Comment by egorfine
13 hours ago
> Another example is road traffic law. Even just speeding offences, I think you probably catch everyone who actually drives in the UK, often enough that after a month the only people left allowed to drive would be people like me who don't even own a car.
You don't have to strip the driving licenses. You should impose a fine and not an extremely painful one for starters.
And then probably within less than a year the whole population will drive properly.
I think I'm in favor of indiscriminately fining everyone speeding at every camera, but I realize there is no privacy-preserving way to do it today thus I will be against it.
(I'm a driver and car lover who is never speeding)
That's covered by "system has to be radically changed". UK driving licences give you room for 12 "penalty points" worth of mistakes before you risk being banned from the road, of which speeding costs you at least 3: https://www.gov.uk/penalty-points-endorsements/endorsement-c...
Indeed. 4 strikes and you are out seems fine to me (as a UK driver). You can also opt to take a speed awareness course in leu of the points, I believe
4 strikes today with current speed enforcement is fine; 4 strikes in a hypothetical where 100% of infractions are caught, I aver will catch (almost) everyone who actually drives within a month.
2 replies →
I dunno. We got car insurance once that had a "put this spy device in your car for a couple weeks for a lower rate" deal and I felt like I was driving a lot less-safely when I was constantly worried about looking like I was driving safely.
Like, to pick an example that's specifically speed-limit related, if more people really tried hard to do 25MPH (the marked speed limit on many of them) or under for the entire length of an interstate off-ramp, I think we'd be spending more money on brake pads and there'd be a lot more cars getting rear-ended. Sticking to that speed the entire length is silly and not very safe, and things work just fine without people doing that. Tons of other edge cases like that where you're technically breaking some law or another for a little while, but things work way better if you do. Plus practically every one of these laws has some kind of judgement-call clause that applies to modify it, and I don't want the people making those judgement calls to know that if they do what seems right to them in the moment, there's a very high likelihood they'll be hassled for it.
I've never seen an interstate off-ramp in the US with a 25MPH speed limit (white sign). I've seen 25MPH advisories (yellow sign), but those aren't a legal limit. Advisory signs are the maximum safe speed for the worst possible conditions (road covered in ice).
I otherwise agree.
I have to kind of agree with you on all points here.
The point he’s making that people violate the letter of the law in many, many small ways, and to prosecute people for all of them would be a crippling burden on both individuals and the economy.
If speeding is not something that happens constantly, then a radar could detect the instances of speeding, and only turn on a camera when a speeding car is nearby. This would keep the majority of passing cars from being recorded, and would record the fewer cars the fewer drivers would be speeding.
How long until the AI estimates how fast you were going based on the time you were tagged at 2 cameras? The system says travel between these cameras should take 3 minutes. You made it in 2:45. No review, just a ticket in the mail.
That's how it actually works in some places (https://www.carwow.co.uk/blog/average-speed-cameras-how-do-t...). You don't need AI because we already know that distance = speed * time. We can calculate to a high degree of certainty - with high school math - that you had to have 1. been speeding or 2. bent space time if you cover the distance between them in too short of time.
Several months later, the state changes the speed limit on the street without changing the ticket check. Some time after, traffic authorities add a bypass road or a fast lane to deal with the new traffic problems and forget to update the timings. Then it's reported that a rural municipality set timing thresholds just below the speed limit to cover budgetary shortfalls.
Eventually the camera manufacturers offer "easy setup" systems that dynamically adjust based on actual journey times. This works fine until the first office holiday, when the routine congestion is gone.
If their clocks are actually synchronized and can show that in court then unless you've got a warp drive and can bend space time it can be pretty definitive that one was speeding between those two points. Especially if you're on something like a toll road which utilizes transponders for billing. I'm almost surprised this isn't already done in those situations.
You don't even need AI for this. Its pretty basic.
It is similar to how air enforced speed limits are done. They just paint two lines on the highway. A plane overhead times your car between the lines.
This is exactly how non-AI assisted speed cameras [1] have worked for almost four decades. You don’t even need video for it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatso
If speeding is not something that happens constantly, then a radar could detect the instances of speeding
And if it is, which it generally is, it means the speed limits are not set appropriately. But that point always seems to be overlooked.
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Yeah it's a bit of wishful thinking from my side, I confess.
> exactly why we end up with surveillance states
Hate that. This is why I wrote that it looks like there is no privacy-preserving way to trap ALL speeding drivers, although I have been corrected on that specific part.
What I wanted to say is that I would love for road infractions to be fined all the time so that people would know that there is no free ride.