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Comment by Molitor5901 | Hacker News Reader

A lot of small towns depend on predatory law enforcement, especially civil forfeiture. With depressed tax revenue they are incentivized to rake people over the coals.

https://cei.org/blog/charlotte-area-police-departments-are-r...

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Civil forfeiture (and the police corruption it incentivizes) is indeed a huge issue. But I have a hard time getting similarly riled up about red light cameras (or speed cameras): the negative position here is that municipalities should just roll over when drivers want to drive dangerously on their roads, which doesn't seem right.

(From one perspective, these kind of cameras prevent corruption: automated enforcement means fewer bored local cops trying to steal your money or pin whatever crime they can think of on you as you drive.)

I have lived in two cities that opted to remove their red light cameras. The negative position was an erosion of privacy.[0]

I think it’s deeply uncharitable to frame it as “rolling over” on crime. That’s the same manipulative rhetoric proponents use to argue for gunshot detection systems. Safety and privacy are the dueling interests - not anti-crime and pro-crime.

[0] Along with studies that found red light cameras increased accidents. I’ve seen studies in both directions, though.

To be clear: gunshot detection is mostly bullshit. By contrast, I don't think there's (substantial?) disagreement about the true-positive rate for red-light cameras: municipalities that tend to let people off do so not because the violation didn't occur, but because the violation was deemed subjectively to be insufficiently serious.

(I believe strongly in personal privacy, and I don't buy the argument that red light cameras are a meaningful erosion thereof. Driving is a privilege that's extended with the expectation of safe behavior, which is why you're required to drive in a publicly identifiable vehicle with a government-issued license on your person. With that being said, I would happily support any local legislation that limits unconditional data collection from red-light cameras.)

There are also many instances of yellow light times being reduced to make people more likely to run red lights, making what should've been legal, illegal and fining people for it. Further, they made the roads less safe since the safest thing to be on the road is predictable.

Florida shortened yellow lights to increase red light camera revenue https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5707465

if so, then that is bad. the solution isn't to remove red light cameras (which can save lives, by preventing drivers from entering an intersection with perpendicular cars), rather to standardize how long yellow lights should be

They were, but the incentive structure encouraged them to shorten those times. It doesn't help that in addition to what I mentioned above, many of these manufacturers work out deals with cities to get a percentage of these fines, resulting in an incentive for them to no eliminate false positives and find ways to fine more people, which is even worsened by courts often finding that such systems are infallible. I recall one story of a DUI being upheld against a person even when it was show that the device showing he was intoxicated was more than a year beyond its calibration date.

My intended point isn't that red light cameras can't be done right, but that in reality, the incentives result in them not being done so. It's a near endless game of whack-a-mole to force their implementation ethically.

There are some other threads here talking about changing where fines go that could get things on the right track, but there are some many other avenues pointed out in my comments and others that are potential for abuse.

Ours removed them after the guys who made and installed the cameras were caught ducking the process servers from triggering their own cameras and all involved were found to be hypocrites.

> Along with studies that found red light cameras increased accidents

Really?

Perhaps a citation?

I do not believe it

Causing people to panic and jam on the brakes, perhaps? Rear-end collision from someone who had been expecting to follow through the red light (with camera) ... Seems a rare combination.

There's decent evidence that red light cameras increase the total number of accidents, due to people suddenly stopping at yellows rather than blowing through[1]. At the same time, there's decent evidence that red light cameras decrease the number of fatal accidents, due to fewer people blowing through[2].

So the story is complicated: red light cameras seem to have a positive effect on the serious accident rate, but a negative effect on the overall rate. Municipalities could probably improve this by both doing a better job of signaling upcoming yellows and by redesigning roads to match the marked limit, rather than encouraging intuitive higher-speed driving. Personally however, I would take more fender-benders over more fatalities any day of the week.

[1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/red-light-cameras...

[2]: https://www.iihs.org/topics/red-light-running

https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/doral-red-light-cameras-g...

Linked to in TFAYDR

My anecdata is when the city of Philadelphia put speed cameras on Roosevelt Blvd, a hellish road that had a speed limit of 45 through residential areas with 12 lanes and people regularly driving 80, with iirc 2 or 3 of the top 10 most frequent accident rate intersections in the country, driving on the road noticably improved and the average speed dropped a good 15 mph.

Isn’t the problem that many municipalities give different orange light times for signaled intersections for those with and without cameras, so causing more accidents (people hard braking unnecessarily), and then entrapping people (do you potentially cause a crash by hard braking or risk a ticket because this particular light has a camera timed to half the normal orange light timing?)

If a municipality ever gives shorter times for lights with cameras the answer is very clear: it is about revenue not safety. There is no safety related justification that would ever say “the timing of a light is tied to income production”

There should be a national standard yellow light times, perhaps scaled based on the speed limit of the area. That way folks will develop an intuition that serves them everywhere. Ideally with a countdown signal like making the light smaller or a number of seconds.

It's entrapment playing games with the timing to get more money from people, cameras or not.

There are already documented/recommended timings for lights.

The whole point that people are bringing up is that there are a large number of documented examples of municipalities explicitly giving intersections with red light cameras significantly lower orange light times than all surrounding non-camera’s intersections. More over these municipalities have a documented increase in collisions, but collisions don’t cost the municipality anything, they just add a greater tax (through increased premiums) to all the people living in them.

I believe the correct course of action is cameras - red light, and speed, applied universally - however in the US where blatant corruption is legal it’s not reasonable to say “don’t break the law if you don’t want fines”, especially when again the whole reason this is up for debate is that timings for red light cameras are significantly shorter than non camera intersections. Eg what is legal in one intersection is illegal on the next and your only way to know is whether you get a fine in the mail.

This all ignores the part where fine based penalties for a crime simply renders crime legal for the wealthy. Again, if the intent is to ensure safety there would not be a subset of society for whom the law functionally does not apply, but the intent is very clearly revenue.

I passed through a town in Ohio and was cited to pay or appear to a mayors court. I looked it up and it was literally the mayor's court, and he was required to have something like one day of training.

Immediately decided they'd probably just arrest me on some bullshit upon arriving and if not in a town of 100 or whatever there was no use arguing so I just paid.

The map of the town was like one Podunk neighborhood plus like a 100 ft stretch of state highway gerrymandered in for ticket revenue.

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