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Comment by rcpt | Hacker News Reader

> Drivers now do not want to get stuck at the light, so they are consistently running red lights

Police stopped enforcing red lights all over California after covid. And getting cameras installed is a Herculean task.

Police stopped enforcing in my city too. And 10% of drivers know this. People will keeping chipping away at the safety margins until people start dying. Then maybe police will do their job and those 10% of drivers will start worrying about manslaughter charges.

The Texas government decided that red light cameras can't enforce the law. That's how car-brained we are.

Muh privacy or something.

Ironically, the right to privacy was questioned by Alito when he helped nullify Roe v Wade. It will be "interesting" to see what other things we consider private aren't private in the eyes of this court. And even more "interesting" to see the converse.

Interesting.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/roe-....

We have a joke over here in Germany that if you want to commit a crime, be sure to do it in a car - keeps you out of prison.

The core issue is those red light cameras create a persistent database of who is where, which is then sold at a marginal cost to whoever wants it to advertise to/manipulate/track a population. Adding cameras everywhere invites a dystopian nightmare vs better urban design and occasional traffic police would solve the same problem.

Write the legislation so data is not retained/sold. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

"occasional traffic police" have proven ineffective at enforcing the law.

And biased humans deciding who to pull over is a lot more of a "dystopian nightmare" than cameras which eliminate those problems entirely https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2402547121

i grew up somewhere that had red light cameras, the idea that they are selling the data is BS justification for diminished state capacity to enforce something really important.

e: for those downvoting, please point me to a single case of a municipality selling red light violation data if this is such a real concern

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