If I would have to rate difficulty of Traffic enforcement, I would have put it quite low... What makes it so difficult?
The problem with traffic enforcement is that the police want it to remain available as a pretext to stop anyone when they want to.
For example, the MUTCD recommends that speed limits typically be set to the 85th percentile traffic speed. One of the reasons for this is that speed differentials are very dangerous. Another is that you typically want laws to have at least a little bit of leeway between "thing law abiding people are expected to actually do" and "thing with government-imposed penalties", rather than having them separated by 0.
But US speed limits are regularly set 10-15 MPH below that speed, so that the majority of traffic is exceeding them. Because then the police have an excuse to pull over anyone they want to. This is also often used a source of fine revenue because as long as they don't do so much enforcement that people actually comply with the law, they can periodically park a patrol car on the side of the road and "efficiently" hand out one ticket after another.
Which is the problem with automated enforcement. If people were consistently fined then you would get compliance rather than widespread violations. At which point people might object more strongly to the speed limits not being set by the book. But regardless of which way that comes out, it causes you to lose the fine revenue and the pretext to stop anyone, since you stop having both of those if you do either of the things that results in most people being in compliance with the law.
2. Automated enforcement is generally in the form of fines, which habitual violators ignore.
3. Confiscating vehicles as an escalating consequence of automated enforcement is so unpopular no one will even suggest it.
I get that point 1 is extremely valid in a place like the US where everyone can have a gun.
Do other countries not enforce fines?
In the UK you can have your car confiscated on the spot if the automated number plate recognition in a patrol car flags you don't have insurance. Fines are enforced, but escalating that to non-payment of fines seems like something they could do (people might complain, but only the ones not paying their fines!)
- Suppose a vehicle chooses not to stop. What's the safest way to complete the stop? High-speed chases are dangerous. The eventual spike trap or pushing the tail end of the car or whatnot is dangerous. The fleeing person won't be in a sound state of mind for safe driving even if not followed. Toss in a little human error like forgetting to turn your lights and sirens on, and these are predictably extremely dangerous. Just under 1% end in a fatality.
- There's an elevated risk of wrecks, side-swipes, and whatnot by virtue of being on the side of the road, often in dangerous areas.
- Most assaults on police officers don't involve guns. There are something like 7-8k assaults on officers due to traffic stops annually, despite knowing they carry guns. A little over a hundred of those result in serious injury to the officer, most of which don't use guns in the process.
- Don't forget injury to the passengers. 100k/yr are injured by the police at a traffic stop. Again, that's usually without guns. And why wouldn't they be? The police have nearly a carte blanche, and they're being placed into an environment where they know they're at risk, with perceived risk being higher than actual risk.
You mention the UK, so how do they fare? They have 100x fewer traffic stops, so I'll scale up the numbers accordingly. In particular, that means they have 2.5x officers injured just from vehicles being rammed during stops than the US has assaults on officers in total. That's suggestive of gun violence not being the entire story regarding traffic stop safety.
Mind you, that's not quite apples to apples. The UK has 5x fewer people and 2-3x fewer miles driven per person per year, suggesting we're missing another factor of 5-10 when trying to figure out why the US has more traffic stops, and my first guess would be that the UK police have a selection bias toward more serious offenses, so the higher safety rates of the US police are at least in part due to pulling over a higher share of less violent individuals.
Nevertheless, it's not just gun violence. Traffic stops are dangerous elsewhere too. (not to be interpreted as a comment on gun policy, rather that it's annoying to see important conversations like consequences of traffic stop safety derailed by irrelevant nationalistic swipes and jabs)
Traffic stops should be used for traffic enforcement and treated as community policing, not as the main method of hoping to stumble on things the police should have resolved via actual police work and effort.
[0] https://policeepi.uic.edu/u-s-data-on-police-shootings-and-v...
If Northern Ireland was the size of Greenland back in the 80s, I'm sure traffic stops in the middle of nowhere would've been a bit hairy, too.
It seems like our federal system is an obstacle. I'm in Maryland and a huge fraction of our biggest habitual traffic violators somehow get Virginia license plates.
> Do other countries not enforce fines?
Where I live (Baltimore, MD) the 10 vehicles with the most unpaid speeding tickets owe $81,000 between them. So you can push 10k in unpaid fines and remain on the road somehow.
Policing shouldn't be done via traffic stops. Traffic stops should be done via traffic stops.
The rules and numbers are allowed to be what they are so long as mass tasteful/mild noncompliance is tolerated. The second you start robotically (electronic robots vs meat robots in uniform does not matter in this case) fining people for taking lefts on red arrows at 1am or exceeding the speed limit a bit in the base case you will see politicians pandering to voters by changing those rules such that the typical person can behave typically without any particular care to abide by them and generally not break them.