I have no sympathy for people who speed past a stopped school bus.
With that said, the automation of law enforcement is deeply concerning to me. I'm of the opinion that most of our laws are calibrated based on enforcement costs that are simply being removed and it's going to fundamentally transform society if we continue to automate in this way.
My daughter got one of these. The school bus was pulled over on the side of the road; not in a travel lane. The bus driver opened the door as she was passing the back of the bus and closed it before she got to the front of the bus. She got a $250 fine. I pled not guilty (because it is my car). This was last summer, and we still do not have a court date.
Plenty of these tickets are BS that most actual cops would not write. The only saving grace is there is video instead of just someone's description of what happened.
At 15 mph it would take less than 2 seconds for a car at the back of a bus to reach the front of a bus. Are you suggesting that the driver of the bus was able to open and then close their door in less than two seconds? Alternatively, Are you suggesting that your daughter was driving slower than 15 mph yet was unable to stop?
I certainly believe there is room for discretion when officers write tickets, but not for passing a school bus.
What I like about the automation of rules is that it takes away targeted enforcement and the opportunity for leniency to be offered only to certain groups.
The UK model for speed cameras is that they can (generally) only be placed in areas that have shown to have a higher than average number of accidents on the stretch of road, caused by speeding. So at least (in theory) they are focused on reducing accidents and not raising money.
We have a bunch of red light cameras which actually cause more accidents than they prevent. Perhaps t-bones are more dangerous than read-ends, but accident prevention it isn't.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
It seems pretty messed up to suggest that we shouldn’t enforce people not blowing through red lights because then they’ll slam on their brakes and cause rear end accidents instead.
Not GP, but I've seen multiple credible news stories on this.
The problem isn't the red-light camera itself, it is that whoever installs/manages them also reduces the time of the yellow-light warning, so the red light comes on significantly sooner. The normal yellow light timing is a properly studied and engineered interval based on traffic and speed to give drivers sufficient warning to see, decide, and go or slow-stop in a safe and predictable fashion.
When the red-light-camera installers/managers decide to cut that time to increase infractions and increase revenue, they create situations where drivers think they are going to make it to the intersection in good time, but are surprised by the sooner-changing red light, so emergency-brake before the line. This causes accidents, including accidents where the car is pushed into the intersection and causes a rear-end then T-bone.
This invalid yellow-red light timing was revealed in some lawsuits about it.
I think the right solution is to maintain properly engineered timing, install cameras that also trigger a full video from multiple angles, and manually evaluate each positive and ticket only the egregious ones and have records of the violators who caused accidents.
But since the easy money is evidently too much of a temptation to fck with people, ban them all.
We already ban the thing that is being abused — running red lights. Yet people do it with deadly results so much we're looking for another solution.
With the cameras, the camera salespeople and the town managers just can't get away from "It increases revenue (and if we screw with the yellow-light-timing we can increase it even more!".
I'd be all over making any town manager and red-light-camera-salesperson involved in a decision to screw with the red lights personally and criminally liable for any accidents resulting from screwing with yellow-light timing, and requiring all timing before installation to be officially logged, but they'll try to find ways around that too. And then there is the whole surveillance capitalism thing — we've got the cameras, why not record all license plates, and tie them to driver license and voting records, and, and, and...
Red lights reduce injury and deaths due to car crashes.
Red light cameras do NOT do so, and when the companies/cities screw with the properly engineered yellow light timing to increase revenue, the cameras INCREASE crashes and injuries. It has been definitively studied multiple times, and cities have de-installed camera systems after these findings.
If cameras are installed without adjusting the yellow- light timing, the effect is not demonstrated. Thinking about it, a likely camera ticket will reduce one of three types of red-light-running, where an impatient driver slows at the red light, looks, then crosses anyway if traffic is light. That one causes few accidents — the careful drivers are already careful and either don't do it or do it with sufficient cautions accidents are extremely unlikely.
The others, where the driver fails to see the red light and blows through it, or where they are just on some criminal blast through town (evading cops, high on drugs, whatever), will not be deterred in the slightest by the cameras. The eyesight of the first will not be helped by a likely camera-automated-ticket, and the second already has far bigger legal problems coming and won't care.
So, explain the circumstances where a red light camera actually reduces accidents and injuries. I'm not even seeing a plausible measurable effect beyond revenue extraction.
Red-light cameras reduce t-bone type collisions, which are highly lethal. The scenarios you list are fantasies. The true problem, which you omit, is drivers recklessly blowing red lights because they're impatient.
There's usually a two-second delay between a light turning red and the next light turning green, just as a simple safety precaution. No driver is perfect, and red lights get run through accidentally all the time.
While running the red light is still dangerous, running it as soon as it turns red is unlikely to cause an accident. It's still ticketable, and if a cop sees it happen, they should make a stop and issue a ticket.
If you are distracted, or time the yellow light badly, and you have to make a decision on whether to lay on the horn and run the red light as soon as it changes, or slam your brakes and try to avoid running through the intersection, you're already in a position where you're going to have to commit a moving violation, and you don't need the threat of automatic monetary penalties guiding your judgement on which move to make.
There are situations where slamming the brakes creates a more serious hazard than running the red light, but the red light cameras only ticket you for running the red light. Why create an artificial preference for one hazard over the other, rather than trust the driver to drive defensively in these situations?
The cameras don't even need to go away; they just need a human in the loop to apply these tickets rationally. Maybe don't ticket the driver who barely missed yellow, but do ticket the driver who blew through the red with zero regard for the rules. Make sure these rules are understood by drivers, so that they don't fear automatic enforcement more than they do bodily harm to themselves and others, but still think twice about ignoring the rules of the road.
This seems to say the opposite, which is that the benefits of reducing right-angle crashes (getting t-boned) outweighs the increase in rear-end crashes.
How do the cameras cause the crash, and not the lights themselves? Is it that the flashes of the camera causes people to brake suddenly, or the very presence of the camera causes some people to brake at the lights and others not to?
I find it interesting, as in the UK we don't have loads of red light cameras (though we do have them) but people driving through red lights is a rarity - even when there is no-one around and at night, the vast majority of people will obey a red light.
While I acknowledge there is now a legality question around the use of "red light cameras". I have no sympathy for people who are not stopping for school busses: I can't stomach that the article frames this as "burden" on those driving past the bus.
"there’s evidence the program is heavily burdening residents who either can’t or don’t pay the fines."
> The footage is sent to local police for review. If they decide the law was broken, the driver receives a $250 ticket in the mail.
Where is the automation? This is no more automated than a speed camera or a parking camera. It's not even worthy of being called AI truth be told.
Traffic laws are underpoliced by orders of magnitude. Setting aside the general catastrophe which is car-centric (more like car-exclusive) design of our urban and suburban spaces. Technology gives us extremely cheap and easy ways to monitor traffic laws, much cheaper and much more reliable than having a cop roam around. The very least we can do is use it to make cars suck a bit less.
Unfortunately it sounds like this program is designed to maximize revenue for the private vendor, not make roads safer by changing driver behavior. The county is also using this surface-level fix as an excuse to avoid more fundamental road design changes that would actually improve safety for vulnerable road users.
Other automated enforcement mechanisms like average speed cameras and automated tolling are more effective at achieving their purported goals. Ultimately, enforcement will always be secondary to proper road design in both cost and effectiveness.
Traffic laws are usually arbitrary, victimless (or at least the perpetrator is the victim), and over-policed because they are revenue drivers and police job security. No crimes, no need for the police.
The speed camera that was found to shorten yellow lights to force more tickets? The flock camera that is used to stalk an ex? These are the cameras you love?
As I understand it, Tesla auto driving (and, maybe, Waymo), have consistency issues with passing stopped school buses. Sometimes they stop, sometimes they don't.
But, what little I read about it, nothing from the photos or video show that the busses were actually signaling. A bus can stop, and you can pass it. When they embark children, they have to put their flashers on (or, back in the day on my busses, they had signals and a STOP sign that popped out from the driver side). When the flashers are running, that's when you are supposed to stop (both ways). Otherwise, it's just a bus on the side of the road.
I normally agree. However, this doesn't really automate the function like speed cameras or regular red-light cameras do. This still has police in the loop. The real problem is that it tickets owner and not driver.
With that said, the automation of law enforcement is deeply concerning to me. I'm of the opinion that most of our laws are calibrated based on enforcement costs that are simply being removed and it's going to fundamentally transform society if we continue to automate in this way.