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.
"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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
"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.
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.
Yglesias: We should do things that are popular!
Also Yglesias: Robots will fine you for going 40 in a 35.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
"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.
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.