The author does a good job highlighting the profiteering use of these devices. My concern is that when you're issued a ticket by one of these you're never truly given a chance to examine the evidence.
We have fallen prey to the idea that the magic box says you did it, therefore you did it. There is no examination of the "thought process" of the magic box. That's all protected as proprietary. In a setting where you have an arresting officer you can question the officer in court you can question his thought process his procedure you can understand why he made the decision he made and challenge all of those base assumptions. Because if there was some flaw in his initial reason for the suspicion there was no basis of charging you with a crime.
With the magic box we are allowed to do none of this. It's assumed that the software in the magic box apparently has zero bugs or those bugs would become readily apparent when you test a known set of inputs against a expected set of outputs. Anyone who's got any kind of software engineering experience knows that if you have a test of expected inputs with expected outputs you will make your software match that. without the full disclosure of the code that's running on the device for examination there is no effective cross-examination of the one witness the state has against you for violation of a crime. That's the only way we can examine the thought process of the magic box itself.
Until courts can be convinced to throw out cases when the source code is not produced this kind of thing will happen. The assumption that the magic box is right and will always be right. Because you can't even get the magic box to perform your own testing you are never allowed to examine the evidence against you.
IANAL, but the way I understand it is that the way they get around that is by making the violation a civil penalty, not a criminal offense. You can fight it and maybe get a "hearing" but really would have to go out of your way to get an actual judge involved.
Good news, doesn't affect your driving record. Bad news, everything else that is wrong with it on every level still applies.
Israel has, in many cities, switched to video evidence - you can review the a movie of the claimed infraction from a few minutes before to a few minutes after it happened. The exact algorithm doesn't matter w.r.t to any specific event -- although it does matter if you claim e.g. selective enforcement.
There's still issues of authenticity, integrity, time keeping precision, etc - but I think these are better understood problems; no idea if source code for those was ever demanded (or available), or if they were challenged.
Slightly different tack, but I was thinking if you had a license frame that had enough infrared LEDs around it, it wouldn't be visible to LEO officers, but the glare might disrupt any license-plate scanners on police cars, or traffic cameras.
I googled it, and it's been discussed a bit in a previous HN thread:
In Russia tickets from camera are issued by police officer. There is also a lot of errors, but You can go to court with a person that sign You a ticket. And it works.
In my state in the US traffic cameras can not be used to issue traffic fines and license plate readers can only be used by an officer in an equipped car. Corruption is real and it’s good to have laws reflect this.
> In a setting where you have an arresting officer you can question the officer in court you can question his thought process his procedure you can understand why he made the decision he made and challenge all of those base assumptions.
This is strange as many jurisdictions take an officer's written report of crimes as a higher form of evidence than any other evidence (video), combined with post court revealations that officers routinely lie under oath.
Then you have the whole escalation issue, where a failed turn signal, excessive (or, now less than excessive) speed, or failure to stop leads to a situation where 1. The police officer is likely to be hit by a vehicle while on the side of the road 2. The stopped driver may react erratically 3. The stopping officer may act erratically.
With recent American police failings coming to light, we should welcome video evidence as safer and more accurate for all parties
The state supreme court of Minnesota struck down traffic cams as they felt it was unfair because:
>The court argued that Minneapolis had, in effect, created a new type of crime: "owner liability for red-light violations where the owner neither required nor knowingly permitted the violation."
I would take a different approach: The source code shouldn't be allowed to testify in the first place. Do whatever you want with the black box but the court should ignore it. What the camera should do is produce a video of the offense and that's the only thing the court should look at.
The case where the source matters is the breathalyzer--and in that case it shouldn't matter because the the system is *inherently* seriously flawed by biology: breath alcohol is not a good indication of blood alcohol. The breathalyzer should only be used to figure out who needs to be blood tested, it is not remotely reliable enough for court.
> My concern is that when you're issued a ticket by one of these you're never truly given a chance to examine the evidence.
This is my issue with alcohol breath-analyzers as well. I have no knowledge about how they work, whether they truly measure the amount of alcohol one has ingested, or they infer it from some other measure. I have read accounts from people saying even eating a lot of carbs can trigger the detectors. But since I am no expert, challenging the issue at a traffic stop is very difficult.
I am very particular about never driving after having a drink, I even go so far as not driving the same day if I've had even a single beer. But every time a policeman stops me and asks me to blow into the device, I'm scared that it will go off. And my point is that I shouldn't be scared, given that I am not breaking the rule.
Stop is pretty clear, if you ignore the fact that your car body will move a bit after your wheels stop moving.
Where to stop is less clear.
In California, the DMV handbook says:
"...you must make a full “STOP” whenever you see this sign. Stop at the white limit line (a wide white line painted on the street) or before entering the crosswalk..."
You could argue that the 'at the white line' part is unclear.
Does it mean that the entirety of your car must be behind the white line?
If so, how far behind is acceptable? Anything over 1/16th of an inch? Is 1 foot behind OK? How about a yard?
If not, is it OK as long as some part of your vehicle is above the line when you stop?
A traffic camera is effectively a witness. The Sixth Amendment gives us the right to face and cross-examine our accusers in court. Ever see a traffic camera in court? Even if that were possible, how does one cross-examine a traffic camera?
This is false. Between the states and US Supreme Courts, the rulings regarding traffic cameras go either way. Last year the US Supreme Court found a violation of the Fourth Amendment in favor of the suspect to suppress [1]
The first comment on the article is better written and more credible than the article itself. Yes, selective enforcement sucks, but it seems the author's own neighborhood board asked for more enforcement? And, yes, over-sensitivity can be a problem, but the author doesn't make this case effectively (the camera could just have been under-sensitive before).
> Data from MPD shows that in June 2020, the camera in question snapped 82 violators. Then there were 2,850 tickets in July 2020 (compared to 231 tickets in July 2019). Then the camera started flashing like paparazzi in Cannes: From August through November, a total of 17,216 tickets were issued. That’s $1,721,600 from one camera at one intersection in just four months.
This is the SAME CAMERA, just recalibrated, and it issues 34x as many tickets one month to the next. In four months, this single camera has sucked almost $2 million from the residents. How many stop-sign violators do you think this tiny intersection has? And if you're caught by this clearly malfunctioning camera, you basically have no recourse in the legal system?
This is abusive, plain and simple. Whether or not it was intentionally done like this another question (probably it wasn't, probably it's just a miscalibration), but either way it doesn't make it right.
Remember: the purpose of a camera like this is to improve conditions for residents, but instead it's bleeding them for money with absolutely no proof of any improvement in safety.
EDIT: oh, and another thing:
> “I’ve got five tickets,” Gopalakrishna told me. “Before I found out about the first one, I’d gotten four more.”
If you don't know that you've gotten a ticket until much later, how exactly are you supposed to modify your behavior? How could you possibly avoid getting tickets 2-5 if you don't even know about getting the first one?
I've asked for such cameras to be placed around my state's capitol and many of the wealthy neighborhoods but it never happens. I wonder why this neighborhood got one?
That doesn’t alway matter. Last time I was pulled over I stopped and counted to five cause the cop was sitting in the median. He pulled me over anyway to check if I was drunk (it was midnight) admitted I had stopped and let me go. But I’d still rather deal with a cop who bends the rules than a traffic enforcement company behind fifteen layers of corruption and government chaff.
1. If your stop duration is less than the frame rate of the camera, you will be logged as a violator.
2. Where is the camera expecting you to stop? If you stop before or after the point the camera is expecting, the camera will record you as driving through the stop.
3.To hopefully avoid a ticket, stop every three inches or so waiting five seconds each time.
Can anyone explain why the US has so many stop signs? Here in rainy Britian, we have "give way" signs at 99.9% of junctions. You're not required to stop. There are stop signs, but in 10 years of driving I've only seen 1 in the UK. They don't seem necessary frankly...
The US also has 4-way stop signs, where each driver has to remember the arrival of the other vehicles, then move off in the correct sequence.
I once also saw a 3-way stop, meaning a 4-road junction, where one road had right-of-way and the others had to do the precedence order. Obviously, this was insanely dangerous - if anyone on the stopping approaches thought it was a 4-way stop, and assumed that all other vehicles would stop, then it would pull out in front of a vehicle that actually had the right-of-way.
Then there's right-turn-on-red, which is scary for pedestrians...
But this is about DC. DC is full of intersections which should be controlled by traffic lights but have either nothing or a stop sign, because that’s cheaper. It’s an example of the generally poor infrastructure, and it makes the pedestrian experience rather annoying.
It didn’t seem great to me when I lived in DC. Having the “right of way” doesn’t mean that cars, eager to grab their turn, will respect it, or even see you. Plus, most of these are not 4-way stop signs. And, DC has plenty of roundabouts as well (streets were laid out in the 18th c. by a French dude). And that’s even worse, as a driver or a pedestrian, because US drivers have no idea what to do in a traffic circle.
Same in Sydney, Australia - it's 'give way' signs or roundabouts, and they're much more efficient IMHO. Mythbusters did an episode on it, too, which supports my view.
There are very few 'yield' intersections here in Toronto, Canada. It's all 4-way stops which are very confusing because the right of way is inconclusive and circumstantial.
The US as a rule avoids junctions without a traffic control device. Yield signs (equiv. of "give way") are very rarely used, except as part of merge scenarios (including).
The exceptions are:
A merge does not normally have traffic control devices except possibly a yield sign, or special merge signage.
Obviously a one way road forking (like part of a divided highway) does not need signals or stop signs.
Driveways do not usually count as roads for determining if an intersection exists. Commercial driveways are sometimes treated as roads, typically with stop signs, and ocassionally in heavy traffic areas with traffic lights. Large commercial areas (big box stores, or shopping centers) are more likely to have their driveways treated as roads.
Two roads intersecting without anything present to control traffic basically never happens. The less important street or less traffic street will typically get stop signs. If both roads are negligible traffic and build to the same standards, the stop sign direction is picked arbitrarily. If there is significant traffic, but both roads are approximately equal in importance and volume, 4 way stop is typically used, basically functioning as a poor-mans roundabout. In cases with really high traffic, traffic lights are typically used at intersections.
Most areas in the US do not make heavy use of roundabouts. They are becoming increasingly more common over time, but mostly in newly developed areas and it still varies by location. Retrofitting existing intersections is not super common (although it probably happens a lot more in some parts of the country).
Besides the obvious issue the secondary problem with most of these systems is they prey on the poor doubly so as it can lead to loss of vehicle in some localities.
HOWEVER.
DC's own web page details in this PDF[0] the fines for traffic. $50 if you do not stop for a stop sign, same fine for passing a school bus with flashing lights. So in effect by using the 3rd party service they are doubling fines. If anything automated fine systems should be mandated to be a fraction of the fine you would incur when ticketed by an officer.
>What if they said all of a sudden everybody who jaywalks in one neighborhood gets a ticket? Would anybody say that is fair?
So, how would we make it fair? There's lot of societally acceptable but tickete-able offences out there. Jaywalking, speeding 5-10 over, almost-fully-but-not-quite stopping at stop signs (incidentally in my country these are called "American" stops). Before, people were a lot more lax about it but now with technology they could be enforced 100% of the time. Should the rules be changed to less strict? Only apply fines in dangerous situations (excessive speeding or not stopping at all)? Smaller punishments in acceptance that everyone is going to be caught more frequently? Normalizing an ever watching, ticket printing machine?
I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding the purpose of these laws. With civil statutes, the objective is not to fully extinguish behaviors like jaywalking, but to provide law-enforcement with tools to maintain order. Most officers don't run around citing people for every violation they spot. They instead look for people who are behaving in a way that is dangerous or disorderly, and then use the law to reign them in.
This kind of automation gets that relationship exactly backwards, and is not the basis of a healthy balance between freedom and order.
> With civil statutes, the objective is not to fully extinguish behaviors like jaywalking, but to provide law-enforcement with tools to maintain order. Most officers don't run around citing people for every violation they spot. They instead look for people who are behaving in a way that is dangerous or disorderly, and then use the law to reign them in.
It's not about "maintaining order". These laws serve as a legitimate cover story for police to harass indiscriminately, as they are widely disregarded, giving a blank check to police to stop and harass anyone based on their own hunches, biases, or prejudice.
It's a bad system, and it has nothing to do with maintaining order, and everything to do with legitimizing police misconduct.
> It is not, however -- by any stretch of the imagination -- the goal of civil statutes to enable indiscriminate harassment.
Do you have any evidence to support this claim? There's plenty to support the idea that these non-crimes exist on the books specifically to enable police to target so-called "undesirables" who would otherwise be breaking no law:
I wish this was true. But in reality, in my experience in the Netherlands and in Australia, tickets get written because x, y says so. Not because you were or weren't doing anyy reckless. And we are conditioned by this, I am really dumbfounded when people are not jaywalking in the middle of the night in an empty street. And personally I am glad to take that ticket risk.
>But in reality, in my experience in the Netherlands and in Australia, tickets get written because x, y says so. Not because you were or weren't doing anyy reckless.
Yes, we can certainly agree that this "anti-pattern" occurs, and that it's a perversion of the system. I've been on the receiving end of some technically-correct-but-not-helping-anyone tickets myself. On the whole, however, it is my feeling that police operate as described above.
More to the point, it is not the purpose of these laws to fully suppress the behavior they punish. When applied in a manner to do so, it is a perversion.
> (incidentally in my country these are called "American" stops)
As an aside, this has always been funny to me—you called them American stops; in America they’re called California stops; in California, we called them L.A. stops. The buck stops there, though: in Los Angeles, nobody stops.
Smaller punishments with more tickets would still mean having to deal with paying a ticket, which is often more annoying than a small fine.
I think moving the goalposts and changing the rules from "any speeding gets you a fine" to "excessive speeding always gets you a fine and lesser speeding can be grounds for an ad-hoc fine by a present officer (who would explain how speeding was dangerous in that particular situation)". It would hopefully get rid of the feeling that unaccountable machines are preying on our missteps while allowing reasonable police officers to discipline unsafe drivers. You could still of course have police who are just out to annoy others, but I'm not sure that something new ticketing laws can fix.
Yup. The vast majority of what the cameras capture is safe but technically illegal (although in this case I'm not even sure of that--the law says stop, it doesn't say how long you have to remain stopped) behavior. It's only by statistical fiddling that they show any safety improvement.
1) Red light cameras tend to displace the accidents from the intersection to just before the intersection, but they don't reduce accidents or injuries.
2) Regression to the mean--put a camera in a spot with a high accident rate and see the accident rate drop. But blips tend to average out anyway, unless it's a fundamental problem with the spot you would expect the accident rate to drop back to normal.
Also, we don't have cameras here but I have observed a pattern to traffic enforcement: I have *never* seen traffic enforcement other than DUI checkpoints at a location where there wasn't a mismatch between the law and the reality on the road. Examples:
1) There used to be a *big* speed trap on the highway northeast of town. One day they finally raised the speed limit there--and I haven't seen a cop there since.
2) One mile is full of houses, narrow, legitimately 35 mph. Then there's a mile built to 45 mph standards, but it has *one* house (which I believe is not occupied) and is 35 mph, even on the southbound side which in the area near the house is isolated from it by a barrier no little kid could cross. The next mile is built to the same standards and is correctly 45 mph. One guess as to where the cop sits.
3) We used to have a stupid law prohibiting turning on red when there were multiple turn lanes. I'm thinking of a T intersection where the road widened to 4 lanes just before the T. Just after the right turn there's good shelter for the cops to hide--and they really rack up a score on people making perfectly safe turns from the rightmost lane. I believe the legislature finally fixed that. Life has changed, I haven't been though that intersection since to see if the trap went away.
4) One that used to apply right near our house. The half-main street is built to 35 mph standards, but when we moved in there was a spot 1/2 mile along it that was undeveloped and thus narrower--25 mph. That resulted in the whole mile being 25 mph. The cop sat 1/4 mile along, where it still looked like a 35 mph road even though it was 25 mph. When the narrow spot was fixed the limit was raised to 35 mph and I haven't seen a cop there since.
And the purely abusive: Crosswalk enforcement, I got nailed in a situation where continuing on was completely safe but I'm not sure I could even have made a panic stop before the line, certainly not without asking for being rear-ended. Not only that but the only place served by that crosswalk was closed.
Edit: The only legitimate traffic stops I have ever seen involve a cop driving along and witnessing a problem.
- Stretch of freeway by my old house that looks and feels like any freeway you've ever been on, except they limit the speed to 45mph. Try to go 45 at your own peril as car and semi alike go 65 past you. Then the cop camps there. I avoid that freeway now.
- Shopping center exit onto a small side street had a "no left turn" sign, but trying to obey this meant a massive detour around if you needed to go left. The side street was empty most of the time (and low speed!), so people tended to just go for it. Cop camped out there. They removed the sign a year later.
I'd start by making it uniformly enforced, and with no "cliff" where you can go from being unticketed to owing thousands through a calibration change.
In this case, change the ticketing model to have a graduated scale so e.g. going 1mph through a stop sign is $1, going 2 is $3, going 10mph is $100. Ideally, enforce it through technology at all stops. And then anyone who accrues more than say $10 in fines in a month has to pay it, and everyone can see where they are towards that.
And then to make it properly "fair" make it equitable, e.g. ticket costs indexed against your personal income rather than a flat rate.
I was moved to a new city to get a fresh start. The city had a camera van. The operator would park the van in random places and flash people going over the speed limit. Needless to say, this van and it's operator were very unpopular. My boss came in to work one day very agitated. He said he went by the van earlier in the month and got flashed, when he knew he was under the speed limit. So he went by the van again, this time 5 mph slower. He got flashed again. He figured he had a good case in traffic court now so he went by the van again, now 10 mph hour slower, to make his iron clad case. He was agitated on this day because he just received three tickets for not wearing his seatbelt.
Last week I received a $100 ticket from DC by this exact same camera for "not stopping at the stop sign". I reviewed the captured footage from the ticket which shows me coming to a stop before proceeding across the intersection (granted my front wheel was in front of the stop line but behind the start of the crosswalk).
In order to make my case to contest the ticket I downloaded a video analysis tool called Tracker[0], and tracked the position of my car's logo frame-by-frame. The tool allowed me to easily plot the velocity of the car over time to show that I reached 0m/s before passing the intersection. Now I wait and see if they accept the evidence and drop the ticket (after reading this article I'm not too optimistic that they will...).
So, Pennsylvania doesn't allow local cops to use radar for speed detection. This causes everyone to drive 10-30 mph faster than the speed limit.
However, I've never felt safer driving in anywhere else in America than I do in PA. I'm not sure how does PA perform in highway safety, but if the data is also on my side it's a great case study that speeding enforcement or just various traffic law enforcement doesn't do much to increase safety. Or might even decrease it.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadWe have fallen prey to the idea that the magic box says you did it, therefore you did it. There is no examination of the "thought process" of the magic box. That's all protected as proprietary. In a setting where you have an arresting officer you can question the officer in court you can question his thought process his procedure you can understand why he made the decision he made and challenge all of those base assumptions. Because if there was some flaw in his initial reason for the suspicion there was no basis of charging you with a crime.
With the magic box we are allowed to do none of this. It's assumed that the software in the magic box apparently has zero bugs or those bugs would become readily apparent when you test a known set of inputs against a expected set of outputs. Anyone who's got any kind of software engineering experience knows that if you have a test of expected inputs with expected outputs you will make your software match that. without the full disclosure of the code that's running on the device for examination there is no effective cross-examination of the one witness the state has against you for violation of a crime. That's the only way we can examine the thought process of the magic box itself.
Until courts can be convinced to throw out cases when the source code is not produced this kind of thing will happen. The assumption that the magic box is right and will always be right. Because you can't even get the magic box to perform your own testing you are never allowed to examine the evidence against you.
Good news, doesn't affect your driving record. Bad news, everything else that is wrong with it on every level still applies.
There's still issues of authenticity, integrity, time keeping precision, etc - but I think these are better understood problems; no idea if source code for those was ever demanded (or available), or if they were challenged.
I googled it, and it's been discussed a bit in a previous HN thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9258462
This is strange as many jurisdictions take an officer's written report of crimes as a higher form of evidence than any other evidence (video), combined with post court revealations that officers routinely lie under oath.
Then you have the whole escalation issue, where a failed turn signal, excessive (or, now less than excessive) speed, or failure to stop leads to a situation where 1. The police officer is likely to be hit by a vehicle while on the side of the road 2. The stopped driver may react erratically 3. The stopping officer may act erratically.
With recent American police failings coming to light, we should welcome video evidence as safer and more accurate for all parties
https://theamericanstatesassembly.net/correct-your-status
>The court argued that Minneapolis had, in effect, created a new type of crime: "owner liability for red-light violations where the owner neither required nor knowingly permitted the violation."
The case where the source matters is the breathalyzer--and in that case it shouldn't matter because the the system is *inherently* seriously flawed by biology: breath alcohol is not a good indication of blood alcohol. The breathalyzer should only be used to figure out who needs to be blood tested, it is not remotely reliable enough for court.
This is my issue with alcohol breath-analyzers as well. I have no knowledge about how they work, whether they truly measure the amount of alcohol one has ingested, or they infer it from some other measure. I have read accounts from people saying even eating a lot of carbs can trigger the detectors. But since I am no expert, challenging the issue at a traffic stop is very difficult.
I am very particular about never driving after having a drink, I even go so far as not driving the same day if I've had even a single beer. But every time a policeman stops me and asks me to blow into the device, I'm scared that it will go off. And my point is that I shouldn't be scared, given that I am not breaking the rule.
Um, not moving for a time?
Where to stop is less clear.
In California, the DMV handbook says:
"...you must make a full “STOP” whenever you see this sign. Stop at the white limit line (a wide white line painted on the street) or before entering the crosswalk..."
You could argue that the 'at the white line' part is unclear.
Does it mean that the entirety of your car must be behind the white line?
If so, how far behind is acceptable? Anything over 1/16th of an inch? Is 1 foot behind OK? How about a yard?
If not, is it OK as long as some part of your vehicle is above the line when you stop?
If not, how far over the line can you be?
Normally one would assume that they want you to stop at any distance behind the line because nothing else makes sense in context.
"stop at any distance behind the line" would include stopping 50 yards behind the line, which would not achieve anything useful.
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/18-556_e1pf.pdf
> Data from MPD shows that in June 2020, the camera in question snapped 82 violators. Then there were 2,850 tickets in July 2020 (compared to 231 tickets in July 2019). Then the camera started flashing like paparazzi in Cannes: From August through November, a total of 17,216 tickets were issued. That’s $1,721,600 from one camera at one intersection in just four months.
This is the SAME CAMERA, just recalibrated, and it issues 34x as many tickets one month to the next. In four months, this single camera has sucked almost $2 million from the residents. How many stop-sign violators do you think this tiny intersection has? And if you're caught by this clearly malfunctioning camera, you basically have no recourse in the legal system?
This is abusive, plain and simple. Whether or not it was intentionally done like this another question (probably it wasn't, probably it's just a miscalibration), but either way it doesn't make it right.
Remember: the purpose of a camera like this is to improve conditions for residents, but instead it's bleeding them for money with absolutely no proof of any improvement in safety.
EDIT: oh, and another thing:
> “I’ve got five tickets,” Gopalakrishna told me. “Before I found out about the first one, I’d gotten four more.”
If you don't know that you've gotten a ticket until much later, how exactly are you supposed to modify your behavior? How could you possibly avoid getting tickets 2-5 if you don't even know about getting the first one?
2. Where is the camera expecting you to stop? If you stop before or after the point the camera is expecting, the camera will record you as driving through the stop.
3.To hopefully avoid a ticket, stop every three inches or so waiting five seconds each time.
I once also saw a 3-way stop, meaning a 4-road junction, where one road had right-of-way and the others had to do the precedence order. Obviously, this was insanely dangerous - if anyone on the stopping approaches thought it was a 4-way stop, and assumed that all other vehicles would stop, then it would pull out in front of a vehicle that actually had the right-of-way.
Then there's right-turn-on-red, which is scary for pedestrians...
The US just has a lot more of that.
We also just have roundabouts all over the place and Americans seem to be allergic to them for whatever reason.
Pedestrian experience is probably the one downside of roundabouts.
There are very few 'yield' intersections here in Toronto, Canada. It's all 4-way stops which are very confusing because the right of way is inconclusive and circumstantial.
The exceptions are:
A merge does not normally have traffic control devices except possibly a yield sign, or special merge signage.
Obviously a one way road forking (like part of a divided highway) does not need signals or stop signs.
Driveways do not usually count as roads for determining if an intersection exists. Commercial driveways are sometimes treated as roads, typically with stop signs, and ocassionally in heavy traffic areas with traffic lights. Large commercial areas (big box stores, or shopping centers) are more likely to have their driveways treated as roads.
Two roads intersecting without anything present to control traffic basically never happens. The less important street or less traffic street will typically get stop signs. If both roads are negligible traffic and build to the same standards, the stop sign direction is picked arbitrarily. If there is significant traffic, but both roads are approximately equal in importance and volume, 4 way stop is typically used, basically functioning as a poor-mans roundabout. In cases with really high traffic, traffic lights are typically used at intersections.
Most areas in the US do not make heavy use of roundabouts. They are becoming increasingly more common over time, but mostly in newly developed areas and it still varies by location. Retrofitting existing intersections is not super common (although it probably happens a lot more in some parts of the country).
HOWEVER.
DC's own web page details in this PDF[0] the fines for traffic. $50 if you do not stop for a stop sign, same fine for passing a school bus with flashing lights. So in effect by using the 3rd party service they are doubling fines. If anything automated fine systems should be mandated to be a fraction of the fine you would incur when ticketed by an officer.
[0]https://go.mpdconline.com/GO/CIR-07-04.pdf
So, how would we make it fair? There's lot of societally acceptable but tickete-able offences out there. Jaywalking, speeding 5-10 over, almost-fully-but-not-quite stopping at stop signs (incidentally in my country these are called "American" stops). Before, people were a lot more lax about it but now with technology they could be enforced 100% of the time. Should the rules be changed to less strict? Only apply fines in dangerous situations (excessive speeding or not stopping at all)? Smaller punishments in acceptance that everyone is going to be caught more frequently? Normalizing an ever watching, ticket printing machine?
This kind of automation gets that relationship exactly backwards, and is not the basis of a healthy balance between freedom and order.
It's not about "maintaining order". These laws serve as a legitimate cover story for police to harass indiscriminately, as they are widely disregarded, giving a blank check to police to stop and harass anyone based on their own hunches, biases, or prejudice.
It's a bad system, and it has nothing to do with maintaining order, and everything to do with legitimizing police misconduct.
It is not, however -- by any stretch of the imagination -- the goal of civil statutes to enable indiscriminate harassment.
Your anti-cop ideology is leaking. It's unoriginal, uninsightful, and unhelpful.
Do you have any evidence to support this claim? There's plenty to support the idea that these non-crimes exist on the books specifically to enable police to target so-called "undesirables" who would otherwise be breaking no law:
https://lbpost.com/longbeachize/opinion/the-classist-racist-...
Yes, we can certainly agree that this "anti-pattern" occurs, and that it's a perversion of the system. I've been on the receiving end of some technically-correct-but-not-helping-anyone tickets myself. On the whole, however, it is my feeling that police operate as described above.
More to the point, it is not the purpose of these laws to fully suppress the behavior they punish. When applied in a manner to do so, it is a perversion.
As an aside, this has always been funny to me—you called them American stops; in America they’re called California stops; in California, we called them L.A. stops. The buck stops there, though: in Los Angeles, nobody stops.
I think moving the goalposts and changing the rules from "any speeding gets you a fine" to "excessive speeding always gets you a fine and lesser speeding can be grounds for an ad-hoc fine by a present officer (who would explain how speeding was dangerous in that particular situation)". It would hopefully get rid of the feeling that unaccountable machines are preying on our missteps while allowing reasonable police officers to discipline unsafe drivers. You could still of course have police who are just out to annoy others, but I'm not sure that something new ticketing laws can fix.
1) Red light cameras tend to displace the accidents from the intersection to just before the intersection, but they don't reduce accidents or injuries.
2) Regression to the mean--put a camera in a spot with a high accident rate and see the accident rate drop. But blips tend to average out anyway, unless it's a fundamental problem with the spot you would expect the accident rate to drop back to normal.
Also, we don't have cameras here but I have observed a pattern to traffic enforcement: I have *never* seen traffic enforcement other than DUI checkpoints at a location where there wasn't a mismatch between the law and the reality on the road. Examples:
1) There used to be a *big* speed trap on the highway northeast of town. One day they finally raised the speed limit there--and I haven't seen a cop there since.
2) One mile is full of houses, narrow, legitimately 35 mph. Then there's a mile built to 45 mph standards, but it has *one* house (which I believe is not occupied) and is 35 mph, even on the southbound side which in the area near the house is isolated from it by a barrier no little kid could cross. The next mile is built to the same standards and is correctly 45 mph. One guess as to where the cop sits.
3) We used to have a stupid law prohibiting turning on red when there were multiple turn lanes. I'm thinking of a T intersection where the road widened to 4 lanes just before the T. Just after the right turn there's good shelter for the cops to hide--and they really rack up a score on people making perfectly safe turns from the rightmost lane. I believe the legislature finally fixed that. Life has changed, I haven't been though that intersection since to see if the trap went away.
4) One that used to apply right near our house. The half-main street is built to 35 mph standards, but when we moved in there was a spot 1/2 mile along it that was undeveloped and thus narrower--25 mph. That resulted in the whole mile being 25 mph. The cop sat 1/4 mile along, where it still looked like a 35 mph road even though it was 25 mph. When the narrow spot was fixed the limit was raised to 35 mph and I haven't seen a cop there since.
And the purely abusive: Crosswalk enforcement, I got nailed in a situation where continuing on was completely safe but I'm not sure I could even have made a panic stop before the line, certainly not without asking for being rear-ended. Not only that but the only place served by that crosswalk was closed.
Edit: The only legitimate traffic stops I have ever seen involve a cop driving along and witnessing a problem.
- Stretch of freeway by my old house that looks and feels like any freeway you've ever been on, except they limit the speed to 45mph. Try to go 45 at your own peril as car and semi alike go 65 past you. Then the cop camps there. I avoid that freeway now.
- Shopping center exit onto a small side street had a "no left turn" sign, but trying to obey this meant a massive detour around if you needed to go left. The side street was empty most of the time (and low speed!), so people tended to just go for it. Cop camped out there. They removed the sign a year later.
All the speeds you quoted are a 5mph offset. Which is weird.
Might amuse you to know that in the US, they're often called "California" stops, and in California, they're often called "Hollywood" stops ;)
In this case, change the ticketing model to have a graduated scale so e.g. going 1mph through a stop sign is $1, going 2 is $3, going 10mph is $100. Ideally, enforce it through technology at all stops. And then anyone who accrues more than say $10 in fines in a month has to pay it, and everyone can see where they are towards that.
And then to make it properly "fair" make it equitable, e.g. ticket costs indexed against your personal income rather than a flat rate.
[0] https://physlets.org/tracker/
However, I've never felt safer driving in anywhere else in America than I do in PA. I'm not sure how does PA perform in highway safety, but if the data is also on my side it's a great case study that speeding enforcement or just various traffic law enforcement doesn't do much to increase safety. Or might even decrease it.