There's a real question here about what triggers the violation. Setting it at 36 for 35 mph zones, with tickets put in the mail, will generate a lot of revenue and a lot of anger. Putting it at 45 for a 35 mph zone raises questions about what we mean when we say 35 mph is "the law."
Most places in the US use 11 above on the cameras. Chicago has recently gone to 6 above. It should probably be far stricter, but we need to boil the frog on this as we make our streets safer.
I think any robot fining of speed limits would have to accompany a 5 mph increase in all posted speed limits, given that it's pretty well understood everywhere that it's perfectly fine and expected to drive 5 over.
After that, a 4mph buffer should also be written into the law to allow for the fact thats speedometers are rarely perfectly calibrated.
Finally, in areas where it's well known that traffic is regularly much, much faster than the posted speed limit, thinking the highways around Chicago here, tests should be done to re-assess accepted speed and safe speed.
No posted speed limits are already generally too high for if a car were to interact with a pedestrian on a surface street. Just because people think speeding is acceptable (I was this way most of my life too!) does not me we should let it.
Notably the cameras in fact never enforce the exact limit yet. Even in Chicago it's a 6 mph over.
In practice, that doesn’t matter. You should 20 miles over with no penalties. Then tighten. You have to keep your job as the elected official or it doesn’t matter. If you get voted out due to this, the next guy takes them down.
You're almost certainly right. The policy will no doubt be formulated in some dull bureaucratic way with the public not paying attention and after some initial resistance during its rollout, people will simply come to accept it.
My experience of human behavior is most people drive at whatever speed the rest of the people on the highway are driving at. Then, there's about 10% who drive 20% above that, weaving in and out. Those of us going with the flow would like cops to focus on the norm-breakers and not the broken tail light. A better way to make traffic laws effective would be how much over the average you're driving than everyone else. This seems totally data enforceable.
This is suitable for highways, but absolutely a terrible idea for surface streets. If everyone is going 40, that's a crappy street for pedestrians--we care about lowering absolute speeds, not relative speeds, anywhere that bikes and peds interact with cars.
You could also make the fines proportional to how much you're over the speed limit. So you still get fined if you're 9mph over, but the fine's only $20 or whatever.
Automated enforcement is generally recommended to accompany a large drop in the size of fines. The theory of high fines is that you need to make it irrational to speed, meaning you need to make the fine high enough that it registers even though you know you’ll probably get away with it. If the camera *will* catch you then even knowing it’s a $10 fine will produce some deterrence. (Maybe have the fines go up for repeat offenders.)
I'd love to see the robots pick off the top X biggest speeders. At least here in MA (yes, we kind of all drive like total massholes...) you see speeding and then you see SPEEDING.
Also Yglesias: we shouldn't have dumb laws and cops in cruisers with guns drawn enforcing them. If we want dumb laws, a bill in the mail is the way to go.
Ummm....Yglesias is trying to reduce the number of times when ordinary people get pulled over by cops. Do you think that such traffic stops are popular? Do you think that the pursuit of the popular option here would entail leaving in place the system where people are routinely pulled over by cops, and (somewhat less routinely) shot and killed in the course of those stops?
Cause, my gut instinct tells me that these are not interactions that enjoy a lot of popular support. I don't hear voters clamoring to get pulled over more often.
As he said, upper middle class white people talk a big game about how bad traffic stops are, but they dislike having to deal with the consequences of speeding more.
"Do you think that such traffic stops are popular"
No, getting pulled over sucks. But not nearly so much as expanding the surveillance state, and having big brother watch you all the time, and fine you at the drop of a hat
Eh, in 10-15 years the robots will be the drivers too, and it'd be great if we change the traffic rules to be more sensible *before* we launch a fleet of vehicles that actually consistently follow them.
More sensible is one of those terms like reasonable and inappropriate. I imagine when the robots take over there’ll still be a back seat driver driving the car into a ditch.
It sucks that basically everything about traffic enforcement in the USA has been designed, over many decades, to train people that it's all corrupt BS. The National Maximum Speed Law was widely derided and flouted. Roads are built to encourage illegal speeds (which are, as noted, tolerated except in arbitrary instances). Policing is devolved down to the micro level, so there are unaccountable small-town speed traps all over the place. In many places that do use automated enforcement, there are shady contracts and kickbacks and camera placement decisions.
Hello, Roscoe, NY! Where they interrupt a long stretch of 65mph highway with an entirely gratuitous stretch of 55mph, just in order to rake in the fines.
Rosendale, WI has T-shirts that say "Rosendale - just the ticket!" and a picture of a squad car at the gas stations, so you can get a memento of your traffic stop.
I don't see why state governments give local governments the power to set speed limits like that.
Have a bunch of road-type classifications and let local governments petition to change the classification of their local road, but don't list let them change the limit because you crossed a legal boundary.
"high fines can interact with unrelated financial precarity to generate devastating consequences for relatively minor legal violations"
This point cannot be overemphasized. If anyone wants to see this in action go spend a morning in any traffic court. I am a usually non practicing attorney, but just before the pandemic I accompanied one of my kid's college age friends to court to help with what even the DA we met with thought was a BS ticket.
It was an awful, sad, and dispiriting spectacle to watch and participate in. Sitting there it felt almost medieval in the lack of justice, and in fact actual injustice, being meted out to an almost uniformly poor and lower middle class set of citizens. First, it takes a minimum of two separate trips if you want to do anything but just pay. So minimum 4-5 hours lost wages if you work a day time job. And sitting there it was clear that almost none of the charges being discussed were people who had done outrageously dangerous acts, most were things like missing taillights, expired plates, etc. Plus a lot of people appearing because they had failed to pay an initial $150 or $200 fine.
The minimum deal available to anyone was to pay the nearly $250 in "court costs" and provide proof that they had ameliorated the problem. I looked around and thought who in the world thinks any of these people have a spare $250 that if they give it to the court is not going to result in unpaid rent, utilities, groceries, or long credit card indebtedness.
One woman, being chided by the judge for coming back for a third time asking for more time to pay was given a choice, pay or jail. She said, I'm never going to have the money --- several hundred dollars at that point --- and said OK put me in jail for two days.
Setting aside that probably many of these stops were probably mere pretextual stops looking for evidence of other crimes, to the extent that you want to actually enforce these laws the annoyance of being stopped and made to pay $25 rather than $250 would almost certainly have the same deterrence/enforcement effect.
Are you saying that court costs are charged to the accused in criminal cases?
If so, that is outrageous in itself. The fine should be exactly the same regardless of how it is reached - you can apply a discount for pleading guilty, but that is because someone who admits a crime is less likely to do it again than someone who avows they have done nothing wrong, not because they save the judicial process time and costs.
Civil courts are different; the person responsible for it going to court should pay, which is usually the loser of the case (though if the winner wins on a technicality and really shouldn't have gone to court, then the court can rules so).
The penalty is generally fine X plus court cost Y. Mercy is considered being allowed to pay only court cost Y in return for either pleading guilty and not insisting on a trial, or for showing that you had ameliorated the initial violation.
For instance, in my client's case, he was ticketed for "following too close" when he slid into someone while traveling downhill DURING A BLACK ICE EVENT when literally no amount of safe following would have prevented a crash. Common occurrences of amelioration needed were things like fixing taillights or paying the car registration up to date.
This is something I've been thinking about for years as a possible solution in the US.
I've lived in Berlin, Germany since 2015, and before that lived in Krakow, Poland for two years. In all that time, I literally have never witnessed a traffic stop of a motorist by the police*. Traffic enforcement is all done exclusively with speed cameras from my experience. What that results in is a completely different relationship to the police. Police cars in Germany are going somewhere - presumably to respond to actual emergency calls. Every time I go back to visit the US (mostly in my hometown of Las Vegas and the Bay Area, CA), police cruisers seem to be prowling around the streets, monitoring pedestrians, veering in and out of lanes to run the plates of cars that piqued their attention. I think the mild invigilation of speeding cameras, is far preferable than the sort of slinking predator behaviors that traffic cops in the US exhibit. And of course when you add in the cops' reasonable expectation that a good number of American motorist will be armed, the arrangement seems perfectly designed for disastrous outcomes. Automate!
*I've been "pulled" over once in Berlin, but I was on a bike, and the policemen were also on bikes. I'd peddled through a red light at an empty intersection, they let me go with a warning.
The flip side of that—at least in the Netherlands—is that the only traffic laws that are enforced are the ones that can be automated, namely speeding (mostly on freeways) and parking.
You cannot walk a block in most Dutch cities without squeezing between cars parked on the sidewalk because parking enforcement, being automated, only fines you for not paying for or being properly permitted in an actual parking spot. I've watched people drive the wrong way down a one-way street—multiple times—in direct view of a cop and honk angrily at the cars going in the right direction. Once a delivery truck just said F-it and started playing chicken with the cars that were going in the right direction, which was funny, but super illegal! But my favorite are the numerous cars that drove over the sidewalk to access a road rather than going around the block—my favorite because said sidewalk was *directly across the street from the police station*.
Driving down a particular stretch of freeway where packs of state patrol cars used to hide behind a bridge during occasional speed enforcement campaigns and then pounce on unsuspecting motorists all going about the same speed, I used to imagine we drivers were a herd of zebras or buffalo or something, and they were lions or wolves hiding in wait, jumping out to pull down and eat an unlucky one.
The behavior of cops is really pathological, and it induces shocking pathologies in the civilians as well.
Believe me when I tell you that I am the most conventional-looking older white dude, with the most conventional CV and a spotless criminal record. I have never taken any drugs, and I have never fallen afoul of any laws other than traffic laws.
Still, when I see a red strobe in my rearview, I start sweating and shaking as though I were a particularly amateurish mule trying to get through customs with a kilo of something tucked under my shirt. I am, no exaggeration, terrified. Terrified of being pulled over, and of the whole dehumanizing, bullying, brutalizing ordeal that I am about to be out through.
Oh, and as for actual traffic-stops, I have only had maybe five in 50 years of driving. But they were each appallingly awful, and traumatizing.
Traffic stops are really, really bad, and I say that as an old white guy with, on paper, nothing to fear.
The thing is that it's so blatantly true that the police operate with total impunity and often in a completely arbitrary manner that I don't think there is anyone who has not internalized fear that things could go terribly wrong during a stop. In this way it really is a lot like getting mugged. Even the most pro-cop Blue-Lives-Matter assholes out there are cowed.
" Even the most pro-cop Blue-Lives-Matter assholes out there are cowed."
Hey, you didn't have to call me out by name like that!
But, yeah, it's the combination of arbitrariness, impunity, deadly force, lack of recourse, and the fact that nothing less than abject groveling can reduce your chance of getting shot in the head. The current policing regime forces ordinary people to act in a way that does not befit citizens of a free democracy.
Here's something that has vastly improved my interactions with everyone from police to fast-food workers: I realize they are all just normal people trying to get through daily grind, just like me. I try to show them a bit of kindness, respect, and, if needed, grace and hope I can receive the same in return.
Yes true, they are just normal people - like the motorists being stopped. And that's why traffic stops can lead to horrible outcomes. The idea is to minimize human volatility as much as possible.
Just another example of how the blatant racism in American Life has poisoned the whole of society. For decades White people has known of what is happening to black people pulled over by the police and reassured themselves that "It can't happen to me". Only problem is that every time we see the cherries in the rear-view there is a crisis of confidence. "How do I know that the dog is trained".
I agree that racism poisons (pretty much) everything in American Life, but I do not think there was ever a time in my seven decades when I thought, "it can't happen to me," or "how do I know that dog is trained." I have always known *both* that American policing is incredibly racist, *and* that cops think that they have impunity in their dealings with all Americans, of all colors. In their minds, there is a strict hierarchy in which whites are above blacks, and cops are above all.
For me (and for most people I know, most of them white) there was never a crisis of confidence, because there was never the confidence you impute to us.
As a Brit, I know lots of people who got into real trouble when stopped by traffic cops in the US.
Here, if you are stopped by a cop, the first thing you do is to get out of the car and meet the cop between the two vehicles. Making them come to your window is the sort of thing that rich, arrogant people do, and cops resent it.
I've never been stopped in the US, but I know a bunch of people who have and they did what they would do here, and you can imagine how badly that went...
Pathological - extreme in a way that is not normal or that shows an illness or mental problem OR relating to or caused by disease.
"Terrified of being pulled over, and of the whole dehumanizing, bullying, brutalizing ordeal that I am about to be out through."
Is this common? I had uh...a lead foot you might call it when I was younger, and have been pulled over (let's be vague to disguise how bad) say somewhere between 1 and over 100+ times in my life. (Very thankful there wasn't a point system back then)
I've never had this reaction like you describe. And I wouldn't describe any of them as "traumatizing." Annoying, frustrating, expensive (soo expensive), but even when they pulled me out and patted me down and held me for a while(totally deserved that one), it wasn't traumatizing.
A white police officer friend of mine in a Los Angeles suburb told me that even in his cop car, when a sherif car gets behind him he gets legitimately concerned. According to him, "Those guys will absolutely pull you over and put dirt on you."
He told me this after I had told him how they had(just) pulled me over(in my driveway) for no violation (said my car seemed out of place in the neighborhood). Searched my car for 30 minutes, sobriety tested me, and then let me go.
I have it on excellent authority -- on this very thread! -- that my fears are due solely to my own pathology. So, there's no way that an LEO could have felt any anxiety about interactions with another LEO. One of you is mistaken.
Oh, I can beat that story too. At 13 years old(white, skinny, 85#) I was walking down a country road with a friend (in Tam Valley just north of S.F.). A police car stopped about 10 yards behind us so we both walked over to it. The officer said that he was looking for some young people that didn't match our description and had we seen them. He said they had thrown something at a passing car. We said we had not and he went on his way.
5 minutes later another cop car comes around the corner slams on its brakes sliding to a stop just behind us. The cop jumps out and runs toward us. He throws us on the hood of his car. I try to turn to explain that we just spoke to his fellow officer. To call his fellow officer. He pulls his service revolver, presses it deeply into my back and slams me face first back into the hood of his car. Moments later a call comes in on his radio and he races off without saying a word.
Honestly, my interactions with criminals and my least pleasant hitchhiking experiences have all been less dire than _many_ of my interactions with police.
I'm really grateful to you for having examined all 350 million other Americans to make sure that none of them feel the same way. Could you also share your findings with the other people down-thread who agree with me? Thx!
While I'm with Matt and Co that abolishing the police is a horrible idea, the meme that they act as a Gang is also mostly true at this point. It's a sad state of affairs.
Especially because I'm pretty sure it's safer for me to be speeding slightly along with every other car than be going the speed limit but 5-10 MPH slower than every other car.
When one firsts think automated enforcement one might think "but if we're all going the same speed, should we really all get tickets" ... but if automated enforcement were common, everyone would learn to actually follow the limit.
I think this article downplays the effectiveness of traffic calming/road diets. You make the roads narrow enough (protected bike lanes! Trees!) and the average speed will drop and there likely will be more buy-in for automated traffic enforcement since speeders are now a minority.
As it is, our speed limits are too low for how the road feels driving on it and too high for the safety of others, and so traffic tickets feel unfair.
If the speed limit aligns with what is reasonably considered a safe speed for road conditions, I'm fine with the automated enforcement. Two concerning situations: highways which are relatively low speed limit 55mph but are wide and easily driven 80 off hours (basically everything around Chicago), the same sort of highways in high traffic periods yet some folks insist on driving aggressively at the posted limit despite slower flow of traffic. Safe driving is not easily summarized by a posted speed limit or even following traffic signals. If the rules feel stupid the enforcement will be infuriating.
Even beyond highways, a lot of roads have dumb speed limits. A road near me recently had its speed limit lowered from 30 to 25 mph. No one follows it because it's a wide, straight road, and people know full well that it's safe to go faster. (Heck, I can break the speed limit on that road with my bike...)
Road diets are cool, but in SLC we have to wait for bond money to redesign the entire road or just do a repaint diet when the road just needs its surface redone (chip and seal).
It’s slow deliberate work and requires money, a committed transportation engineer, and not kicking the community hornet nest.
Protected bike lanes are astonishingly cheap. The point of the road diets Hadley is talking about is narrowing roads; this will happen if jersey barriers are installed to make bike lanes.
Just a small anecdote from driving in Estonia: speed cameras are common enough on major roads throughout the capital, Tallinn, and here and there on major roads into the outlying suburbs. Beyond that, they're pretty uncommon. Do they work? I'd say Yes. I certainly try to obey the traffic laws there, as opposed to the U.S., where I take the ethos of "drive the high end of the prevailing speed," but "drive courteously" and "drive the speed limit on neighborhood streets." White privilege, as Matt's article now makes me reflect. :(
Anyway, back to Estonia: Ticket issuance is instantaneous -- the owner of the car (my wife!) gets a text on her phone within like a minute that a driver of her car (me!) just ran a yellow-red light or was photographed speeding at location X and that a ticket in the amount of Y euros needs to be paid via the link below. Tickets are steeply scaled by first offense, second offense, etc. I suspect they can handle a couple kph over the limit, but not the unofficial 10% over that one hopes for in an American speed trap. Long story short, it really took the bounce out of this tigger as a driver and I think that's a good thing; it sort of reoriented my relation to habitual speeding.
One elephant in the room here is (anecdotally very common) areas where the average speed of traffic exceeds the posted limit. I'm sure the question of what the speed limit "should" be is complicated in all sorts of wonky ways. But I think one reason speed cameras are unpopular is that spotty human enforcement is a partial workaround for "unreasonable" limits, and enforcing those limits mechanically and consistently makes people angry. It might be that any broad deployment of speed cameras needs to go hand in hand with a broad audit of existing speed limits, and maybe some reform in how those limits are set?
Speaking as someone who is at the business end of the bumper, drivers are poor judges of what speed is reasonable. "Reasonable" means "fast, and I don't care about the pedestrians and bicyclists I might hit." When we audit speeds, we should be open to lowering them.
This contention is and will always be patently ridiculous, and you know it.
Whether this is your intention or not:
"I don't want to expand the surveillance state"
Actually means, in practice:
"I don't want to be subject to ANY standard of justice or law, and I am willing to have my less fortunate neighbors be brutalized regularly to preserve my immunity."
That is how the status quo works.
Uniform and less brutal enforcement might mean the government knows you hit 90 on I-95 last month and get you a $25 fine, but it also means the poor single mom with a broken taillight is told to fix it instead of getting a $250 fine that she can't pay and lands her a contempt of court charge, a week in jail, and a lost job.
I think the more reasonable version of this argument is that it is the responsibility of those who would like to expand surveillance as criminal deterrence to prove that this new power will not be misused. The track record of local, state and (particularly) federal governments on this point is not good.
Why should we assume that the implementation of this system will be done well, in which case we will improve on the status quo, rather than poorly/cruelly, in which case the downside on the status quo is significant?
"Why should we assume that the implementation of this system will be done well, in which case we will improve on the status quo, rather than poorly/cruelly, in which case the downside on the status quo is significant?"
Frankly, for the same reason that we should assume that marijuana would be quickly legalized if laws against it were enforced with the same fervor against rich prep school kids as they are against poor public school ones.
Laws that are universally enforced are subject to massive political pressure in favor of moderate/reasonable outcomes. The only democratic states able to sustain punitive legal consequences for minor offenses are those which don't apply the offenses frequently or uniformly.
You're still conflating two issues. I agree that the status quo is unevenly enforced and suboptimal. I am also amenable to the argument that the government is liable to severely misuse a thorough surveillance and identification apparatus.
As far as I'm concerned it is the responsibility of expansion proponents to assuage those fears, not the responsibility of status quo proponents to assume the best. That is the burden that comes with demanding change.
I'm not sure what "two issues" could possibly be "conflated" in the above argument, but let me make a run at it again:
The only way to make the rules uniform, when it comes to traffic enforcement, is to either not enforce them or enforce them everywhere.
If you don't enforce them, there will be considerable pressure to do so, because I think we all know that will create an unsustainable and dangerous situation.
If you enforce them everywhere, but continue to have punitive fines, jail time, and other severe punishments for minor offenses, you will face public pressure to dial the punishments down.
It will not be possible, in a democratic society, to make punishments both universal and draconian, because the electorate will not stand for it. As such, it is reasonable to assume that we will, in the parlance you use above, implement this reform well.
I'd expect that after a number of violations, the consequences would ramp up non-linearly, eventually ending with loss of driving privileges. Isn't that the way it works now? For me "your insurance is going to go up" has always been more than adequate insurance, so I haven't tested this.
What counts as misused here? My understanding is something like:
- When I'm driving on public roads, I'm in plain site of anyone. Everyone can see how I'm driving.
- I'm subject to surveillance by the police (in that the can park their cars on the side of the road and watch me, or drive on the same streets and watch me) now. There's no expectation of privacy.
- What's changing in going from cop cars to robots is _capacity_.
So I'm not sure what right of mine I'd hope to cling to in saying that robot traffic enforcement is not okay. "I have a right to be mostly not surveilled due to resource constraints" doesn't seem like a real defense.
("I'm annoyed because in the old system I was mostly not surveilled due to resource constraints" seems like what I will actually think if it happens, but that's me being grumpy.)
""I don't want to be subject to ANY standard of justice or law, and I am willing to have my less fortunate neighbors be brutalized regularly to preserve my immunity.""
No that's not what it means. I'm very familiar with the legal system. I've served 10 months behind bars for some BS that shouldn't even be a crime.
That doesn't mean I will support draconian solutions that make the police state worse.
More government monitoring of people is NEVER the answer. Moreover, are you really so naïve that you think the police state will suddenly turn kind and gentle now that they have even more power, and can monitor you all the time???
And even if by some magical chance that happened, it's still not worth it to me. I'm quite sure that if we put camera's everywhere and had the government monitoring everything, crime would go down. But I think giving government that much power is the worse crime. I don't want to live in that society.
You’ve tried this argument with me several times, and each time I point out the fundamental hole: given the ease and secrecy with which information can now be gathered, you’re naive or perhaps delusional to believe the government doesn’t already have access to whatever it wants to know, whenever it wants to know it.
There is no point in pretending otherwise and I am not going to humor any argument which does so pretend, not for even a second.
The only way to prevent the government from "doing bad things" with the data it already has is to acknowledge it has it and regulate what it can do with it and how it can publicize it.
Period.
No libertarian claptrap you come up with is going to change my mind on the matter, because it's all patently delusional.
Moreover, as Bsupnik pointed out above, I have no right to privacy when in public. Period. Never have. No conception of the word, in history, has been that broad.
Have you not noticed, for instance, that virtually every signaled intersection in the country is being retrofitted with a camera for license-plate reading to track kidnapping and violent crime suspects?
So this is a binary choice:
A. Enforce the law well and even-handedly by permitting a narrow use of information the government already has.
Or
B. Enforce the law capriciously and brutally by forcing the government to pretend it doesn't have better data.
Those are the only two options. No other option is possible. So which will it be?
Also, it's pretty easy to turn off your phone, or even to not own a smart phone (the horror). You can't opt out of a government surveillance program like MY proposes
Because I already have a startup, I can't do this one, but somebody should....
Create a car insurance company, let's call it Snitchr, where you give people with a safe record insurance for free. The catch is that you have to put a dashcam in your car that captures the speed of all cars in it's immediate area and uploads it to the underwriting database.
Snitchr then turns around and syndicates the data to other insurance companies for a fee, who then turn around and raise the rates based on the data. Win/win for the driver, for whom bad drivers are subsidizing their insurance - and the industry, as they now have a far superior database on which to underwrite compared to "who got a speeding ticket"
Nothing stops you, because it is 100% legal to take a picture of people and cars in public. I know there are a couple states that heavily regulate exactly what you can underwrite on, but I assume that insurance companies are clever and can use their clout to work around those.
If my own startup didn't already have its seed round, I would literally be personally standing something like this up. If you do start it, let me know, I have angel money ready to deploy.
I always wanted a rearward facing camera with AI detection for cop headlights and a mesh network to other nearby similarly equip cars. At least in California, the Supreme Court has repeatedly stated that identifying the presence of police is protected 1st amendment speech. I guess that "Waze" comes close to this except it's forward facing eyeballs.
Yup, just make the camera 360 degrees, much like what you already see on the self-driving cars today. The tech is here and it works... just needs to be deployed.
Eh, if the data was actually worth that much to an insurer they would simply require that you attach one of their little black boxes to your car in return for providing any coverage.
Insurers have a pretty good sense of how fast and how well or poorly we all drive, and they charge everyone accordingly. They're probably not that interested in differentiating by actual individual driving habits. See for instance their use of credit ratings for setting individual rates. If you have crappy credit you pay substantially more, even though that clearly has nothing to do with how good or bad a driver is.
Yeah, my fiancee does this. She keeps shopping around her insurance, so I don't know what she has now, but I remember she's had both GEICO and Progressive and they both gave her the box (I think, I've never seen it) and the discount (how, I don't know, she drives like a demon).
Metromile does this already - clearly precedent for measuring the speed/habits of the driver. This just cranks it up to 11, while creating a pretty epic network effect.
As it turns out, given how people actually drive, it is exactly what we need.
And the good news is that there is nothing the law can do about it, since public photography is a very well established right that isn't going away anytime soon.
Eliminating traffic stops for a host of administrative problems also has a number of knock on benefits. Busted tail light, speed, etc. could all be handled through video/photo and a mailed citation. This eliminates not only the cop having to worry about a violent interaction with a motorist, and vice versa. It also takes off the board a host of other awful cop tricks. Oops, is that a baggie of pot on your back seat? Any number of awful civil forfeiture practices go out the door if the cops aren't physically involved in the process. Give the cops less chance to let bad apples do their thing, and give all of them less chance for a random violent interaction and free them up to do useful stuff.
For the rest of the issues raised here, almost all of those are fixable and I'd be willing to bet have been fixed elsewhere.
I completely agree with Matt's core diagnosis, and his proposed solution. However, I find his focus on race off-target. Yes, it is wise to take actions that reduce unwarranted police violence, but in my view by focusing on the issue of "racial justice" when addressing a problem that involves better policing, better law enforcement, better community relations, and safer streets reflects a contemporary pathology within the Democratic party.
Agree, white people, especially to the extent they're generally higher up the economic ladder probably have fewer interactions with the police, but those interactions are probably not nice, they're just less "unnice." Police in this country see themselves as almost separate from the society in which they operate. Fixing that culture will be a long hard process, so the more we reduce it the better we'll be.
As with so much of your thinking about these issues, I agree in principal but I suspect that you're assuming a spherical cow: namely, a police department that can actually be trusted to do its job.
Here in your former hometown, everyone who cares has figured out that the way you dodge the speed cameras is simple: you deface your license plate so that the cameras can't read it. If you're _really_ motivated, you can order fake temporary tags from NJ or TX on Instagram that are "valid" in the sense that they're in the dealership databases for those states but are not in any way connected to your real identity. Et voila: blow through any speed trap you care to with impunity, and park your car anywhere that they're not going to tow you.
The obvious solution would be to tow cars with defaced plates and which have been sporting the same temp tag for over a week, but there's the rub: the NYPD themselves are the biggest and most regular scofflaws of such rules, and have no intention of enforcing them. So the rules are only, in the end, enforced against people who would have complied with the law in the first place. Everyone else enjoys a culture of accepted corruption, except of course for mere pedestrians and bicyclists, who continue to be maimed and killed in ever-increasing numbers because as a city and a country we believe that nothing is more important than the convenience and enjoyment of automobile owners.
" pedestrians and bicyclists, who continue to be maimed and killed in ever-increasing numbers because as a city and a country we believe that nothing is more important than the convenience and enjoyment of automobile owners."
And here we get to one of the central roots of the problem.
Cops in the Netherlands or Germany are not necessarily less racist than cops in the States. But the culture is not so insanely car-centric. We suffer from multiple reinforcing pathologies here -- racism, police impunity, and bizarre car-centrism, too.
“ except of course for mere pedestrians and bicyclists”
Let’s not pretend New York cyclists and pedestrians are innocent here. The disrespect for rules of the road in NYC is global. I’ve never seen a place where pedestrians are so bewildered by the concept of protected turns, for instance. As soon as the light changes in a direction, they just wander into the crosswalk, often headphones in doing their so important New York things.
"Protected turns are made at signal-controlled intersections when a green arrow light is present. When a turn is protected, all other streams of traffic, cyclists and pedestrians are halted by red traffic signals"
Again, apparently a novel concept many people haven't heard of.
I'm well aware of what a protected turn signal _is_. I'm not sure what the quote marks in your comment are supposed to indicate, but you are not quoting from the NY DMV website as far as I can tell. As far as the law in NY state is concerned, drivers are required to avoid hitting pedestrians at all times. If checking to see that your path is clear of people who will die or be seriously injured if you hit them when you're making a turn is too difficult or arduous, perhaps driving is not for you.
(Also I'm wracking my brain to think of where there's a protected right turn signal south on the island of manhattan and coming up with basically zilch, and can only think of a handful of protected lefts.)
I've been on your side in this thread, but in NYS crosswalks are distinct from the general obligation to not hit pedestrians for a reason. People run across 50 mph roads. I swerve and brake and do my best not to kill them, but if the day comes when I hit the highway sprinter, I will not for a second feel guilty for not yielding to the lowly pedestrian with a death wish.
We can use the money from the traffic tickets to re-engineer the roads so that pedestrians who need to cross a 50 mph road don't have to walk a mile out of their way to do it.
Look, I'm not unaware of the laws of physics here: if someone sprints across the FDR, they're taking their life into their hands and the best-intentioned and aware driver in the world is going to potentially have a hard time not hitting them.
But OP was complaining about pedestrians in crosswalks, crossing with the light.
"Let’s not pretend New York cyclists and pedestrians are innocent here."
Yeah, good point. And since we already know they're not innocent, I approve of the fact that we have granted every car owner the right to execute them on the spot, without any later judicial review.
Look, I wish that cyclists and pedestrians in NYC were as well-behaved as their counterparts in Europe are. But the pedestrians and the cyclists are not in the driver's seat, literally or metaphorically: they are not the source of the madness on NYC streets. That comes from the crazed killer ethos among cars, the exasperated impatience and hair-trigger rage that they manifest at the smallest impediment to their driving 80mph in mid-town.
You know that old joke ha ha not a joke about how men are afraid that women will laugh at them, and women are afraid that men will kill them? Well, cyclists might make a car 10 seconds late to the next stoplight. Cars will make the cyclist on time for their own funeral.
And then the cops will write up a ticket saying that it was the cyclist's fault. Yeah, they're not innocent, are they.
The FDR absolutely does not count as midtown, especially in threads concerned with the ordinary NYC pedestrian who crosses roads with the citywide 25mph speed limit.
The typical enraged NYC driver is frustrated that they can't break 10mph, have to dodge double-parked cars, and can't enter an intersection with a blocked box (because blocking the box is the ideal, if antisocial, strategy).
Why the hell anyone would ever feel bringing a private vehicle into Manhattan was a good idea is completely beyond me, and I certainly don't feel that the city's traffic regulations and transportation infrastructure should in any way cater to such people.
In fact, let's just implement Singapore's congestion pricing scheme across the whole city, fencing off 3-4 increasingly expensive zones as you get closer to Midtown and Lower Manhattan.
"The FDR absolutely does not count as midtown,..."
Sure, I agree it's different from Lex. But it is relevant to the mindset of drivers, because the possibility of blasting up the FDR is *just* out of reach when they're stuck on Lex. That's the expectation that conditions their frustration.
And are they trying to hit 80mph? Well, they take off from a dead start with the kind of acceleration that would get you to 80mph in 200 yards -- if they did not immediately hit another red light in 100 yards. It's a stupid game, and it creates a mass psychosis.
Every aspect of the US big-city traffic nightmare -- even the bad behavior on the part of the bikes (which Atrios complains about, as a pedestrian and cyclist, in Philly) -- starts with the constant road-rage of the drivers, road-rage as a way of life, with a side-helping of entitlement. "How dare anyone interfere with my god-given right to drive instantly anywhere I want?"
Why don't those dealerships get hit with the fine then? I assume if I get an automated ticket in a rental car, the rental agency will get fined, and they'll just pass it on to me.
Gotta _find_ the bastards to issue a summons, and usually there's nothing but an empty lot and tumbleweeds at their official location. Also traffic enforcement is the lowest rung of the NYPD hierarchy and as a rule does not have the resources to run inter-state investigations.
> If you're _really_ motivated, you can order fake temporary tags from NJ or TX on Instagram that are "valid" in the sense that they're in the dealership databases for those states but are not in any way connected to your real identity.
Wait, is THAT why I've seen so many dealer plates from NJ?!
Yup. It's a total scam, mostly coming from "ghost dealerships" that stopped selling physical cars years ago, but kept their license and logins to the state temporary tag database and are now 100% in the business of selling fake dealer plates.
Fines from automatic cameras are capped at $50/ticket last I looked. I'm not sure what the hand-written tickets clock in at, but I also don't think I have ever seen one written in my neighborhood.
Right now the penalty for fake tags is de facto zero: there is no significant enforcement against them.
Great article. Real-world example of this. My wife is from Montgomery County, MD, one of the wealthiest counties in the country, and she loves telling the story of how they got a lot of automated speed traps. There was apparently a push to get them by residents "to catch all the out-of-towners that are speeding around here." Take what you will "out-of-towners" to mean. Once they implemented the automated speed traps, the vast, vast majority of tickets were from the wealthy residents! Luckily the speed traps are still there...
This is what I love about the cameras. Half of the people saying "but this will penalize the poor" argue that in bad faith when they damn well know that being white and driving a nice car is the best way to not be pulled over by the cops... and that usually the drivers getting away with really bad driving are rich dudes who think rules of normal society just don't apply to them.
It's the "SATs are racist" bullshit all over again.
The professional classes know damned well they can cultivate even their dumbest kids to blow through "holistic" admissions processes better than poor Asian immigrant families (or Caribbean, or any other high-educational-attainment group) and they've enlisted Hispanic and Black folk as willing dupes by lying their asses off about the implications of the data we have.
The net effect will be to completely couple admissions to parental wealth, but when that becomes clear in 10 years, they'll pivot and find some new "metric that will fix everything" and repeat the process.
I don’t understand the concern about identifying the driver. If someone borrows your car and parks in front of a fire hydrant the car gets a ticket. It doesn’t matter who parked it there. How is that any different than speeding?
If someone parks my car in front of a fire hydrant, I get a fine, but nothing happens to my license/insurance.
If I get caught speeding, that goes on my record and my insurance rates go up, even if I wasn't driving.
A couple of knock-on thoughts there:
1) This can be part of "reduced penalties if we catch you more often". If these are caught more often, then perhaps insurance cares less about it, or we stop reporting it to insurance, or it doesn't affect my license as much.
2) To the extent that my car insurance covers my _car_ - letting someone else drive it who is speeding actually _is_ relevant to my insurance company.
"In order for a camera speeding ticket to affect your insurance, it would have to put points on your license or be added to your driving record. Arizona, California and Oregon are currently the only states that treat camera tickets in the same way as regular moving violations. Ten states don’t use speeding cameras at all, and nine states – including New York and North Carolina – explicitly ban insurers from raising rates based on speeding camera tickets."
Yup, 99.9% of the time, you are either getting the driver, or you are getting someone else, for which after the first couple automated tickets, the owner of the car will wisely bend the arm of the person who drives but does not own the car.
Getting fined and your insurance jacked up is a nice incentive to not let idiots drive your car.
It strikes me that this issue, like many Matt writes about, is one that has a clear, technocratic solution. The solution's beneficiaries are disperse, and its antagonists are select and vocal.
I live in a small-medium city, and I'm trying to imagine how I would go about fighting for automated traffic enforcement. A lot of people are going to be against it. As I commented on Monday, lots of people don't like any laws at all. I'm curious how systems like this get put in place. Maybe I'll write our council and see what they say.
"As I commented on Monday, lots of people don't like any laws at all..." for other people, added the narrator.
The "hands off my!" "how dare you regulate my!" crowd are very often the same people as the "there oughta be a law against those people!" "we need to get tough on those people!" crowd.
Mayor says she's not sure if it's legal in NC, and she forwarded it to the City Lawyer.
This is a common response to my emails to City Council. They love nothing more than to deflect blame to North Carolina State Govt. or NCDOT. I'm not sure if my problem is that I live in a Republican dominated state or if my city govt. is gaslighting me by eschewing all responsibility...or both!
I've been surprised how quickly council/mayor gets back to me when I email them. I guess I should be happier! Unfortunately, they always get back quickly to say, "sorry, that problem is as immutable as the rising sun."
Maybe you could take it up with your neighbors and friends and get a little movement going?
It does seem to align with how you described the local mindset of de-policing. But maybe there's too little support for "rules should be enforced" as you also said.
Well, If we're being blocked by a very gerrymandered state legislature that hates our little outlier Dem city, I think that it's going to be a heavy lift. Sigh.
"and the only way to do that [reduce speeding] is with rigorous speeding enforcement."
My only quibble would be that many think that better street design, more focused on pedestrians and bikers, would lead to more reasonable car speeds. Strongtowns and a bunch of bike and urban design focused youtube channels are big on this.
This is true and lots of municipalities have implemented this. One issue is that traffic calming measures, as they're sometimes called, cost money, where traffic cops, and traffic cameras make money.
Also some people barrel through narrow streets and get air from speed bumps. Those people need to be fined.
Is it possible that if this policy proposal was implemented, it would have the unintended effect of increasing crime.
Does the fear of a random police stop prevent bad guys from committing more crimes?
If you know that there was no chance of you being pulled over, would you be more likely to carry illegal weapons? Would you load your trunk up with more drugs to traffic?
We pretend that the only externality of police stops is bad police stops, people being killed for no reason, etc... (yes this happens)... but I am willing to bet that police get lucky as well. Pull over the felon with a guy, get the drug trafficker.
Note: I am being a devil's advocate here... I am not against Matt's proposal, I just think that we need to acknowledge reality. We need to at least discuss the tradeoffs.
If the benefits of random stops outweigh the costs, then we should just do random stops without the pretext of pulling someone over for a violation. If who they stop is actually random and not at the officer's discretion, there will be no bias.
I'm not a lawyer, so I can't speak to the constitutional issues, but morally, not being stopped randomly doesn't seem like an inviolable natural right. There are many much more onerous impositions we accept for the greater good. It's just a question of is the benefit is enough to justify it. It probably isn't. I definitely don't think searching random cars to occasionally find drugs is justified.
"The right of the people to be secure...against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation."
~IVth Amendment.
"I solemnly swear that the random number generator picked this guy" is not probable cause.
Cops need a reason to pull you over. And definitely need a reason to do more than that. That's why New York stop and frisk policies were unconstitutional IMHO
Yglesias: We should do things that are popular!
Also Yglesias: Robots will fine you for going 40 in a 35.
Yeah because that’s actually a big deal. Car brain has normalized dangerous antisocial behavior.
There's a real question here about what triggers the violation. Setting it at 36 for 35 mph zones, with tickets put in the mail, will generate a lot of revenue and a lot of anger. Putting it at 45 for a 35 mph zone raises questions about what we mean when we say 35 mph is "the law."
Most places in the US use 11 above on the cameras. Chicago has recently gone to 6 above. It should probably be far stricter, but we need to boil the frog on this as we make our streets safer.
I think any robot fining of speed limits would have to accompany a 5 mph increase in all posted speed limits, given that it's pretty well understood everywhere that it's perfectly fine and expected to drive 5 over.
After that, a 4mph buffer should also be written into the law to allow for the fact thats speedometers are rarely perfectly calibrated.
Finally, in areas where it's well known that traffic is regularly much, much faster than the posted speed limit, thinking the highways around Chicago here, tests should be done to re-assess accepted speed and safe speed.
No posted speed limits are already generally too high for if a car were to interact with a pedestrian on a surface street. Just because people think speeding is acceptable (I was this way most of my life too!) does not me we should let it.
Notably the cameras in fact never enforce the exact limit yet. Even in Chicago it's a 6 mph over.
In practice, that doesn’t matter. You should 20 miles over with no penalties. Then tighten. You have to keep your job as the elected official or it doesn’t matter. If you get voted out due to this, the next guy takes them down.
As a cyclist, I do not accept that it is perfectly fine and acceptable to routinely speed everywhere.
You're almost certainly right. The policy will no doubt be formulated in some dull bureaucratic way with the public not paying attention and after some initial resistance during its rollout, people will simply come to accept it.
My experience of human behavior is most people drive at whatever speed the rest of the people on the highway are driving at. Then, there's about 10% who drive 20% above that, weaving in and out. Those of us going with the flow would like cops to focus on the norm-breakers and not the broken tail light. A better way to make traffic laws effective would be how much over the average you're driving than everyone else. This seems totally data enforceable.
This is suitable for highways, but absolutely a terrible idea for surface streets. If everyone is going 40, that's a crappy street for pedestrians--we care about lowering absolute speeds, not relative speeds, anywhere that bikes and peds interact with cars.
The problem with fines is anything that will deter an affluent person will crush a poor one
I believe that in Finland traffic fines are a % of income (last year’s?). That should address your concern.
Agreed. We should crush the affluent crime breaker, and succor the poor. We should be thoughtful about what are crimes.
You could also make the fines proportional to how much you're over the speed limit. So you still get fined if you're 9mph over, but the fine's only $20 or whatever.
Automated enforcement is generally recommended to accompany a large drop in the size of fines. The theory of high fines is that you need to make it irrational to speed, meaning you need to make the fine high enough that it registers even though you know you’ll probably get away with it. If the camera *will* catch you then even knowing it’s a $10 fine will produce some deterrence. (Maybe have the fines go up for repeat offenders.)
I'd love to see the robots pick off the top X biggest speeders. At least here in MA (yes, we kind of all drive like total massholes...) you see speeding and then you see SPEEDING.
Also Yglesias: we shouldn't have dumb laws and cops in cruisers with guns drawn enforcing them. If we want dumb laws, a bill in the mail is the way to go.
Ummm....Yglesias is trying to reduce the number of times when ordinary people get pulled over by cops. Do you think that such traffic stops are popular? Do you think that the pursuit of the popular option here would entail leaving in place the system where people are routinely pulled over by cops, and (somewhat less routinely) shot and killed in the course of those stops?
Cause, my gut instinct tells me that these are not interactions that enjoy a lot of popular support. I don't hear voters clamoring to get pulled over more often.
As he said, upper middle class white people talk a big game about how bad traffic stops are, but they dislike having to deal with the consequences of speeding more.
"Do you think that such traffic stops are popular"
No, getting pulled over sucks. But not nearly so much as expanding the surveillance state, and having big brother watch you all the time, and fine you at the drop of a hat
Come on, it’s more like “we should talk about things that are popular, then do things that are good”
In cities with halfway functional public transit systems these things are popular: https://www.transalt.org/press-releases/poll-vast-majority-of-new-york-city-voters-support-speed-safety-cameras
Eh, in 10-15 years the robots will be the drivers too, and it'd be great if we change the traffic rules to be more sensible *before* we launch a fleet of vehicles that actually consistently follow them.
More sensible is one of those terms like reasonable and inappropriate. I imagine when the robots take over there’ll still be a back seat driver driving the car into a ditch.
Not so bad if its small fine such as $0.10 per mile.
Thankfully this can be done in a local context where Dems never lose.
Not obvious this would be a partisan thing.
It sucks that basically everything about traffic enforcement in the USA has been designed, over many decades, to train people that it's all corrupt BS. The National Maximum Speed Law was widely derided and flouted. Roads are built to encourage illegal speeds (which are, as noted, tolerated except in arbitrary instances). Policing is devolved down to the micro level, so there are unaccountable small-town speed traps all over the place. In many places that do use automated enforcement, there are shady contracts and kickbacks and camera placement decisions.
"unaccountable small-town speed traps"
Here's looking at you, Osakis, Minnesota.
Hello, Roscoe, NY! Where they interrupt a long stretch of 65mph highway with an entirely gratuitous stretch of 55mph, just in order to rake in the fines.
Rosendale, WI has T-shirts that say "Rosendale - just the ticket!" and a picture of a squad car at the gas stations, so you can get a memento of your traffic stop.
I don't see why state governments give local governments the power to set speed limits like that.
Have a bunch of road-type classifications and let local governments petition to change the classification of their local road, but don't list let them change the limit because you crossed a legal boundary.
Hard no on the higher speed limits. See 20 is Plenty success stories in many major cities.
"high fines can interact with unrelated financial precarity to generate devastating consequences for relatively minor legal violations"
This point cannot be overemphasized. If anyone wants to see this in action go spend a morning in any traffic court. I am a usually non practicing attorney, but just before the pandemic I accompanied one of my kid's college age friends to court to help with what even the DA we met with thought was a BS ticket.
It was an awful, sad, and dispiriting spectacle to watch and participate in. Sitting there it felt almost medieval in the lack of justice, and in fact actual injustice, being meted out to an almost uniformly poor and lower middle class set of citizens. First, it takes a minimum of two separate trips if you want to do anything but just pay. So minimum 4-5 hours lost wages if you work a day time job. And sitting there it was clear that almost none of the charges being discussed were people who had done outrageously dangerous acts, most were things like missing taillights, expired plates, etc. Plus a lot of people appearing because they had failed to pay an initial $150 or $200 fine.
The minimum deal available to anyone was to pay the nearly $250 in "court costs" and provide proof that they had ameliorated the problem. I looked around and thought who in the world thinks any of these people have a spare $250 that if they give it to the court is not going to result in unpaid rent, utilities, groceries, or long credit card indebtedness.
One woman, being chided by the judge for coming back for a third time asking for more time to pay was given a choice, pay or jail. She said, I'm never going to have the money --- several hundred dollars at that point --- and said OK put me in jail for two days.
Setting aside that probably many of these stops were probably mere pretextual stops looking for evidence of other crimes, to the extent that you want to actually enforce these laws the annoyance of being stopped and made to pay $25 rather than $250 would almost certainly have the same deterrence/enforcement effect.
Are you saying that court costs are charged to the accused in criminal cases?
If so, that is outrageous in itself. The fine should be exactly the same regardless of how it is reached - you can apply a discount for pleading guilty, but that is because someone who admits a crime is less likely to do it again than someone who avows they have done nothing wrong, not because they save the judicial process time and costs.
Civil courts are different; the person responsible for it going to court should pay, which is usually the loser of the case (though if the winner wins on a technicality and really shouldn't have gone to court, then the court can rules so).
The penalty is generally fine X plus court cost Y. Mercy is considered being allowed to pay only court cost Y in return for either pleading guilty and not insisting on a trial, or for showing that you had ameliorated the initial violation.
For instance, in my client's case, he was ticketed for "following too close" when he slid into someone while traveling downhill DURING A BLACK ICE EVENT when literally no amount of safe following would have prevented a crash. Common occurrences of amelioration needed were things like fixing taillights or paying the car registration up to date.
This is something I've been thinking about for years as a possible solution in the US.
I've lived in Berlin, Germany since 2015, and before that lived in Krakow, Poland for two years. In all that time, I literally have never witnessed a traffic stop of a motorist by the police*. Traffic enforcement is all done exclusively with speed cameras from my experience. What that results in is a completely different relationship to the police. Police cars in Germany are going somewhere - presumably to respond to actual emergency calls. Every time I go back to visit the US (mostly in my hometown of Las Vegas and the Bay Area, CA), police cruisers seem to be prowling around the streets, monitoring pedestrians, veering in and out of lanes to run the plates of cars that piqued their attention. I think the mild invigilation of speeding cameras, is far preferable than the sort of slinking predator behaviors that traffic cops in the US exhibit. And of course when you add in the cops' reasonable expectation that a good number of American motorist will be armed, the arrangement seems perfectly designed for disastrous outcomes. Automate!
*I've been "pulled" over once in Berlin, but I was on a bike, and the policemen were also on bikes. I'd peddled through a red light at an empty intersection, they let me go with a warning.
The flip side of that—at least in the Netherlands—is that the only traffic laws that are enforced are the ones that can be automated, namely speeding (mostly on freeways) and parking.
You cannot walk a block in most Dutch cities without squeezing between cars parked on the sidewalk because parking enforcement, being automated, only fines you for not paying for or being properly permitted in an actual parking spot. I've watched people drive the wrong way down a one-way street—multiple times—in direct view of a cop and honk angrily at the cars going in the right direction. Once a delivery truck just said F-it and started playing chicken with the cars that were going in the right direction, which was funny, but super illegal! But my favorite are the numerous cars that drove over the sidewalk to access a road rather than going around the block—my favorite because said sidewalk was *directly across the street from the police station*.
Driving down a particular stretch of freeway where packs of state patrol cars used to hide behind a bridge during occasional speed enforcement campaigns and then pounce on unsuspecting motorists all going about the same speed, I used to imagine we drivers were a herd of zebras or buffalo or something, and they were lions or wolves hiding in wait, jumping out to pull down and eat an unlucky one.
The behavior of cops is really pathological, and it induces shocking pathologies in the civilians as well.
Believe me when I tell you that I am the most conventional-looking older white dude, with the most conventional CV and a spotless criminal record. I have never taken any drugs, and I have never fallen afoul of any laws other than traffic laws.
Still, when I see a red strobe in my rearview, I start sweating and shaking as though I were a particularly amateurish mule trying to get through customs with a kilo of something tucked under my shirt. I am, no exaggeration, terrified. Terrified of being pulled over, and of the whole dehumanizing, bullying, brutalizing ordeal that I am about to be out through.
Oh, and as for actual traffic-stops, I have only had maybe five in 50 years of driving. But they were each appallingly awful, and traumatizing.
Traffic stops are really, really bad, and I say that as an old white guy with, on paper, nothing to fear.
The thing is that it's so blatantly true that the police operate with total impunity and often in a completely arbitrary manner that I don't think there is anyone who has not internalized fear that things could go terribly wrong during a stop. In this way it really is a lot like getting mugged. Even the most pro-cop Blue-Lives-Matter assholes out there are cowed.
" Even the most pro-cop Blue-Lives-Matter assholes out there are cowed."
Hey, you didn't have to call me out by name like that!
But, yeah, it's the combination of arbitrariness, impunity, deadly force, lack of recourse, and the fact that nothing less than abject groveling can reduce your chance of getting shot in the head. The current policing regime forces ordinary people to act in a way that does not befit citizens of a free democracy.
Here's something that has vastly improved my interactions with everyone from police to fast-food workers: I realize they are all just normal people trying to get through daily grind, just like me. I try to show them a bit of kindness, respect, and, if needed, grace and hope I can receive the same in return.
So true. Bless your heart.
Yes true, they are just normal people - like the motorists being stopped. And that's why traffic stops can lead to horrible outcomes. The idea is to minimize human volatility as much as possible.
Just another example of how the blatant racism in American Life has poisoned the whole of society. For decades White people has known of what is happening to black people pulled over by the police and reassured themselves that "It can't happen to me". Only problem is that every time we see the cherries in the rear-view there is a crisis of confidence. "How do I know that the dog is trained".
I agree that racism poisons (pretty much) everything in American Life, but I do not think there was ever a time in my seven decades when I thought, "it can't happen to me," or "how do I know that dog is trained." I have always known *both* that American policing is incredibly racist, *and* that cops think that they have impunity in their dealings with all Americans, of all colors. In their minds, there is a strict hierarchy in which whites are above blacks, and cops are above all.
For me (and for most people I know, most of them white) there was never a crisis of confidence, because there was never the confidence you impute to us.
As a Brit, I know lots of people who got into real trouble when stopped by traffic cops in the US.
Here, if you are stopped by a cop, the first thing you do is to get out of the car and meet the cop between the two vehicles. Making them come to your window is the sort of thing that rich, arrogant people do, and cops resent it.
I've never been stopped in the US, but I know a bunch of people who have and they did what they would do here, and you can imagine how badly that went...
"The behavior of cops is really pathological"
Pathological - extreme in a way that is not normal or that shows an illness or mental problem OR relating to or caused by disease.
"Terrified of being pulled over, and of the whole dehumanizing, bullying, brutalizing ordeal that I am about to be out through."
Is this common? I had uh...a lead foot you might call it when I was younger, and have been pulled over (let's be vague to disguise how bad) say somewhere between 1 and over 100+ times in my life. (Very thankful there wasn't a point system back then)
I've never had this reaction like you describe. And I wouldn't describe any of them as "traumatizing." Annoying, frustrating, expensive (soo expensive), but even when they pulled me out and patted me down and held me for a while(totally deserved that one), it wasn't traumatizing.
A white police officer friend of mine in a Los Angeles suburb told me that even in his cop car, when a sherif car gets behind him he gets legitimately concerned. According to him, "Those guys will absolutely pull you over and put dirt on you."
He told me this after I had told him how they had(just) pulled me over(in my driveway) for no violation (said my car seemed out of place in the neighborhood). Searched my car for 30 minutes, sobriety tested me, and then let me go.
Sorry, but your story cannot be true.
I have it on excellent authority -- on this very thread! -- that my fears are due solely to my own pathology. So, there's no way that an LEO could have felt any anxiety about interactions with another LEO. One of you is mistaken.
Oh, I can beat that story too. At 13 years old(white, skinny, 85#) I was walking down a country road with a friend (in Tam Valley just north of S.F.). A police car stopped about 10 yards behind us so we both walked over to it. The officer said that he was looking for some young people that didn't match our description and had we seen them. He said they had thrown something at a passing car. We said we had not and he went on his way.
5 minutes later another cop car comes around the corner slams on its brakes sliding to a stop just behind us. The cop jumps out and runs toward us. He throws us on the hood of his car. I try to turn to explain that we just spoke to his fellow officer. To call his fellow officer. He pulls his service revolver, presses it deeply into my back and slams me face first back into the hood of his car. Moments later a call comes in on his radio and he races off without saying a word.
Honestly, my interactions with criminals and my least pleasant hitchhiking experiences have all been less dire than _many_ of my interactions with police.
"This is, in fact, solely your own pathology..."
Oh, thank god! I am so relieved to hear that.
I'm really grateful to you for having examined all 350 million other Americans to make sure that none of them feel the same way. Could you also share your findings with the other people down-thread who agree with me? Thx!
While I'm with Matt and Co that abolishing the police is a horrible idea, the meme that they act as a Gang is also mostly true at this point. It's a sad state of affairs.
Especially because I'm pretty sure it's safer for me to be speeding slightly along with every other car than be going the speed limit but 5-10 MPH slower than every other car.
When one firsts think automated enforcement one might think "but if we're all going the same speed, should we really all get tickets" ... but if automated enforcement were common, everyone would learn to actually follow the limit.
The police do that here mainly because of the drug war. It doesn't have much to do with traffic
Forget tickets. Civil asset forfeiture is bigger game for many departments. Google: seized cash
Often blamed on being drug related even if there are no drugs.
Agreed, I very much oppose civil asset forfeiture. It's government approved theft.
They never have drunk drivers in Germany?
Believe it or not even in China traffic enforcement is left mainly to cameras. (DUI enforcement being the major exception).
I think this article downplays the effectiveness of traffic calming/road diets. You make the roads narrow enough (protected bike lanes! Trees!) and the average speed will drop and there likely will be more buy-in for automated traffic enforcement since speeders are now a minority.
As it is, our speed limits are too low for how the road feels driving on it and too high for the safety of others, and so traffic tickets feel unfair.
If the speed limit aligns with what is reasonably considered a safe speed for road conditions, I'm fine with the automated enforcement. Two concerning situations: highways which are relatively low speed limit 55mph but are wide and easily driven 80 off hours (basically everything around Chicago), the same sort of highways in high traffic periods yet some folks insist on driving aggressively at the posted limit despite slower flow of traffic. Safe driving is not easily summarized by a posted speed limit or even following traffic signals. If the rules feel stupid the enforcement will be infuriating.
Agreed. There are too many joke speed limits out there.
It looks like Chicago is well aware of this, so for a while they only had automatic tickets for going 10 mph over the speed limit. Then they changed it to 6 and people got pissed off https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/ct-chicago-speed-camera-tickets-city-council-20210915-kihqqvn23ffpnjsqpm3aq45b7q-story.html
Even beyond highways, a lot of roads have dumb speed limits. A road near me recently had its speed limit lowered from 30 to 25 mph. No one follows it because it's a wide, straight road, and people know full well that it's safe to go faster. (Heck, I can break the speed limit on that road with my bike...)
The problem is all that requires engaging with locals who, more often than not, will stonewall anything like this.
Road diets are cool, but in SLC we have to wait for bond money to redesign the entire road or just do a repaint diet when the road just needs its surface redone (chip and seal).
It’s slow deliberate work and requires money, a committed transportation engineer, and not kicking the community hornet nest.
Protected bike lanes are astonishingly cheap. The point of the road diets Hadley is talking about is narrowing roads; this will happen if jersey barriers are installed to make bike lanes.
Just a small anecdote from driving in Estonia: speed cameras are common enough on major roads throughout the capital, Tallinn, and here and there on major roads into the outlying suburbs. Beyond that, they're pretty uncommon. Do they work? I'd say Yes. I certainly try to obey the traffic laws there, as opposed to the U.S., where I take the ethos of "drive the high end of the prevailing speed," but "drive courteously" and "drive the speed limit on neighborhood streets." White privilege, as Matt's article now makes me reflect. :(
Anyway, back to Estonia: Ticket issuance is instantaneous -- the owner of the car (my wife!) gets a text on her phone within like a minute that a driver of her car (me!) just ran a yellow-red light or was photographed speeding at location X and that a ticket in the amount of Y euros needs to be paid via the link below. Tickets are steeply scaled by first offense, second offense, etc. I suspect they can handle a couple kph over the limit, but not the unofficial 10% over that one hopes for in an American speed trap. Long story short, it really took the bounce out of this tigger as a driver and I think that's a good thing; it sort of reoriented my relation to habitual speeding.
One elephant in the room here is (anecdotally very common) areas where the average speed of traffic exceeds the posted limit. I'm sure the question of what the speed limit "should" be is complicated in all sorts of wonky ways. But I think one reason speed cameras are unpopular is that spotty human enforcement is a partial workaround for "unreasonable" limits, and enforcing those limits mechanically and consistently makes people angry. It might be that any broad deployment of speed cameras needs to go hand in hand with a broad audit of existing speed limits, and maybe some reform in how those limits are set?
Speaking as someone who is at the business end of the bumper, drivers are poor judges of what speed is reasonable. "Reasonable" means "fast, and I don't care about the pedestrians and bicyclists I might hit." When we audit speeds, we should be open to lowering them.
I agree that many speed limits are unreasonable.
I would still oppose any automation because I don't want to expand the surveillance state.
This contention is and will always be patently ridiculous, and you know it.
Whether this is your intention or not:
"I don't want to expand the surveillance state"
Actually means, in practice:
"I don't want to be subject to ANY standard of justice or law, and I am willing to have my less fortunate neighbors be brutalized regularly to preserve my immunity."
That is how the status quo works.
Uniform and less brutal enforcement might mean the government knows you hit 90 on I-95 last month and get you a $25 fine, but it also means the poor single mom with a broken taillight is told to fix it instead of getting a $250 fine that she can't pay and lands her a contempt of court charge, a week in jail, and a lost job.
I think the more reasonable version of this argument is that it is the responsibility of those who would like to expand surveillance as criminal deterrence to prove that this new power will not be misused. The track record of local, state and (particularly) federal governments on this point is not good.
Why should we assume that the implementation of this system will be done well, in which case we will improve on the status quo, rather than poorly/cruelly, in which case the downside on the status quo is significant?
"Why should we assume that the implementation of this system will be done well, in which case we will improve on the status quo, rather than poorly/cruelly, in which case the downside on the status quo is significant?"
Frankly, for the same reason that we should assume that marijuana would be quickly legalized if laws against it were enforced with the same fervor against rich prep school kids as they are against poor public school ones.
Laws that are universally enforced are subject to massive political pressure in favor of moderate/reasonable outcomes. The only democratic states able to sustain punitive legal consequences for minor offenses are those which don't apply the offenses frequently or uniformly.
You're still conflating two issues. I agree that the status quo is unevenly enforced and suboptimal. I am also amenable to the argument that the government is liable to severely misuse a thorough surveillance and identification apparatus.
As far as I'm concerned it is the responsibility of expansion proponents to assuage those fears, not the responsibility of status quo proponents to assume the best. That is the burden that comes with demanding change.
I'm not sure what "two issues" could possibly be "conflated" in the above argument, but let me make a run at it again:
The only way to make the rules uniform, when it comes to traffic enforcement, is to either not enforce them or enforce them everywhere.
If you don't enforce them, there will be considerable pressure to do so, because I think we all know that will create an unsustainable and dangerous situation.
If you enforce them everywhere, but continue to have punitive fines, jail time, and other severe punishments for minor offenses, you will face public pressure to dial the punishments down.
It will not be possible, in a democratic society, to make punishments both universal and draconian, because the electorate will not stand for it. As such, it is reasonable to assume that we will, in the parlance you use above, implement this reform well.
Why would the rich care though about those minor fines. That's just the cost of the commute.
I'd expect that after a number of violations, the consequences would ramp up non-linearly, eventually ending with loss of driving privileges. Isn't that the way it works now? For me "your insurance is going to go up" has always been more than adequate insurance, so I haven't tested this.
In an ideal world, negative externalities of speeding could be balanced via a tax that even ambulances and police cars should pay.
In an emergency, anyone could be empowered to speed as necessary. Reduce centralized decision making.
Your and my definitions of "ideal" vary somewhat.
What counts as misused here? My understanding is something like:
- When I'm driving on public roads, I'm in plain site of anyone. Everyone can see how I'm driving.
- I'm subject to surveillance by the police (in that the can park their cars on the side of the road and watch me, or drive on the same streets and watch me) now. There's no expectation of privacy.
- What's changing in going from cop cars to robots is _capacity_.
So I'm not sure what right of mine I'd hope to cling to in saying that robot traffic enforcement is not okay. "I have a right to be mostly not surveilled due to resource constraints" doesn't seem like a real defense.
("I'm annoyed because in the old system I was mostly not surveilled due to resource constraints" seems like what I will actually think if it happens, but that's me being grumpy.)
""I don't want to be subject to ANY standard of justice or law, and I am willing to have my less fortunate neighbors be brutalized regularly to preserve my immunity.""
No that's not what it means. I'm very familiar with the legal system. I've served 10 months behind bars for some BS that shouldn't even be a crime.
That doesn't mean I will support draconian solutions that make the police state worse.
More government monitoring of people is NEVER the answer. Moreover, are you really so naïve that you think the police state will suddenly turn kind and gentle now that they have even more power, and can monitor you all the time???
And even if by some magical chance that happened, it's still not worth it to me. I'm quite sure that if we put camera's everywhere and had the government monitoring everything, crime would go down. But I think giving government that much power is the worse crime. I don't want to live in that society.
I think 1984 was a warning not a guide book.
You’ve tried this argument with me several times, and each time I point out the fundamental hole: given the ease and secrecy with which information can now be gathered, you’re naive or perhaps delusional to believe the government doesn’t already have access to whatever it wants to know, whenever it wants to know it.
There is no point in pretending otherwise and I am not going to humor any argument which does so pretend, not for even a second.
So if the government is going to do bad things we should just say ok?
I sat make it illegal, and if we catch them breaking the law gold them accountable.
The only way to prevent the government from "doing bad things" with the data it already has is to acknowledge it has it and regulate what it can do with it and how it can publicize it.
Period.
No libertarian claptrap you come up with is going to change my mind on the matter, because it's all patently delusional.
Moreover, as Bsupnik pointed out above, I have no right to privacy when in public. Period. Never have. No conception of the word, in history, has been that broad.
Have you not noticed, for instance, that virtually every signaled intersection in the country is being retrofitted with a camera for license-plate reading to track kidnapping and violent crime suspects?
So this is a binary choice:
A. Enforce the law well and even-handedly by permitting a narrow use of information the government already has.
Or
B. Enforce the law capriciously and brutally by forcing the government to pretend it doesn't have better data.
Those are the only two options. No other option is possible. So which will it be?
Google Maps already knows how fast everyone drives...
Google maps can't send men with guns to my house.
Also, it's pretty easy to turn off your phone, or even to not own a smart phone (the horror). You can't opt out of a government surveillance program like MY proposes
Because I already have a startup, I can't do this one, but somebody should....
Create a car insurance company, let's call it Snitchr, where you give people with a safe record insurance for free. The catch is that you have to put a dashcam in your car that captures the speed of all cars in it's immediate area and uploads it to the underwriting database.
Snitchr then turns around and syndicates the data to other insurance companies for a fee, who then turn around and raise the rates based on the data. Win/win for the driver, for whom bad drivers are subsidizing their insurance - and the industry, as they now have a far superior database on which to underwrite compared to "who got a speeding ticket"
Nothing stops you, because it is 100% legal to take a picture of people and cars in public. I know there are a couple states that heavily regulate exactly what you can underwrite on, but I assume that insurance companies are clever and can use their clout to work around those.
If my own startup didn't already have its seed round, I would literally be personally standing something like this up. If you do start it, let me know, I have angel money ready to deploy.
Also, you don't want free. People will sign up and steal the dashcams.
You want cheap insurance. Very cheap.
Yeah, basically you have to make it the cost of the dashcam, which thankfully can be done cheap at reasonable scale.
I always wanted a rearward facing camera with AI detection for cop headlights and a mesh network to other nearby similarly equip cars. At least in California, the Supreme Court has repeatedly stated that identifying the presence of police is protected 1st amendment speech. I guess that "Waze" comes close to this except it's forward facing eyeballs.
Yup, just make the camera 360 degrees, much like what you already see on the self-driving cars today. The tech is here and it works... just needs to be deployed.
Eh, if the data was actually worth that much to an insurer they would simply require that you attach one of their little black boxes to your car in return for providing any coverage.
Insurers have a pretty good sense of how fast and how well or poorly we all drive, and they charge everyone accordingly. They're probably not that interested in differentiating by actual individual driving habits. See for instance their use of credit ratings for setting individual rates. If you have crappy credit you pay substantially more, even though that clearly has nothing to do with how good or bad a driver is.
A bunch of insurers do give discounts for the little black boxes. Especially for younger or inexperienced drivers.
Yeah, my fiancee does this. She keeps shopping around her insurance, so I don't know what she has now, but I remember she's had both GEICO and Progressive and they both gave her the box (I think, I've never seen it) and the discount (how, I don't know, she drives like a demon).
Metromile does this already - clearly precedent for measuring the speed/habits of the driver. This just cranks it up to 11, while creating a pretty epic network effect.
Hell, you are reporting people who are committing an offence. You could also pass the data to the police.
If nobody paid for the data, I'd just have the startup open the data and let God sort it out.
As it turns out, given how people actually drive, it is exactly what we need.
And the good news is that there is nothing the law can do about it, since public photography is a very well established right that isn't going away anytime soon.
Eliminating traffic stops for a host of administrative problems also has a number of knock on benefits. Busted tail light, speed, etc. could all be handled through video/photo and a mailed citation. This eliminates not only the cop having to worry about a violent interaction with a motorist, and vice versa. It also takes off the board a host of other awful cop tricks. Oops, is that a baggie of pot on your back seat? Any number of awful civil forfeiture practices go out the door if the cops aren't physically involved in the process. Give the cops less chance to let bad apples do their thing, and give all of them less chance for a random violent interaction and free them up to do useful stuff.
For the rest of the issues raised here, almost all of those are fixable and I'd be willing to bet have been fixed elsewhere.
I completely agree with Matt's core diagnosis, and his proposed solution. However, I find his focus on race off-target. Yes, it is wise to take actions that reduce unwarranted police violence, but in my view by focusing on the issue of "racial justice" when addressing a problem that involves better policing, better law enforcement, better community relations, and safer streets reflects a contemporary pathology within the Democratic party.
Too funny! This is a point that you can find MY himself making in many tweets, and probably a few SB posts as well.
In a way it's kind of ironic, I suppose.
Agree, white people, especially to the extent they're generally higher up the economic ladder probably have fewer interactions with the police, but those interactions are probably not nice, they're just less "unnice." Police in this country see themselves as almost separate from the society in which they operate. Fixing that culture will be a long hard process, so the more we reduce it the better we'll be.
As with so much of your thinking about these issues, I agree in principal but I suspect that you're assuming a spherical cow: namely, a police department that can actually be trusted to do its job.
Here in your former hometown, everyone who cares has figured out that the way you dodge the speed cameras is simple: you deface your license plate so that the cameras can't read it. If you're _really_ motivated, you can order fake temporary tags from NJ or TX on Instagram that are "valid" in the sense that they're in the dealership databases for those states but are not in any way connected to your real identity. Et voila: blow through any speed trap you care to with impunity, and park your car anywhere that they're not going to tow you.
The obvious solution would be to tow cars with defaced plates and which have been sporting the same temp tag for over a week, but there's the rub: the NYPD themselves are the biggest and most regular scofflaws of such rules, and have no intention of enforcing them. So the rules are only, in the end, enforced against people who would have complied with the law in the first place. Everyone else enjoys a culture of accepted corruption, except of course for mere pedestrians and bicyclists, who continue to be maimed and killed in ever-increasing numbers because as a city and a country we believe that nothing is more important than the convenience and enjoyment of automobile owners.
" pedestrians and bicyclists, who continue to be maimed and killed in ever-increasing numbers because as a city and a country we believe that nothing is more important than the convenience and enjoyment of automobile owners."
And here we get to one of the central roots of the problem.
Cops in the Netherlands or Germany are not necessarily less racist than cops in the States. But the culture is not so insanely car-centric. We suffer from multiple reinforcing pathologies here -- racism, police impunity, and bizarre car-centrism, too.
“ except of course for mere pedestrians and bicyclists”
Let’s not pretend New York cyclists and pedestrians are innocent here. The disrespect for rules of the road in NYC is global. I’ve never seen a place where pedestrians are so bewildered by the concept of protected turns, for instance. As soon as the light changes in a direction, they just wander into the crosswalk, often headphones in doing their so important New York things.
You do realize that this is completely legal, and that turning cars are obligated to yield the right of way to pedestrians in the crosswalk, right? https://dmv.ny.gov/about-dmv/chapter-5-intersections-and-turns
"Protected turns are made at signal-controlled intersections when a green arrow light is present. When a turn is protected, all other streams of traffic, cyclists and pedestrians are halted by red traffic signals"
Again, apparently a novel concept many people haven't heard of.
Have you ever actually *been* to New York? Protected turns are damned rare compared to the rest of the US.
There are a relative handful of locations with protected lefts, and virtually zero protected rights.
If you wanted to bitch about Philadelphia, then sure, you've got a bit more of a leg to stand on.
I'm well aware of what a protected turn signal _is_. I'm not sure what the quote marks in your comment are supposed to indicate, but you are not quoting from the NY DMV website as far as I can tell. As far as the law in NY state is concerned, drivers are required to avoid hitting pedestrians at all times. If checking to see that your path is clear of people who will die or be seriously injured if you hit them when you're making a turn is too difficult or arduous, perhaps driving is not for you.
(Also I'm wracking my brain to think of where there's a protected right turn signal south on the island of manhattan and coming up with basically zilch, and can only think of a handful of protected lefts.)
I've been on your side in this thread, but in NYS crosswalks are distinct from the general obligation to not hit pedestrians for a reason. People run across 50 mph roads. I swerve and brake and do my best not to kill them, but if the day comes when I hit the highway sprinter, I will not for a second feel guilty for not yielding to the lowly pedestrian with a death wish.
We can use the money from the traffic tickets to re-engineer the roads so that pedestrians who need to cross a 50 mph road don't have to walk a mile out of their way to do it.
Look, I'm not unaware of the laws of physics here: if someone sprints across the FDR, they're taking their life into their hands and the best-intentioned and aware driver in the world is going to potentially have a hard time not hitting them.
But OP was complaining about pedestrians in crosswalks, crossing with the light.
"drivers are required to avoid hitting pedestrians at all times"
This is true. But that doesn't mean pedestrians get to walk in the road at any time they want either
I was also confused by "as soon as the light changes in a direction." If you meant jaywalking just say jaywalking.
Jaywalking is much more dangerous when you don't understand the traffic pattern but think you do.
"Let’s not pretend New York cyclists and pedestrians are innocent here."
Yeah, good point. And since we already know they're not innocent, I approve of the fact that we have granted every car owner the right to execute them on the spot, without any later judicial review.
Look, I wish that cyclists and pedestrians in NYC were as well-behaved as their counterparts in Europe are. But the pedestrians and the cyclists are not in the driver's seat, literally or metaphorically: they are not the source of the madness on NYC streets. That comes from the crazed killer ethos among cars, the exasperated impatience and hair-trigger rage that they manifest at the smallest impediment to their driving 80mph in mid-town.
You know that old joke ha ha not a joke about how men are afraid that women will laugh at them, and women are afraid that men will kill them? Well, cyclists might make a car 10 seconds late to the next stoplight. Cars will make the cyclist on time for their own funeral.
And then the cops will write up a ticket saying that it was the cyclist's fault. Yeah, they're not innocent, are they.
> to their driving 80mph in mid-town.
lol at the idea of breaking 30mph in midtown before 10pm
That's my point: they are in a constant state of rage because they are *trying* to hit 80mph and the conditions do not allow it.
(And people come damned close on the FDR, though maybe that does not count as mid-town even when it's running alongside mid-town.)
The FDR absolutely does not count as midtown, especially in threads concerned with the ordinary NYC pedestrian who crosses roads with the citywide 25mph speed limit.
The typical enraged NYC driver is frustrated that they can't break 10mph, have to dodge double-parked cars, and can't enter an intersection with a blocked box (because blocking the box is the ideal, if antisocial, strategy).
So STOP DRIVING IN MANHATTAN, FOR FUCK'S SAKE.
Why the hell anyone would ever feel bringing a private vehicle into Manhattan was a good idea is completely beyond me, and I certainly don't feel that the city's traffic regulations and transportation infrastructure should in any way cater to such people.
In fact, let's just implement Singapore's congestion pricing scheme across the whole city, fencing off 3-4 increasingly expensive zones as you get closer to Midtown and Lower Manhattan.
"The FDR absolutely does not count as midtown,..."
Sure, I agree it's different from Lex. But it is relevant to the mindset of drivers, because the possibility of blasting up the FDR is *just* out of reach when they're stuck on Lex. That's the expectation that conditions their frustration.
And are they trying to hit 80mph? Well, they take off from a dead start with the kind of acceleration that would get you to 80mph in 200 yards -- if they did not immediately hit another red light in 100 yards. It's a stupid game, and it creates a mass psychosis.
Every aspect of the US big-city traffic nightmare -- even the bad behavior on the part of the bikes (which Atrios complains about, as a pedestrian and cyclist, in Philly) -- starts with the constant road-rage of the drivers, road-rage as a way of life, with a side-helping of entitlement. "How dare anyone interfere with my god-given right to drive instantly anywhere I want?"
"I approve of the fact that we have granted every car owner the right to execute them on the spot, without any later judicial review."
Who argued that?
Let's just ba... COUGH COUGH cough *congestion price the fuck out of*... private automobiles in NYC and be done with it.
Why don't those dealerships get hit with the fine then? I assume if I get an automated ticket in a rental car, the rental agency will get fined, and they'll just pass it on to me.
Gotta _find_ the bastards to issue a summons, and usually there's nothing but an empty lot and tumbleweeds at their official location. Also traffic enforcement is the lowest rung of the NYPD hierarchy and as a rule does not have the resources to run inter-state investigations.
That said it occasionally happens: https://nypost.com/2021/08/05/used-car-king-of-ny-busted-in-paper-license-plate-scam/
> If you're _really_ motivated, you can order fake temporary tags from NJ or TX on Instagram that are "valid" in the sense that they're in the dealership databases for those states but are not in any way connected to your real identity.
Wait, is THAT why I've seen so many dealer plates from NJ?!
Yup. It's a total scam, mostly coming from "ghost dealerships" that stopped selling physical cars years ago, but kept their license and logins to the state temporary tag database and are now 100% in the business of selling fake dealer plates.
Apparently not everybody if people have lobbied for camera detected speeding not to hit one's insurance rates. :)
Are the traffic fines in NY set at the levels of "we only catch some of you" or have they been lowered?
If the penalty for speeding was lower but for having fake tags was higher - might this change?
Fines from automatic cameras are capped at $50/ticket last I looked. I'm not sure what the hand-written tickets clock in at, but I also don't think I have ever seen one written in my neighborhood.
Right now the penalty for fake tags is de facto zero: there is no significant enforcement against them.
Great article. Real-world example of this. My wife is from Montgomery County, MD, one of the wealthiest counties in the country, and she loves telling the story of how they got a lot of automated speed traps. There was apparently a push to get them by residents "to catch all the out-of-towners that are speeding around here." Take what you will "out-of-towners" to mean. Once they implemented the automated speed traps, the vast, vast majority of tickets were from the wealthy residents! Luckily the speed traps are still there...
This is what I love about the cameras. Half of the people saying "but this will penalize the poor" argue that in bad faith when they damn well know that being white and driving a nice car is the best way to not be pulled over by the cops... and that usually the drivers getting away with really bad driving are rich dudes who think rules of normal society just don't apply to them.
It's the "SATs are racist" bullshit all over again.
The professional classes know damned well they can cultivate even their dumbest kids to blow through "holistic" admissions processes better than poor Asian immigrant families (or Caribbean, or any other high-educational-attainment group) and they've enlisted Hispanic and Black folk as willing dupes by lying their asses off about the implications of the data we have.
The net effect will be to completely couple admissions to parental wealth, but when that becomes clear in 10 years, they'll pivot and find some new "metric that will fix everything" and repeat the process.
I don’t understand the concern about identifying the driver. If someone borrows your car and parks in front of a fire hydrant the car gets a ticket. It doesn’t matter who parked it there. How is that any different than speeding?
If someone parks my car in front of a fire hydrant, I get a fine, but nothing happens to my license/insurance.
If I get caught speeding, that goes on my record and my insurance rates go up, even if I wasn't driving.
A couple of knock-on thoughts there:
1) This can be part of "reduced penalties if we catch you more often". If these are caught more often, then perhaps insurance cares less about it, or we stop reporting it to insurance, or it doesn't affect my license as much.
2) To the extent that my car insurance covers my _car_ - letting someone else drive it who is speeding actually _is_ relevant to my insurance company.
You can lose your license for getting too many speeding tickets, at least in some states.
Probably somewhat relates to this:
"In order for a camera speeding ticket to affect your insurance, it would have to put points on your license or be added to your driving record. Arizona, California and Oregon are currently the only states that treat camera tickets in the same way as regular moving violations. Ten states don’t use speeding cameras at all, and nine states – including New York and North Carolina – explicitly ban insurers from raising rates based on speeding camera tickets."
Yup, 99.9% of the time, you are either getting the driver, or you are getting someone else, for which after the first couple automated tickets, the owner of the car will wisely bend the arm of the person who drives but does not own the car.
Getting fined and your insurance jacked up is a nice incentive to not let idiots drive your car.
It strikes me that this issue, like many Matt writes about, is one that has a clear, technocratic solution. The solution's beneficiaries are disperse, and its antagonists are select and vocal.
I live in a small-medium city, and I'm trying to imagine how I would go about fighting for automated traffic enforcement. A lot of people are going to be against it. As I commented on Monday, lots of people don't like any laws at all. I'm curious how systems like this get put in place. Maybe I'll write our council and see what they say.
"As I commented on Monday, lots of people don't like any laws at all..." for other people, added the narrator.
The "hands off my!" "how dare you regulate my!" crowd are very often the same people as the "there oughta be a law against those people!" "we need to get tough on those people!" crowd.
Everyone who drives faster than me is an idiot, and everyone who drives more slowly is a jerk.
(than me) -> (than I)
If I didn't post a correction it was going to bug me.
Everyone whose grammar is less precise than mine is illiterate; everyone who writes fancier than me has a stick up their ass.
"Writes fancier than I [write]"
Well, I can tell that you're not referring to NYC traffic if you think that "idiot" and "jerk" are the relevant terms of abuse.
Mayor says she's not sure if it's legal in NC, and she forwarded it to the City Lawyer.
This is a common response to my emails to City Council. They love nothing more than to deflect blame to North Carolina State Govt. or NCDOT. I'm not sure if my problem is that I live in a Republican dominated state or if my city govt. is gaslighting me by eschewing all responsibility...or both!
Shocker: it's prohibited by statue in NC except in specific areas! Cool.
Got to say, the most impressive part of this is that the mayor (and others!) responded to you in an hour or two.
Yes, that is an admirable example of governmental accountability!
I've been surprised how quickly council/mayor gets back to me when I email them. I guess I should be happier! Unfortunately, they always get back quickly to say, "sorry, that problem is as immutable as the rising sun."
Maybe you could take it up with your neighbors and friends and get a little movement going?
It does seem to align with how you described the local mindset of de-policing. But maybe there's too little support for "rules should be enforced" as you also said.
Well, If we're being blocked by a very gerrymandered state legislature that hates our little outlier Dem city, I think that it's going to be a heavy lift. Sigh.
"and the only way to do that [reduce speeding] is with rigorous speeding enforcement."
My only quibble would be that many think that better street design, more focused on pedestrians and bikers, would lead to more reasonable car speeds. Strongtowns and a bunch of bike and urban design focused youtube channels are big on this.
Street design is good, but I think you still fundamentally need rules that are enforced.
This is true and lots of municipalities have implemented this. One issue is that traffic calming measures, as they're sometimes called, cost money, where traffic cops, and traffic cameras make money.
Also some people barrel through narrow streets and get air from speed bumps. Those people need to be fined.
Is it possible that if this policy proposal was implemented, it would have the unintended effect of increasing crime.
Does the fear of a random police stop prevent bad guys from committing more crimes?
If you know that there was no chance of you being pulled over, would you be more likely to carry illegal weapons? Would you load your trunk up with more drugs to traffic?
We pretend that the only externality of police stops is bad police stops, people being killed for no reason, etc... (yes this happens)... but I am willing to bet that police get lucky as well. Pull over the felon with a guy, get the drug trafficker.
Note: I am being a devil's advocate here... I am not against Matt's proposal, I just think that we need to acknowledge reality. We need to at least discuss the tradeoffs.
If the benefits of random stops outweigh the costs, then we should just do random stops without the pretext of pulling someone over for a violation. If who they stop is actually random and not at the officer's discretion, there will be no bias.
Where's the probable cause of violating people's rights?
I'm not a lawyer, so I can't speak to the constitutional issues, but morally, not being stopped randomly doesn't seem like an inviolable natural right. There are many much more onerous impositions we accept for the greater good. It's just a question of is the benefit is enough to justify it. It probably isn't. I definitely don't think searching random cars to occasionally find drugs is justified.
"The right of the people to be secure...against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation."
~IVth Amendment.
"I solemnly swear that the random number generator picked this guy" is not probable cause.
(IANAL)
Cops need a reason to pull you over. And definitely need a reason to do more than that. That's why New York stop and frisk policies were unconstitutional IMHO
That could be possible. I don't know the data.
I'm against drug laws so that would be a feature not a bug to me.
But I'm still against the expansion of the surveillance state
Yes... but this position only makes sense if we had legalization, and then enforcement of the legal entities.
Some portion of murders/crime are a direct result of competition in the drug trade. Or at the very least, the profits fund the guns/crime.
Then if you legalize it... do you then enforce the legal monopoly?
Yes I think so, you treat it like you do alcohol.