I mean, being anti-authority is fine, but even if you achieve your stateless society, don’t you still want your stateless society to still have traffic co-ordination somehow?
Photo enforcement cameras are problematic for several reasons.
A) It has been shown that yellow lights with such cameras are very often set to a yellow duration briefer than generally accepted engineering practices to increase revenue *1
B) They discourage a rare misbehavior, actually running red lights, whilst causing another to become common. That is slamming on the brakes even when it isn’t safe to stop. Exacerbated by A. Better slam on the brakes when it flicks yellow even if you are way too close to reasonably stop whilst going only the speed limit.
People who are caught up by it are almost always those who found themselves a bit too far into the intersection to safely stop. EG those who cross the threshold right as it is changing. There is for reasons of safety a few seconds between one light turning red and another green. At 30 mph (44 feet per second) someone will fully clear a 40 foot intersection in less than a second. That is to say the only people you catch aren’t those who would have collided.
They are those
you fucked with the shorter duration yellow oops
people who hesitated because of 1 and slowed but ultimately decided to proceed thinking they can make it
People with poorer brakes and or dealing with rainy conditions reducing stopping time.
C) Most of the money goes to the contractor who owns the cameras. Essentially you are letting a private company prey on your citizens as long as government gets to keep the scraps.
A) It has been shown that yellow lights with such cameras are very often set to a yellow duration briefer than generally accepted engineering practices to increase revenue *1
Then create and enforce laws that require a given yellow light timer for a given speed.
B) They discourage a rare misbehavior, actually running red lights, whilst causing another to become common. That is slamming on the brakes even when it isn’t safe to stop. Exacerbated by A. Better slam on the brakes when it flicks yellow even if you are way too close to reasonably stop whilst going only the speed limit.
Guess you’d better leave a safe stopping distance between you and the car ahead of you. If you can’t stop quickly enough to not rear-end someone slamming on their brakes, you’re following too closely. Kids and animals run into the street all the time.
You and others like you are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
I’ll add one more. They subvert our right to a trial and seeing our accuser. The fines are all supposed to be viewed by some sort of officer that is supposed to show up if you challenge the ticket. The only one I’ve received didn’t have any info on how to challenge it. It was like a bill that obfuscated my right to a trial. Guilt is assumed and forgiveness is ignored. 28 in a school zone in an unfamiliar city, instant fine with no “oops I fucked up” recourse.
Crazy how car drivers all think they deserve one free pass for dangerous driving.
Pay more attention.
That aside, it’s bullshit that they allegedly made it difficult for you to understand how to take the matter to court. In all fairness I’m not sure I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt here, considering you missed the school zone as well.
You clearly don’t live in and never been to my country (Portugal, which in my personal experience of driving all over Europe has some of the worst driving in the continent) if you think running red-lights is a rare behavior.
Around here, were there are no zero red-light cameras that I know of (unlike other countries in Europe I lived in), it’s literally the norm for people to run the red-light for about 30 seconds after it has switched over from yellow. There’s even a joke around here that “Green means Go, Red means Stop and Yellow means Accelerate”. You will literally get honked at by the person behind you if when you see the yellow light you slow down so as not to run a red-light.
Curiously, in the other countries in Europe I lived in which did have red-light cameras, such behavior was incredibly rare.
Even more entertaining, when I first moved out of Portugal as a young adult I went with that very same behavior trained and not soon after I started driving in my new country of residence (which was The Netherlands) I almost immediately got a €50 fine for running a red light in that way and getting caught by a camera, tried to dispute it, got told “Red is red, it doesn’t mater if it has been red for 1 second or 1 minute”, paid the fine, learned my lesson and never did it again. Whilst anecdotal, it’s none the less one data point of red-light cameras working at making people change their habits.
In The Netherlands they weren’t shorting the yellow light times, but that’s because unlike in the US were the Law and Politics are a total shit-show, the Dutch actually have specified in the law the minimum time period for the yellow light (you know, because they have politicians which are at least somewhat competent and not on the take) and if city halls had it lower than that all of their red-light fines would end up thrown out in court if it was ever found out (and taking them to court over there is also way cheaper than in the US) same as parking fines get thrown out if the “no-parking” sign isn’t properly visible.
You see, the problem you have pointed out is not a problem with red-light cameras, it’s a problem with the Law over there, so it’s the Law that needs fixing not the red-light cameras.
I mean this in a genuine way, why in your mind those are the two options available? Total anarchy without functioning transit or cameras pointing at drivers?
There are several different ways to control traffic. If privacy is an importanr factor for a culture, they’d rank privacy respecting alternatives higher.
I think the arguement is that the cameras are only there because people are running red lights. Don’t you want to catch people who habitually run red lights, and therefore represent a danger to the public? If you’re not the sort of person who runs the red lights then the cameras are irrelevant to you.
If you’re not the sort of person who runs the red lights then the cameras are irrelevant to you.
This is the same argument as ‘mass surveillance shouldn’t matter if you have nothing to hide,’ it’s a fallacy that only considers some elements of the situation.
The way we run society is relevant for all people in it. My taxes fund maintenance of these systems. I want us to work on effective prevention not bandaid punitive systems that don’t improve safety.
The SA article mentions Houston, a notoriously horrible city to drive in (concentric freeway rings, I swear). It pulled data from Texas from before 2010, and I know at least some municipalities were shortening their yellows then to encourage short stopping. It also studies changes in behavior after the punishment tool has been removed, so the drivers are already operating with years of conditioning. They even referenced the study that showed that the number of people running red lights in Virginia dropped 67% after red light cameras were installed? I need to look a little bit closer at their statistical analysis to see what confidence threshold they were using to determine that the reduction in accidents that they did see was not statistically significant, but overall I’m not that impressed by one study from a borderline pop science magazine.
There is some political horseshoe theory that connects “People who cannot stand any kind of authority at all and start shrieking even when a forum mod removes their comments.”
It’s the weird far-left anarchists and far right libertarians finding common ground in wanting a society where mommy doesn’t tell them to not run with scissors. Some of the “sovereign citizens” who make for hilarious Youtube content are sincere in their their irrational hate for any kind of rules and laws.
I have had enough dealings with these folks that I have a pretty strong opinion that nobody has been able to change, that these folks just have serious authority issues and do not give a shit about a broader society and are just mad at their parents.
They are the absolute worst people you could ever have as neighbors. I sometimes think we should drive them into the sea via mobs with torches.
edit: let me double down - if you get angry at the idea of authority (not considering the enforcers or management of that authority, which is a separate thing) you need to be driven into the sea via mobs with torches. We need systems and rules and taxes for a functional society. Work on changing the way that society enforces and motivates people to follow those rules instead of blindly lashing out at anything designed to keep people safe.
I don’t think sov civs actually have a problem with rules or authority. I think they are deeply insecure in the fact that they don’t understand the rules so they make up new ones that they believe to be absolute and above all else.
They believe like dogma in this shit like the maritime flag with stripes and a court with that flag gets magically invalidated so they don’t have to follow any rulings. They get a feeling of control when they understand the rules even when the rules are imaginary.
Police officers and FBI directors are broadly stupid, abusive and incompetent, but that doesn’t encompass all authority.
You face authority every day. You follow systems and rules and contracts so that society functions. You use traffic laws. You don’t shoot people who make you mad, you don’t write bad checks or walk out of stores without paying. You are under a system of authority whether or not you agree with the values and enforcement of the people who enforce these rules.
I’m fine with throwing out the leadership and officers who enforce the laws, but we HAVE to have rules and laws, and this includes safety issues like speeding. I don’t care what motivates you to follow these rules, as long as you do, because I am also on the road.
I don’t need a system of law not to shoot people or walk out without paying. Some of us have ethics. I have found authority in America broadly garbage from bottom to top. It’s not just the top that is fucked.
I don’t need a system of law not to shoot people or walk out without paying. Some of us have ethics.
I cannot take your word for that, even if it’s true, I cannot trust everyone, and even if someone is a good person, every human is vulnerable to emotions and failures of judgement, so yes we do need laws and rules and nothing can change that short of some system of taking away everyone’s free will. I already said that the enforcers as, top to bottom, are a separate issue.
As someone else pointed out, the traffic light itself isn’t being affected, just the automated enforcement mechanism of the camera. We managed just fine without those.
Plus, they’re not safer the way the government likes to claim. People slam on their brakes when they see one, and they can only ticket, it’s not like they’re stopping accidents or saving people, can only report on what happened.
red light ones are not great due to increased rear endings from some idiot slamming the brakes on when they should have gone through / people rushing and assuming the person in front will go through the yellow.
speed ones work great, when placed appropriately (i.e. on a street with an appropriate speed limit for the road design and in areas of higher pedestrian activity). I hate that Ontario just banned speed enforcement cameras, because that means a loss of revenue to pay for the road network maintenance, more police activity enforcing speed (which a camera does automatically all day long) which means police aren’t doing more important stuff and also it’s a waste of my tax dollars, and they will have to spend more of my tax dollars putting shittier speed reduction methods in place like speed bumps (annoying as fuck, bad for fuel economy, loud because people race from speed bump to speed bump, ineffective because people pay attention racing from speed bump to speed bump instead of to what’s going on around them, annoying for bicycles and people with towing trailers, loud when people telling trailers go over them, loud when regular cars go over them, bad for snow plows…)
now, this is just for speed enforcement, not coordinating traffic flow. although in a properly designed network, there are times that this can actually be achieved, unlike those light cycles on arterial roads that let you go through if you speed just a little bit but if you go the speed limit you hit every single red light
There are plenty of areas where the speed that is safe and reasonable to travel is substantially different from the one set. This is only not wildly broken because everyone disobeys the law and the cops refrain from stringent enforcement because forcing the traffic to all slow down would completely break traffic flow.
Maybe this works well in Canada but America governments are about as stupid as Americans.
I mean, being anti-authority is fine, but even if you achieve your stateless society, don’t you still want your stateless society to still have traffic co-ordination somehow?
Stateless =/= rule-less
Photo enforcement cameras are problematic for several reasons.
A) It has been shown that yellow lights with such cameras are very often set to a yellow duration briefer than generally accepted engineering practices to increase revenue *1
B) They discourage a rare misbehavior, actually running red lights, whilst causing another to become common. That is slamming on the brakes even when it isn’t safe to stop. Exacerbated by A. Better slam on the brakes when it flicks yellow even if you are way too close to reasonably stop whilst going only the speed limit.
People who are caught up by it are almost always those who found themselves a bit too far into the intersection to safely stop. EG those who cross the threshold right as it is changing. There is for reasons of safety a few seconds between one light turning red and another green. At 30 mph (44 feet per second) someone will fully clear a 40 foot intersection in less than a second. That is to say the only people you catch aren’t those who would have collided.
They are those
C) Most of the money goes to the contractor who owns the cameras. Essentially you are letting a private company prey on your citizens as long as government gets to keep the scraps.
*1 https://ww2.motorists.org/blog/6-cities-that-were-caught-shortening-yellow-light-times-for-profit/
None of these are actual problems with red light cameras, and actually people run red lights all the damn time.
Then create and enforce laws that require a given yellow light timer for a given speed.
Guess you’d better leave a safe stopping distance between you and the car ahead of you. If you can’t stop quickly enough to not rear-end someone slamming on their brakes, you’re following too closely. Kids and animals run into the street all the time.
You and others like you are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
I’ll add one more. They subvert our right to a trial and seeing our accuser. The fines are all supposed to be viewed by some sort of officer that is supposed to show up if you challenge the ticket. The only one I’ve received didn’t have any info on how to challenge it. It was like a bill that obfuscated my right to a trial. Guilt is assumed and forgiveness is ignored. 28 in a school zone in an unfamiliar city, instant fine with no “oops I fucked up” recourse.
Crazy how car drivers all think they deserve one free pass for dangerous driving.
Pay more attention.
That aside, it’s bullshit that they allegedly made it difficult for you to understand how to take the matter to court. In all fairness I’m not sure I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt here, considering you missed the school zone as well.
You clearly don’t live in and never been to my country (Portugal, which in my personal experience of driving all over Europe has some of the worst driving in the continent) if you think running red-lights is a rare behavior.
Around here, were there are no zero red-light cameras that I know of (unlike other countries in Europe I lived in), it’s literally the norm for people to run the red-light for about 30 seconds after it has switched over from yellow. There’s even a joke around here that “Green means Go, Red means Stop and Yellow means Accelerate”. You will literally get honked at by the person behind you if when you see the yellow light you slow down so as not to run a red-light.
Curiously, in the other countries in Europe I lived in which did have red-light cameras, such behavior was incredibly rare.
Even more entertaining, when I first moved out of Portugal as a young adult I went with that very same behavior trained and not soon after I started driving in my new country of residence (which was The Netherlands) I almost immediately got a €50 fine for running a red light in that way and getting caught by a camera, tried to dispute it, got told “Red is red, it doesn’t mater if it has been red for 1 second or 1 minute”, paid the fine, learned my lesson and never did it again. Whilst anecdotal, it’s none the less one data point of red-light cameras working at making people change their habits.
In The Netherlands they weren’t shorting the yellow light times, but that’s because unlike in the US were the Law and Politics are a total shit-show, the Dutch actually have specified in the law the minimum time period for the yellow light (you know, because they have politicians which are at least somewhat competent and not on the take) and if city halls had it lower than that all of their red-light fines would end up thrown out in court if it was ever found out (and taking them to court over there is also way cheaper than in the US) same as parking fines get thrown out if the “no-parking” sign isn’t properly visible.
You see, the problem you have pointed out is not a problem with red-light cameras, it’s a problem with the Law over there, so it’s the Law that needs fixing not the red-light cameras.
I mean this in a genuine way, why in your mind those are the two options available? Total anarchy without functioning transit or cameras pointing at drivers?
There are several different ways to control traffic. If privacy is an importanr factor for a culture, they’d rank privacy respecting alternatives higher.
First, don’t call it anarchy. But second, the other way to stop people from running reds is more cops.
I think the arguement is that the cameras are only there because people are running red lights. Don’t you want to catch people who habitually run red lights, and therefore represent a danger to the public? If you’re not the sort of person who runs the red lights then the cameras are irrelevant to you.
If it improves safety, which it’s not clear red light cameras do. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/red-light-cameras-may-not-make-streets-safer/
This is the same argument as ‘mass surveillance shouldn’t matter if you have nothing to hide,’ it’s a fallacy that only considers some elements of the situation.
The way we run society is relevant for all people in it. My taxes fund maintenance of these systems. I want us to work on effective prevention not bandaid punitive systems that don’t improve safety.
The SA article mentions Houston, a notoriously horrible city to drive in (concentric freeway rings, I swear). It pulled data from Texas from before 2010, and I know at least some municipalities were shortening their yellows then to encourage short stopping. It also studies changes in behavior after the punishment tool has been removed, so the drivers are already operating with years of conditioning. They even referenced the study that showed that the number of people running red lights in Virginia dropped 67% after red light cameras were installed? I need to look a little bit closer at their statistical analysis to see what confidence threshold they were using to determine that the reduction in accidents that they did see was not statistically significant, but overall I’m not that impressed by one study from a borderline pop science magazine.
Meta-analysis is the way to go.
There is some political horseshoe theory that connects “People who cannot stand any kind of authority at all and start shrieking even when a forum mod removes their comments.”
It’s the weird far-left anarchists and far right libertarians finding common ground in wanting a society where mommy doesn’t tell them to not run with scissors. Some of the “sovereign citizens” who make for hilarious Youtube content are sincere in their their irrational hate for any kind of rules and laws.
I have had enough dealings with these folks that I have a pretty strong opinion that nobody has been able to change, that these folks just have serious authority issues and do not give a shit about a broader society and are just mad at their parents.
They are the absolute worst people you could ever have as neighbors. I sometimes think we should drive them into the sea via mobs with torches.
edit: let me double down - if you get angry at the idea of authority (not considering the enforcers or management of that authority, which is a separate thing) you need to be driven into the sea via mobs with torches. We need systems and rules and taxes for a functional society. Work on changing the way that society enforces and motivates people to follow those rules instead of blindly lashing out at anything designed to keep people safe.
I don’t think sov civs actually have a problem with rules or authority. I think they are deeply insecure in the fact that they don’t understand the rules so they make up new ones that they believe to be absolute and above all else.
They believe like dogma in this shit like the maritime flag with stripes and a court with that flag gets magically invalidated so they don’t have to follow any rulings. They get a feeling of control when they understand the rules even when the rules are imaginary.
Civic religion, but make it gnostic.
Personally I have found authority in America to be stupid, abusive, incompetent or all 3. Do you live somewhere else?
Police officers and FBI directors are broadly stupid, abusive and incompetent, but that doesn’t encompass all authority.
You face authority every day. You follow systems and rules and contracts so that society functions. You use traffic laws. You don’t shoot people who make you mad, you don’t write bad checks or walk out of stores without paying. You are under a system of authority whether or not you agree with the values and enforcement of the people who enforce these rules.
I’m fine with throwing out the leadership and officers who enforce the laws, but we HAVE to have rules and laws, and this includes safety issues like speeding. I don’t care what motivates you to follow these rules, as long as you do, because I am also on the road.
I don’t need a system of law not to shoot people or walk out without paying. Some of us have ethics. I have found authority in America broadly garbage from bottom to top. It’s not just the top that is fucked.
I cannot take your word for that, even if it’s true, I cannot trust everyone, and even if someone is a good person, every human is vulnerable to emotions and failures of judgement, so yes we do need laws and rules and nothing can change that short of some system of taking away everyone’s free will. I already said that the enforcers as, top to bottom, are a separate issue.
If only it were possible to transport humans and goods without a network of cameras invading everyone’s privacy.
If only that was the natural state of the world for more of human history until just a few years ago.
Hell even in Amsterdam they have traffic lights. This isn’t an issue about the lack of public transportation.
Traffic signals and traffic cameras are two entirely different things.
I swear people just jump to the comments they don’t even digest the picture to understand this is about the cameras and not the traffic signals
As someone else pointed out, the traffic light itself isn’t being affected, just the automated enforcement mechanism of the camera. We managed just fine without those.
Plus, they’re not safer the way the government likes to claim. People slam on their brakes when they see one, and they can only ticket, it’s not like they’re stopping accidents or saving people, can only report on what happened.
Traffic enforcement cameras are one of the worst ways I can think of to coordinate traffic.
red light ones are not great due to increased rear endings from some idiot slamming the brakes on when they should have gone through / people rushing and assuming the person in front will go through the yellow.
speed ones work great, when placed appropriately (i.e. on a street with an appropriate speed limit for the road design and in areas of higher pedestrian activity). I hate that Ontario just banned speed enforcement cameras, because that means a loss of revenue to pay for the road network maintenance, more police activity enforcing speed (which a camera does automatically all day long) which means police aren’t doing more important stuff and also it’s a waste of my tax dollars, and they will have to spend more of my tax dollars putting shittier speed reduction methods in place like speed bumps (annoying as fuck, bad for fuel economy, loud because people race from speed bump to speed bump, ineffective because people pay attention racing from speed bump to speed bump instead of to what’s going on around them, annoying for bicycles and people with towing trailers, loud when people telling trailers go over them, loud when regular cars go over them, bad for snow plows…)
now, this is just for speed enforcement, not coordinating traffic flow. although in a properly designed network, there are times that this can actually be achieved, unlike those light cycles on arterial roads that let you go through if you speed just a little bit but if you go the speed limit you hit every single red light
There are plenty of areas where the speed that is safe and reasonable to travel is substantially different from the one set. This is only not wildly broken because everyone disobeys the law and the cops refrain from stringent enforcement because forcing the traffic to all slow down would completely break traffic flow.
Maybe this works well in Canada but America governments are about as stupid as Americans.
You think people pushing that thought further than “What’s the edgiest political personality I can use for posing online”
That can be done though street design. See: The Netherlands.