On the one hand, omnipresent surveillance is bad and ripe for abuse.
On the other, I feel like the haphazard and selective enforcement of traffic laws by police officers is also really bad. Cops can selectively enforce laws so poor people or black people or whatever out-group suffers more. A machine should be impartial.
On the last hand, no traffic enforcement is probably going to get people killed. So that’s not desirable.
Also, fines are problematic. Fines should probably scale with wealth, but also it shouldn’t be a revenue source because that’s a perverse incentive.
Some countries do scalable fines, so you’ll see headlines about a rich person being given a $75k speeding ticket or something.
I do agree with the concept of traffic laws, but I went back to my home state of Iowa recently and it was seriously comical, cameras everywhere, stoplights but just randomly along the road, everyone was driving exactly the speed limit and I was going insane. Having humans involved in policing does introduce biases but it also introduces common sense and good judgement.
I like the idea of mobile camera units, so bad spots can be focused on, people understand that it’s a bad spot, but it doesn’t turn into a permanent fixture.
On the one hand, omnipresent surveillance is bad and ripe for abuse.
On the other, I feel like the haphazard and selective enforcement of traffic laws by police officers is also really bad. Cops can selectively enforce laws so poor people or black people or whatever out-group suffers more. A machine should be impartial.
On the last hand, no traffic enforcement is probably going to get people killed. So that’s not desirable.
Also, fines are problematic. Fines should probably scale with wealth, but also it shouldn’t be a revenue source because that’s a perverse incentive.
Some countries do scalable fines, so you’ll see headlines about a rich person being given a $75k speeding ticket or something.
I do agree with the concept of traffic laws, but I went back to my home state of Iowa recently and it was seriously comical, cameras everywhere, stoplights but just randomly along the road, everyone was driving exactly the speed limit and I was going insane. Having humans involved in policing does introduce biases but it also introduces common sense and good judgement.
I like the idea of mobile camera units, so bad spots can be focused on, people understand that it’s a bad spot, but it doesn’t turn into a permanent fixture.