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Comment by temp0826 | Hacker News Reader

What the heck? How can you get that many tickets and still have a license? (Or manageable insurance costs for that matter lol)

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When New York State authorized the NYC speed camera program they explicitly precluded it from reporting to insurance, and made it not part of the “points” system that triggers license suspension if you accumulate too many infractions, so all that happens is that you get a $50 ticket each time.

If you don’t pay the tickets, your car is at risk of being booted, but if you don’t park on the street or choose to obscure your license plate when you do (how did that leaf get stuck there!?), there aren’t many repercussions.

There was an attempt at a program to actually seize these cars, originally it would have kicked in at 5 tickets/year for immediate towing, but it was watered down to 15 tickets a year triggering a required safe driving class. They sort of half-assed the execution of that, then pointed at the limited results and cancelled it altogether. There’s an effort to pass a state law about this, we’ll see if it makes progress.

> When New York State authorized the NYC speed camera program they explicitly precluded it from reporting to insurance, and made it not part of the “points” system that triggers license suspension if you accumulate too many infractions, so all that happens is that you get a $50 ticket each time.

At the risk of hearing a depressing answer...why?

Because they set the speeds too low to raise revenue.

Unless you live in NYC or a handful of other places, an adult in the US who can't drive (or afford to pay someone to drive for them) is in the equivalent of economic-social prison. Almost all personal transportation infrastructure is designed around car travel, anything else is at best an afterthought and at worst impossible.

Don't get it twisted, I agree with you. The US is far too tolerant of dangerous driving. We are too dependent on cars for travel, and this is a consequence of it.

I'm just shocked that you can have that many offenses and not be in jail. I nearly lost my license in high school with FAR less than 30 incidents. That amount of leeway just doesn't make sense at all, you're so obviously a danger at that point.

Camera tickets are in a weird place legally. They might not be legal, because of the 6th ammendment and due process requirements, so states tread lightly. A light touch gets a lot of compliance and is most likely self-funding; enforcement by humans may be more effective for habitual violators, but you most likely can't have as much coverage and be self-funding.

If you had 30 speeding tickets issued in person, it would be a lot different than 30 speeding tickets issued by machine.

If they're talking about automated speed cameras I guess there's the problem of not being able to correlate the plate of the car with a particular human, a bill simply gets sent to the owner of the car, but maybe if we impounded cars at some point people wouldn't be loaning cars out to their licenseless friends

It's simple. People drive without a license. Having a license doesn't preclude someone from driving a vehicle

I once drove my car a month after it's registration expired. I was pulled over twice in the same day on the same ride home from work, in two separate counties in two separate legal systems. Completely my fault of course. I went to the courts of each county on the appointed day on my tickets, explained what happened to the clerks and had both tickets waved after showing proof of current registration.

The only problem was the two counties had shared but not integrated records systems with each other, as well the state drivers license authority. For two years, my cases got jumbled around the three systems, triggering plate and license suspensions which lead to me getting pulled over four times in that two year period.

It eventually all got sorted out without a lawyer. I didn't have to pay for anything beyond the first two tickets, and many hours on the phone. What was really notable was that by stop number four, from the perspective of the cop who pulled me over, I was someone who had been driving with suspended registration and/or license three times in a row. I was allowed to drive away three out of four times including the last time, and one time the cop would not let me drive, he waited with me patiently until my wife could be dropped off to get the car.

Maybe I'm just lucky, but to be honest I was surprised how not a big deal it was to anyone.

Perhaps they don’t have either.

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