the government that sent the ticket has to prove the violation under the appropriate standard of proof.

Your accuser is not the camera and associated systems that automatically mailed you the ticket. Your accuser is the government that sent you the ticket, and you can face them at the hearing.

The camera is just evidence that your accuser will use at the hearing to establish the violation.

> Red light cameras are just a profit center that do not increase safety and usually cause more accidents.

Is there any research suggesting that?

This is not rhetorical at all - I am genuinely confused by the statement. Unless you run a lot of red lights, or read the mail of your neighbors, how would you know about enforcement from these cameras? What outward sign would appear?

you sure? they are in use in Fremont but not in any other city.