Comment by appreciatorBus
2 days ago
The comparison to private ships doesn't quite land, IMO.
Ships - ships big enough to do material damage would be very small in # - ships big enough to do material damage would have a (somewhat?) professional crew - whatever damage they could do would always be limited to tiny areas - only where water & land meet, only where substantial public or private investment had been made in docks/etc - operators have strong financial incentive to avoid damaging ship or 3rd party property (public or private)
Cars - in some countries the ratio of cars to people is approaching 1 - a vanishingly small portion of vehicles have professional drivers - car operators expect to be able to operate at velocities fatal to others on nearly 100% of land in cities, excepting only land that already has a building on it, and sometimes not even that. - car operators rarely held liable for damage to public property, injury, or death and there's strong political pressure to socialize damage and avoid realistic risk premiums
I don't love flock but IMO the only realistic way to get rid of license plates would be mandatory speed governors that keep vehicles from going more than like 15mph. I would be fine with that, but I suspect most would not. If we expect to operate cars at velocities fatal to people outside our vehicles, then there will always be pressure to have a way of identifying bad actors who put others at risk.
> I don't love flock but IMO the only realistic way to get rid of license plates would be mandatory speed governors that keep vehicles from going more than like 15mph.
I don't understand this reasoning. License plates don't stop speeding from happening. Removing license plates wouldn't prevent enforcement of speed limits either. A cop can pull over and ticket someone without a license plate just as easily as they do now.
At best they're good for a small number of situations where they help identify a car used in a crime (say a hit and run) but even then plenty of crimes are committed using cars that can't be linked back to the driver (stolen for example) or where the plates have been removed/obscured.
I’m not arguing that license plates solve the problem of the danger of cars, simply that as long as cars are dangerous to people not inside the car, there will be political pressure to have some way, however imperfect, of identifying them and their owners/operators.
Even the least sophisticated criminals know that you should buy a stolen Kia or Hyundai for ~$100 and use that to commit your crime. I suspect most of the crime these Flock cameras are catching is red-light runners and maybe hit and runs if it happens to be caught on camera.
A hit and runner hit me in front of such camera and totalled my truck. Police refused to investigate, they're not interested in using camera for such reasons nor is there much incentive that's in it for the police to do so.