Comment by cowlby
21 hours ago
Are they trying to drive safety or revenue? The second order effect people forget about is tickets are a source of revenue for cities and police depts. Surely driverless car companies will absorb a few tickets and fix the issue quickly.
So I do wonder what happens in the future when roads and cars are all automated and city funding from this channel dries up.
Tolls, revenue taxes, ever stricter rules that cause tickets despite technology getting better.
>ever stricter rules that cause tickets despite technology getting better.
That sort of stuff might work on a bunch of peasants since you can screw them individually for small enough amounts it doesn't meet the threshold for political pushback but it won't fly against a few megacorps who do self driving fleets.
Police departments have already moved on from traffic enforcement to civil forfeiture. Like, a decade ago.
I imagine the city funding issue could be solved with some sort of tax to operate within the city, where a couple cents from each mile driven would be paid to the city. Alternatively, a higher cost for registration at the state level.
What I worry more about is a future where private car ownership seems impractical when there is a large fleet of autonomous Ubers out there to handle the day-to-days, which start out cheap. Once society reaches a point of dependence, will there be enough competition to keep the price down, or will we see consumers of the services get squeezed as companies ratchet up prices to increase margins.
Given the lack of enforcement it must not be true that it’s a source of revenue for the city. I see ticketable violations multiple times a day and zero enforcement
Fix the issue quickly, or optimize to the point where revenue gained from breaking the law exceeds the fine. Last I read they were holding steady on "passengers want us to pull into bikelanes to drop-off" in California.
Probably higher city/state taxes. A police officer making over $200k a year with a pension isn’t making most of their salary from traffic tickets.
At the same time, there are not many cops making USD200K per annum in my municipality. And it's in flyover country, where everyone is clamoring for lower taxes. So I think it'd be a bit naive to think politicians wanting to score easy points with voters in cities, and even states, won't take the opportunity to extract a bit of revenue out of Big Tech.
Not saying it's right. Just saying that's how local politics work.