5 ms·

Californian Roads Could Soon Have Speed Cameras Issuing Tickets

23 points by resalisbury 3y ago

pfannkuchen 3y ago
It would be amazing if speeding was enforced 100%, and then the official limits were pushed up where needed. This business where everyone drives above the limit and cops enforce when they feel like it is annoying and is a big enabler of bias in policing.
- Isthatablackgsd 3y ago
  Their selective enforcement in SoCal is annoying. Majority of us are speeding above the limit and they don't even bat an eye. I got a ticket for going above the limit when I was following the flow of the traffic. I guess they are more interested in exercising their power when they felt like it.
- nunez 3y ago
  100% agreed. Speed limits in their current state are infuriating. They are there, so you're _supposed_ to follow them, but nobody does, not even off-duty police, until someone is patrolling, at which point everyone drives ten under the limit at the checkpoint, only to go 15-30 over seconds later. Of course, if YOU try following the limits, even on the rightmost lane, lots of drivers will drive aggressively around you as if you're the one in the wrong!
kwhat4 3y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20230815131255/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/15/us/california-traffic-speed-cameras.html https://web.archive.org/web/20230815131255/https://www.nytim...
exabrial 3y ago
California keeps finding more reasons for me to never live there.
- cinntaile 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure all states have speed limits, where do you live?
- asdajksah2123 3y ago
  Cameras issuing tickets to people driving 11 miles over the speed limit "on streets that are hot spots for street racing, or are in school zones, or have a high number of collisions" is where you draw the line?
  - von_lohengramm 3y ago
    Yes.
  - hnburnsy 3y ago
    One problem is who defines hot spot. The speed camera companies will gin up data showing that one road section at the bottom of a hill with a with speed limit of 30 is definetly a hot spot. Also politicians will get involved and speed cameras will be put in an area for consituent placation instead of for traffic safety. Dont let the camels nose under the tent.
    - catboybotnet 3y ago
      Seconding this. If you are a private company that makes cameras for this specific use case, it is in your best interest to pull numbers out of your ass to place more cameras, therefore making more sales and money on maintenance and/or service fees.
  - phil21 3y ago
    This is how it's pitched. Then in a few years you likely will find it outsourced to a third party contractor, who has helpfully worked with the city or county to place the cameras in convenient spots that just happen to generate a ton of revenue. I'm not totally against the idea, but at least where I live these red light and speeding cameras have devolved into ways to gain revenue vs. safety just by taking note of where they happen to be placed (and not). There also has been an overall push to slowly reduce the threshold for activation of the cameras. Started as egregious speeding, now it's 6 over. The outcome is of course exactly what you would predict: everyone figures out where the cameras are and slams on the brakes for that block only. Super safe!
mistrial9 3y ago
its not only speeding tickets
garciasn 3y ago
From the article: It would make California the 19th state to install cameras that would automatically issue tickets to the owners of vehicles that are spotted exceeding the speed limit by at least 11 miles an hour. [...] The fines could be reduced if the vehicle owner is unable to pay. [...] “We’re out to change behavior. We’re not out to be punitive.” --- So: 1. The unintended consequence is that more people may feel comfortable going 8-10 mph over the limit. 2. Those who can afford the $50 fine (which, knowing CA, is a big part of the population) without any other consequences will end up ignoring it and just paying the fee or using their significant wealth to fight the fees. 3. The rest of the people just won't pay it because they cannot afford it.
- nullc 3y ago
  and companies who install the cameras win big, while people who don't have their sh*t together enough to fill out the required I'm-poor forms correctly get screwed.
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    there is a company near UC Berkeley campus filled with people speaking some east slavic language, that has been making red-light cameras for at least ten years. They have expensive office space and no public signage.
  - WeylandYutani 3y ago
    I don't follow, does being poor give you a right to ignore the speed limit?
    - nullc 3y ago
      The fine article says that the fines will be reduced based on the speeder's ability to pay, comrade. I'm dubious of schemes that have disparate impact based on the target's ability to bring about change-- good at politics and paperwork? reduced fine. Not so good? continued death by 1000 bureaucratic cuts. I'm also dubious of schemes that have low to zero enforcement costs, since the allocation of enforcement resources is one of the most important protections to assure that state intrusion is being directed to matters of actual public consequence. I'm all for ticketing drivers who are putting the public at risk, but if the risk they're creating isn't worth deploying a citing officer is it really worth the imposition on the recipient of the citation? and I'm also pretty dubious of schemes with latency and ones where you'll get tripped up without random local knowledge. Go to visit a friend in another city then end up with a dozen fines and a suspended license before you know what hit you. ... and lets not even get into the latent surveillance potential, mass monitoring people's movements on an industrial scale at low marginal cost.
Scoundreller 3y ago
I wish they took the French and German (and elsewhere approach) where they use some of the revenue to identify the driver and fine them + penalize their license. If you just send the ticket to whomever is the easiest to target (regardless of guilt), then it’s more about revenue than safety.
- gretch 3y ago
  > I wish they took the French and German (and elsewhere approach) where they use some of the revenue to identify the driver and fine them + penalize their license. I don't think this is really necessary if implemented in california. Here, with the driving culture we have, the driver is going to be 99.9% the owner of the vehicle or their spouse. If it's a rental car, just charge the rental company and they'll pass it to whoever was renting at the time. No need to have some kind of investigation that ends the same way each time.
- lukas099 3y ago
  > If you just send the ticket to whomever is the easiest to target (regardless of guilt), then it’s more about revenue than safety. If you lend your car to someone, you are taking responsibility for the way they drive that car. If you can't do that, you shouldn't lend them your car.
  - Scoundreller 3y ago
    > If you lend your ____ to someone, you are taking responsibility No I’m not, they are.
    - lukas099 3y ago
      You should not lend a car to somebody that you cannot trust to act responsibly with it.
- autoexec 3y ago
  > I wish they took the French and German (and elsewhere approach) where they use some of the revenue to identify the driver and fine them + penalize their license. I also hope California takes the French and German approach (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46822472 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46822472) (http://thenewspaper.com/news/29/2975.asp http://thenewspaper.com/news/29/2975.asp)
mabbo 3y ago
Of all the places I'd expect negative reactions to this, I'm shocked HN is one of them. This is automation of a dangerous job that is expensive to pay the labor costs of. That's our thing, folks! That's what tech is all about! If you think the speed limits should be higher so you can drive faster, fine, but that's completely orthogonal to the point here. Better enforcement of road laws, fewer police deaths from road accidents, lower cost to achieve these goals. I see this as entirely beneficial. The only people complaining are the ones who want to disregard road laws because they don't care about the danger they pose to others, and like that there's barely any enforcement.
- Jiro 3y ago
  >The only people complaining are the ones who want to disregard road laws because they don't care about the danger they pose to others, and like that there's barely any enforcement. This assumes that speeding laws are mainly there to prevent danger to others. That's not true.
- bootlickdev 3y ago
  Surprisingly, law enforcement without compromise and expansion of the surveillance state aren't universal engineering values.
- airza 3y ago
  I have to disagree. If the goal is to reduce pedestrian deaths… just make it harder to drive fast. Narrow lanes, speed bumps, continuous sidewalks… all the technology is there and CA is insanely wealthy. Why wire up a surveillance panopticon?
  - lukas099 3y ago
    I like traffic calming too, but sometimes people really do go faster than is safe, even on narrow, windy roads with obstacles. Also if they are used on the highway then traffic calming isn't that applicable. I don't think you have a reasonable expectation of privacy when you're driving your licensed car on a public road anyways.
whalesalad 3y ago
I don't know why we spend so much time and resources on speeding when it is not the biggest issue facing the motoring public.
- gwill 3y ago
  this should allow for fewer net resources to be used to combat speeding thanks to automation. police can be used elsewhere.
- jerlam 3y ago
  There are more people than just the "motoring public".
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  You've probably internalized the talking point that "speeding doesn't cause accidents". While not completely true, the correlation isn't high. However, speeding does have a significant impact on the severity of the accidents, making it an important issue. A little bit of speeding can be the difference between a fatal and non-fatal accident. Speeding is estimated to cause 30,000 deaths a year in the US. https://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/speedmgt/ref_mats/fhwasa1304/Resources3/08%20-%20The%20Relation%20Between%20Speed%20and%20Crashes.pdf https://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/speedmgt/ref_mats/fhwasa1304/Res...
timeon 3y ago
Interesting for me is that for such common thing: 1. they do not have it yet 2. it is in the news
moomoo11 3y ago
can they do something about the dangerous segments of the homeless pop or illegal sideshows or the Asian elders getting assaulted?
francisofascii 3y ago
One of my work projects was developing a system for managing the deployment locations of speed cameras. (Don't want to give away the state.) The speed cameras are rotated around to different locations each day. The vendor that supplies the speed camera systems is called RedFlex. It issues a couple thousand violations a day. Maybe around 1-2% of the total traffic. The legislation makes it lack teeth. There must be a warning sign before the camera. (so if you are paying attention, you simply slow down.) First offense is a warning, must be going 11 mph over, no points, etc.
Ajay-p 3y ago
I have long believed that speed cameras are for revenue generation, not safety.
LargoLasskhyfv 3y ago
Too old-fashioned. Too passive. Too half-assed. 1.) Make any private or commercial car going over 80mph illegal. No exceptions except law enforcement and emergency services, no grandfathering in, no aftermarket upgrades. 2.) Enforce lower limits by geofencing and active beacons, to be strictly observed by mandatory driver assistance systems. Issue immediate death penalty for circumvention by automated rocket launchers at the next possible free spot. 3.) Also limit the maximal acceleration, no matter if ICE supercar or EV, don't want to have unnecessesary microplastics by needlessly burnt rubber, aren't we? 4.) Do the same for acoustics. 5.) Enjoy. 6.) Move all opposers by force to live in the fenced reservations of the race tracks.
sublinear 3y ago
https://youtu.be/pH9dnJ8BmY0 https://youtu.be/pH9dnJ8BmY0 Didn't LA get rid of their cameras recently? Linked a YouTube video about this from an engineer.

23 points by resalisbury 3y ago

It would be amazing if speeding was enforced 100%, and then the official limits were pushed up where needed. This business where everyone drives above the limit and cops enforce when they feel like it is annoying and is a big enabler of bias in policing.

Isthatablackgsd 3y ago
Their selective enforcement in SoCal is annoying. Majority of us are speeding above the limit and they don't even bat an eye. I got a ticket for going above the limit when I was following the flow of the traffic. I guess they are more interested in exercising their power when they felt like it.
nunez 3y ago
100% agreed. Speed limits in their current state are infuriating. They are there, so you're _supposed_ to follow them, but nobody does, not even off-duty police, until someone is patrolling, at which point everyone drives ten under the limit at the checkpoint, only to go 15-30 over seconds later. Of course, if YOU try following the limits, even on the rightmost lane, lots of drivers will drive aggressively around you as if you're the one in the wrong!

kwhat4 3y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20230815131255/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/15/us/california-traffic-speed-cameras.html https://web.archive.org/web/20230815131255/https://www.nytim...

exabrial 3y ago

California keeps finding more reasons for me to never live there.

cinntaile 3y ago
I'm pretty sure all states have speed limits, where do you live?
asdajksah2123 3y ago
Cameras issuing tickets to people driving 11 miles over the speed limit "on streets that are hot spots for street racing, or are in school zones, or have a high number of collisions" is where you draw the line?
- von_lohengramm 3y ago
  Yes.
- hnburnsy 3y ago
  One problem is who defines hot spot. The speed camera companies will gin up data showing that one road section at the bottom of a hill with a with speed limit of 30 is definetly a hot spot. Also politicians will get involved and speed cameras will be put in an area for consituent placation instead of for traffic safety. Dont let the camels nose under the tent.
  - catboybotnet 3y ago
    Seconding this. If you are a private company that makes cameras for this specific use case, it is in your best interest to pull numbers out of your ass to place more cameras, therefore making more sales and money on maintenance and/or service fees.
- phil21 3y ago
  This is how it's pitched. Then in a few years you likely will find it outsourced to a third party contractor, who has helpfully worked with the city or county to place the cameras in convenient spots that just happen to generate a ton of revenue. I'm not totally against the idea, but at least where I live these red light and speeding cameras have devolved into ways to gain revenue vs. safety just by taking note of where they happen to be placed (and not). There also has been an overall push to slowly reduce the threshold for activation of the cameras. Started as egregious speeding, now it's 6 over. The outcome is of course exactly what you would predict: everyone figures out where the cameras are and slams on the brakes for that block only. Super safe!

mistrial9 3y ago

its not only speeding tickets

garciasn 3y ago

From the article: It would make California the 19th state to install cameras that would automatically issue tickets to the owners of vehicles that are spotted exceeding the speed limit by at least 11 miles an hour. [...] The fines could be reduced if the vehicle owner is unable to pay. [...] “We’re out to change behavior. We’re not out to be punitive.” --- So: 1. The unintended consequence is that more people may feel comfortable going 8-10 mph over the limit. 2. Those who can afford the $50 fine (which, knowing CA, is a big part of the population) without any other consequences will end up ignoring it and just paying the fee or using their significant wealth to fight the fees. 3. The rest of the people just won't pay it because they cannot afford it.

nullc 3y ago
and companies who install the cameras win big, while people who don't have their sh*t together enough to fill out the required I'm-poor forms correctly get screwed.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  there is a company near UC Berkeley campus filled with people speaking some east slavic language, that has been making red-light cameras for at least ten years. They have expensive office space and no public signage.
- WeylandYutani 3y ago
  I don't follow, does being poor give you a right to ignore the speed limit?
  - nullc 3y ago
    The fine article says that the fines will be reduced based on the speeder's ability to pay, comrade. I'm dubious of schemes that have disparate impact based on the target's ability to bring about change-- good at politics and paperwork? reduced fine. Not so good? continued death by 1000 bureaucratic cuts. I'm also dubious of schemes that have low to zero enforcement costs, since the allocation of enforcement resources is one of the most important protections to assure that state intrusion is being directed to matters of actual public consequence. I'm all for ticketing drivers who are putting the public at risk, but if the risk they're creating isn't worth deploying a citing officer is it really worth the imposition on the recipient of the citation? and I'm also pretty dubious of schemes with latency and ones where you'll get tripped up without random local knowledge. Go to visit a friend in another city then end up with a dozen fines and a suspended license before you know what hit you. ... and lets not even get into the latent surveillance potential, mass monitoring people's movements on an industrial scale at low marginal cost.

Scoundreller 3y ago

I wish they took the French and German (and elsewhere approach) where they use some of the revenue to identify the driver and fine them + penalize their license. If you just send the ticket to whomever is the easiest to target (regardless of guilt), then it’s more about revenue than safety.

gretch 3y ago
> I wish they took the French and German (and elsewhere approach) where they use some of the revenue to identify the driver and fine them + penalize their license. I don't think this is really necessary if implemented in california. Here, with the driving culture we have, the driver is going to be 99.9% the owner of the vehicle or their spouse. If it's a rental car, just charge the rental company and they'll pass it to whoever was renting at the time. No need to have some kind of investigation that ends the same way each time.
lukas099 3y ago
> If you just send the ticket to whomever is the easiest to target (regardless of guilt), then it’s more about revenue than safety. If you lend your car to someone, you are taking responsibility for the way they drive that car. If you can't do that, you shouldn't lend them your car.
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  > If you lend your ____ to someone, you are taking responsibility No I’m not, they are.
  - lukas099 3y ago
    You should not lend a car to somebody that you cannot trust to act responsibly with it.
autoexec 3y ago
> I wish they took the French and German (and elsewhere approach) where they use some of the revenue to identify the driver and fine them + penalize their license. I also hope California takes the French and German approach (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46822472 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46822472) (http://thenewspaper.com/news/29/2975.asp http://thenewspaper.com/news/29/2975.asp)

mabbo 3y ago

Of all the places I'd expect negative reactions to this, I'm shocked HN is one of them. This is automation of a dangerous job that is expensive to pay the labor costs of. That's our thing, folks! That's what tech is all about! If you think the speed limits should be higher so you can drive faster, fine, but that's completely orthogonal to the point here. Better enforcement of road laws, fewer police deaths from road accidents, lower cost to achieve these goals. I see this as entirely beneficial. The only people complaining are the ones who want to disregard road laws because they don't care about the danger they pose to others, and like that there's barely any enforcement.

Jiro 3y ago
>The only people complaining are the ones who want to disregard road laws because they don't care about the danger they pose to others, and like that there's barely any enforcement. This assumes that speeding laws are mainly there to prevent danger to others. That's not true.
bootlickdev 3y ago
Surprisingly, law enforcement without compromise and expansion of the surveillance state aren't universal engineering values.
airza 3y ago
I have to disagree. If the goal is to reduce pedestrian deaths… just make it harder to drive fast. Narrow lanes, speed bumps, continuous sidewalks… all the technology is there and CA is insanely wealthy. Why wire up a surveillance panopticon?
- lukas099 3y ago
  I like traffic calming too, but sometimes people really do go faster than is safe, even on narrow, windy roads with obstacles. Also if they are used on the highway then traffic calming isn't that applicable. I don't think you have a reasonable expectation of privacy when you're driving your licensed car on a public road anyways.

whalesalad 3y ago

I don't know why we spend so much time and resources on speeding when it is not the biggest issue facing the motoring public.

gwill 3y ago
this should allow for fewer net resources to be used to combat speeding thanks to automation. police can be used elsewhere.
jerlam 3y ago
There are more people than just the "motoring public".
bryanlarsen 3y ago
You've probably internalized the talking point that "speeding doesn't cause accidents". While not completely true, the correlation isn't high. However, speeding does have a significant impact on the severity of the accidents, making it an important issue. A little bit of speeding can be the difference between a fatal and non-fatal accident. Speeding is estimated to cause 30,000 deaths a year in the US. https://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/speedmgt/ref_mats/fhwasa1304/Resources3/08%20-%20The%20Relation%20Between%20Speed%20and%20Crashes.pdf https://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/speedmgt/ref_mats/fhwasa1304/Res...

timeon 3y ago

Interesting for me is that for such common thing: 1. they do not have it yet 2. it is in the news

moomoo11 3y ago

can they do something about the dangerous segments of the homeless pop or illegal sideshows or the Asian elders getting assaulted?

francisofascii 3y ago

One of my work projects was developing a system for managing the deployment locations of speed cameras. (Don't want to give away the state.) The speed cameras are rotated around to different locations each day. The vendor that supplies the speed camera systems is called RedFlex. It issues a couple thousand violations a day. Maybe around 1-2% of the total traffic. The legislation makes it lack teeth. There must be a warning sign before the camera. (so if you are paying attention, you simply slow down.) First offense is a warning, must be going 11 mph over, no points, etc.

Ajay-p 3y ago

I have long believed that speed cameras are for revenue generation, not safety.

LargoLasskhyfv 3y ago

Too old-fashioned. Too passive. Too half-assed. 1.) Make any private or commercial car going over 80mph illegal. No exceptions except law enforcement and emergency services, no grandfathering in, no aftermarket upgrades. 2.) Enforce lower limits by geofencing and active beacons, to be strictly observed by mandatory driver assistance systems. Issue immediate death penalty for circumvention by automated rocket launchers at the next possible free spot. 3.) Also limit the maximal acceleration, no matter if ICE supercar or EV, don't want to have unnecessesary microplastics by needlessly burnt rubber, aren't we? 4.) Do the same for acoustics. 5.) Enjoy. 6.) Move all opposers by force to live in the fenced reservations of the race tracks.

sublinear 3y ago

https://youtu.be/pH9dnJ8BmY0 https://youtu.be/pH9dnJ8BmY0 Didn't LA get rid of their cameras recently? Linked a YouTube video about this from an engineer.