Comment by rahkiin
19 hours ago
In europe we use traffic cameras for this. Going through red light? A bill is in your mailbox automatically. No need for a whole police station.
19 hours ago
In europe we use traffic cameras for this. Going through red light? A bill is in your mailbox automatically. No need for a whole police station.
In Massachusetts, USA, red light cameras were illegal until very recently, due to a 70s era law specifying that a live policeman had to issue a citation for something like that. From well before traffic cameras were common.
Before they were common, yes, but they existed in active use back in the 1960s in the Netherlands: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_enforcement_camera
Put a single live policeman in front of 100 camera screens
We had a pilot program in NJ for them, they were universally hated. People would slam brakes on and be hanging over the edge into intersection and throw their car into reverse panicking to avoid the ticket, ended up causing a ton of new accidents so the program was never continued. In newark people shot at the cameras: https://www.nj.com/news/2012/08/shoot_out_the_red_lights_2_t...
That's an insufficient yellow phase rather than a camera problem. Not sure why NJ would think their population are special snowflakes that can't deal with red light cameras otherwise.
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Hitting the brakes and getting rear ended is barely even a crash compared to T-boning someone or plowing over pedestrians
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Sounds like NJ has some terrible drivers
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Thankfully sawzalls are cheap and plentiful so people can use much safer practices to disable/remove them:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/parkside-drive-speed-...
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We have them in the US too, but it varies widely by jurisdiction because they're regulated at the state level and policed at the local level.
Oh and it's not a bill, it goes through the legal system so people have the right to argue it in court if they want.
NYC is ramping up on this as well.
https://www.nyc.gov/site/finance/vehicles/red-light-camera-v...
Here in my country they removed the cameras in the second largest city after a trial period. It took too much effort to filter out police colleagues running a red (in police or civilian vehicles).
Ah that is easy here. 1) civilian vehicles never get leeway 2) we know the license plates of all police cars so we just filter it. Or actually only do so when they use proper permission to run a light
In most the USA, or at least Arizona, you have to serve someone. Just dropping something in a mail box doesn't mean dick. The very people that invented the traffic cameras up in Scottsdale were caught dodging the process servers from triggers from their own camera.
Another words, you have to spend hundreds of dollars chasing someone down, by the time you add that on to how easy it is to jam up the ticket in court by demanding an actual human being accuse you, it's not the easy win some may think. You're basically looking at $500+ to try and prosecute someone for a $300 ticket.
NY is not Arizona. They have the plate and send the fine to whomever the vehicle is registered to. If the fine isn't paid they flag the plate and impound the car if it's driven in their state.
In FL, a speed camera can give a car's owner can a ticket without needing to know he was the driver. Your perspective is not true nation wide.
"The registered owner of the motor vehicle involved in the violation is responsible and liable for paying the uniform traffic citation issued for a violation"
http://www.leg.state.fl.us/Statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Displ...
That seems completely fucked to me. Charging people who aren't guilty of any crime with a crime because somebody else was driving their car?
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Arizona also did stakeouts to try and catch this guy:
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna32806142
In CO we have automatic traffic cameras, and to my knowledge they just mail you the ticket, which is usually only a fine (and no license points). Its one of those “automatic plea” tickets where if you fight it, you fight (and risk conviction on) the actual offense, while if you just pay the ticket it will automatically get downgraded to a less serious offense (IE parking outside the lines).
I live in AZ, try driving on Lincoln in Paradise Valley. Everyone is going at 40mph because of the speed cameras. Most people don't want to be fugitives.
I sometimes use Tatum with PV's speed vans parked on the side of the road to head towards downtown Phx and, yes, the common speed is definitely around 40. But pretty much as soon as past McDonald and on 44th St, I resume the the normalized 7-8 mph over the posted limit because I know there are no more speed cameras.
Not in New Jersey. I visited my parents and didn’t stop for a full three seconds before making a right on red on a deserted road at night and they fined my dad.
This isn't true we've had plenty of programs where red light camera tickets were rolled out.
Voters just really don't like them.
They were rolled out but the mailed tickets are legally meaningless, someone has to actually hunt you down within a short timespan (I think 90 days) to create any binding requirement to address it.
https://rideoutlaw.com/photo-radar-tickets-in-arizona-a-comp...
Sweden: Their locations are public. There is even an official API.
They are mostly located in sane places.
Apps like Waze consume this API and warn drivers if they’re at risk of getting caught. It’s the deterrence/slowdown at known risky spots they’re after, not the fine, I guess.
I heard that apps warning drivers this way are illegal in Germany?
Aside: what's up with the traffic speed cameras in Sweden? It feels like they're not designed to catch anybody. In my recent drive there it seemed like most of the cameras were in an 80 zone just before it switch to 50 for a tiny town. They wouldn't catch a typical driver who does something like 10 over everywhere -- they would likely have already started slowing down for the 50.
In my city in Canada, that camera would be in the 50 zone.
The typical driver who does something like 10 over everywhere is probably not the biggest safety hazard.
When I lived in a small town in Sweden, the problem was that at night some drivers would blow down the country roads and straight through the small towns at crazy speeds assuming that there was nobody around. On some nights/weekends there were also zero police on duty in the whole municipality, they would have to be called in from a neighboring, larger, municipality.
Because the point is to slow the traffic down, not to extract revenue from the peasantry.
Same as the difference between an obvious speed trap and a "gotcha" speed trap.
I think the general idea is strategic speed shaping before spots where lethal accidents are likely.
So nudging, sort of. There’s a lot of public support for that.
The problem with traffic cameras in the US was that they became outsourced revenue enhancement rather than public safety.
The cameras would get installed at busy intersections with lots of minor infractions to collect fines on rather than unsafe intersections that had lots of bad accidents. And then, when the revenue was insufficient, they would dial down the yellow light time.
Consequently, and rightly, Americans now immediately revolt against traffic cameras whenever they appear.
(San Diego was one particularly egregious example. They installed the cameras on the busy freeway interchange lights when the super dangerous intersection that produced all the T-bone accidents was literally one traffic light up the hill. This infuriated everybody.)