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Comment by ndsipa_pomu | Hacker News Reader

> Speeding tickets are hard to prove.

Are they? Speeding cameras are calibrated regularly, so a company would need to provide video evidence that definitively showed the vehicle travelling slower, which of course isn't possible if the vehicle was speeding.

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Americans are very restrained in their use of speed cameras because the offenses are so easy prove. But I think we are unique. Australia and Canada have no problem using speeding cameras more pervasively.

It is the process that makes it hard and expensive. Even bringing this to court costs money.

Extracting money from normal people is nearly automated.

Okay, but if a city has cast-iron proof of the vehicle speeding, then surely they would win back the costs?

Technologically, it is because you have to establish a chain of trust all the way from the cop, to the radar device, back to the manufacturer, and establish all the way down that nothing was tampered with or miscalibrated.

In the real world that never happens. The judge laughs at you, makes a joke about why you’re wasting your time, and orders you to pay the fine.

One person’s “extracting money from normal people” is another’s “enforcing accountability for those who endanger others’ lives”.

Don’t want to be fined? Don’t speed.

I would argue the opposite. Those who don't speed are disrupting flow of speeding traffic and causing a dangerous traffic impediment. And if everyone stops speeding families suffer fewer necessities healthcare etc as the extra time on road eats into time available to work to provide life saving necessities .

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