That's not to say that we should give up fighting for some level of privacy even when we don't own the cars, but seems more likely that legislation would be passed that forces the vehicle owners/operators (Alphabet in the Waymo case) to blur peoples' faces. Then of course the state (police/gov/etc.) will clamor for a backdoor key that will unlock the blurred faces/bodies if a crime is suspected to have occurred. Speaking of, I wonder if Waymo already does blur people when they capture them through Waymo rides? I can't seem to find mention of it online.

This commentary assumes self-driving cars are here to stay and become the de facto way we drive instead of driving ourselves. Still not sure how their adoption plays out over time because, at least in the US, people will fight against mandates to use self-driving cars because it compromises their freedom (note that the freedom crowd (no judgment) will be saying that, at first, because they will consider it their right to drive themselves, but once the privacy implications are clear there will be full-on (figurative?) wars fought over self-driving). Guessing a politician, in Texas or another red state, will sooner than later enshrine the right-to-drive-oneself into the state constitution.

This seems like an extremely myopic "tech bubble" take to me. I'm trying to find a way to put this so that it doesn't sound like an attack, but have you been to suburban or rural areas outside of places like SF, NYC or Phoenix? Being reliant on third party transportation, on roads the are often in disrepair with poor signage, is a nonstarter for probably most of the US population.

And really, this kind of thing was common in most countries and turned out America (along with Canada, Australia) are the odd ones out with almost ubiquitous private car ownership in most of its area.

I have no idea how self driving taxis will change the USA, but I rode in my first Waymo last week on a trip to SF and it felt very real. Having lived in a country where I took a taxi to work everyday, I can totally see that life working for me (since I already lived it anyways).

Lots of tech folks love to shit on "car-culture" in the US, and while I agree it has resulted in really crappy urban design for a lot of US cities, you can't ignore that a lot of people love their cars because it gives them a ton of freedom. People like being able to go off at a moment's notice, independently, and drive long distances.

America may be an "outlier", but that still doesn't mean that it's reasonable to think we'll move from where we are now to getting rid of our cars because that's how China does it.

My point, though, isn’t how China can show America how to do things, just that American car culture is unusual and unlikely to apply to most of the rest of the world. There are also costs of dumb decisions to consider, which is going to affect the competitiveness of our cities long term (Shanghai doesn’t have to make the same stupid decisions that Denver did, and eventually it just isn’t worth doing business in cities with crappy transit infra), and eventually some more optimal norm is going to affect even the USA.

What's different about the US and those other places is that far more large cities were built after private automobiles were common. There are cars everywhere in both countryside and cities in Italy, say, but there is ALSO more walkability and transit because the cities were there first (and even there, there are cities like Florence that didn't invest in rail for decades before starting to build some more light rail again very recently).

China is something of an odd one out for development patterns because of the much higher levels of state control.

What I don't really see is places voluntarily giving up point-to-point private transit after having it as an easy option for generations. Places where even the super-wealthy have turned in their private cars and drivers and take the bus with everyone else. I think the market that self-driving cars could potentially capture over mass transit is exactly those people who would rather have a private point-to-point experience. Which can be an overlapping set with the people who would also be willing to use mass transit if it was "good enough", in addition to the people who actively dislike mass transit. The total pool of users is very large.

Also, I work in a very rural environment that couldn't be more hostile to self-driving cars, at least as I thought about them before riding in Waymos (an example: where I stay when I work there I have to give people turn by turn directions because if you rely on Google or Apple Maps your car will get stuck on a road with foot-deep ruts where you'll need to be pulled out; I mean it's not driving on those crazy roads in Pakistan you see videos about (never been) but I would be willing to bet those roads, which I transit regularly, are amongst the poorer-quality roads in the US and I can see self-driving tech working there before long).

And I have spent a few evenings trying to understand how the corporate-owned-fleet economics work in rural areas (and in urban). I don't think it works today. But I do think that when costs come down, and they will come down if regulation doesn't kill self-driving cars broadly, or if Elon's right and you can do it with "cameras only," then it will only be a matter of time before the tech is adapted to crappy rural roads.

I disagree.

I grew up in Rural Australia, lived in the Yukon and have driven to many of the world's most remote and undeveloped countries.

You are saying "Self driving cars will NEVER work in "

When what you mean to say is "Self driving cars will first work in the easy cases, and then years later will work in more and more cases until they eventually work everywhere."

FWIW, people said exactly the same thing when the automobile came around and horses were the best transport. Of course automobiles didn't work well in places with no gas stations or very nasty horse tracks for many years. But the years will always roll on, and things will change.

That is, for many areas, I don't think it's just a case of the tech improving bit-by-bit and taking over more and more areas. I think that will happen in some ways, but take for example a friend of mine who lives in Pennsylvania. Where he lives is a far-out suburb, but he often drives out to rural areas on the weekend to go camping, or he drives long distances to various client sites. Forget the tech, I just don't see how an economic model of a self-driving car company would make these kinds of trips feasible anytime in the foreseeable future.

The expensive bits being:

- road maintenance

- theft and vandalism policing

Surely, once Waymo covers most cities, the marginal cost of getting one extra waymo car on the road should be substantially lower than a Bus (and maybe even a Marshrutka?)

...And then, once you have the cars on the road, to avoid increasing waiting times too much (which will lead users to prefer alternative transport methods, walking, cycling, etc.) you need to have slack/extra-capacity in any area that you're serving.

This means that I don't see why Waymo might not expand even in remote mountain towns: they are not going to have a massive fleet, but keeping one or two cars there shouldn't have a different overhead than for a Waymo car serving a city.

(the only caveat might be in making sure that the overnight depot/parking lot won't be too far from the area served).

I think that would be pretty cool, if it means that people won't have to drive themselves anymore... but I'm also quite concerned about the consequences this might have for public transport: if its usage numbers falls, and thus public investments in it stops, entire small town might end up depending on extremely few (one?) self-driving taxi providers.

I don't think there will be a big bang moment where self driving is suddenly here and it works everywhere. Instead I think it looks like what waymo is doing now, self driving taxi services that expand to cover specific regions and then expand more as they begin to handle more edge cases and more extreme weather.

By the time self driving is actually to the standard needed to sell it with a car a younger generation will probably have grown up using self driving taxi's and wonder what they need to own a car for.

You do realize that "most" of the US population lives in cities, right? The "rural" population has remained almost constant since the 1960s, while the "urban" population has grown to roughly 5x the rural population's size. Even just counting the largest 100 cities is more than the rural population. Setting that aside for a moment, how does poor signage affect self-driving cars? They're not like humans expecting to take the third left but miscounting, or turning right at the Dairy Queen (which has shut down). They have GPS and full maps. Those maps might not be perfect, but they'll only ever be wrong once if they're part of a system, which is what's being proposed here.

To be clear, I'm matching your tone here. Normally I'd try to be a little more understanding and tempered.

a) laypeople aren't usually moved by privacy violations more abstract than someone physically watching you do something.

b) most people aren't willing to don practical accessories that noticably change the perception of your face unless it emphasizes qualities considered sexy.

c) safety gear generally isn't considered sexy

I think that this stuff would be perceived like wearing a physical bike helmet for your data privacy with all the cachet of Google Glass.

My sense is that facial recognition is a stop-gap and soon to be superseded, because the tech is there for more holistic 'reads' of a person - And that those subtle things that we humans can't see are actually plain as day and as clear as a fingerprint.

If we cover our face, then the data collected on gait etc. will be more than enough. If we adopt a different gait, then the data on other foibles and styles will then give us away. Etc. (we can't hope to disguise all of these at once)

No idea if that's true or overblown, but it doesnt seem unlikely that such technology becomes possible in the future.

Trying to camouflage seems like a losing battle.

Perhaps in the urban setting but the majority of this country is not contained within cities. Even then are you planning on banning motorcycles and RVs?

> because they will consider it their right to drive themselves

Until a law is passed otherwise they are absolutely correct.

> the right-to-drive-oneself into the state constitution.

I doubt it. The real fight is likely to be whether we continue using mixed vehicle and pedestrian infrastructure or if we force pedestrians off the roadway entirely. Then we'll have a "right to walk" constitutional crisis.

83% of USA population live in urban areas, and that proportion is still steadily growing. The same trends apply everywhere else in the world as well.

If you combine dense urban areas with suburbs. It's about 33% in dense areas and 55% in suburban areas. Which actually doesn't improve the driving situation.

> and that proportion is still steadily growing

Which is why I specifically mentioned motorcycles. In areas of the world with even greater urban density than the USA there are a lot of these on the road.

> The same trends apply everywhere else in the world as well.

These trends are influenced by economic policy and socioeconomic mobility of the population, which are not similar everywhere, so expectations do need to be tailored to them.

Editing to add, I actually think we'll see a new class of Drivers License, one that allows you to operate semi autonomous vehicles, and one that allows you to operate fully manual vehicles with a higher level of continuous written and on the road testing required to hold it. Which is a reasonable and non discriminatory solution to the problem.

Are the suburbs not one of the easier places for autonomous vehicles? I’d think the lower traffic, larger roads, and reliance on cars to get around (due to low density and lack of transit) would make them the ideal place for self-driving cars to succeed.

It’s way more common to take a taxi in the city than the ‘burbs. Behavior for car ownership and expectations around waiting on rides is different. Self driving taxis are an easy transition in cities. In the suburbs, you need to sell people on expensive vehicles that cost a lot per trip (whether owned or hailed).

I believe uber says their average cost per mile is roughly $1. So maybe $2 in urban areas. Waymo is $3 they said.

I saw some statistic that said a new car costs $800 a month now. Since we’re talking about selling new manual vs self driving cars, we can ignore people buying used cars or particularly cheap cars.

If you own a car in a city, you might drive to get groceries once a week and you may drive to a furniture store once every few years, and you take a couple trips to the airport every year. Cost city dwellers walk or take transit. Cities are dense, so the grocery store may be 2mi a way, so roughly 200mi a year, and then maybe 200mi a year for everything else. That’s 400mi a year (or 8mi/wk) with a car that statistically costs $800/mo in America - or 200/wk, so it actually costs $25/mi.

In the suburbs, you may drive 20mi round trip to the grocery store. Then 20mi a day round trip to commute, then 5mi a trip to a restaurant… it adds up to a lot more miles total. I googled it and the average American drives 1200mi/mo. That’s $1.5/mi assuming the same average $800/mo cost of a new car.

That means it’s cheaper for an urban dweller to take uber or Waymo instead of buying a new car. It’s almost but not quite cheaper for a suburbanite to take an uber but definitely not a Waymo.

In a suburban area, it could take 15 minutes for a taxi to get to you. In a rural area, 30 minutes to an hour. Inconvenient, especially since you could hop in the car you already have because of this situation, and probably already be where you want to go by the time they arrive.

In an urban area (especially a super dense city like Manhattan, Tokyo, Mumbai, etc.), you probably spend more time figuring out if you need a taxi than actually getting one (literally seconds in most cases), and god help you if you’re trying to park. It will not go well.

I hard disagree. I think it’ll follow a path more like gun ownership (not trying to wade into that here though). In rural and low density areas, people believe guns provide safety, while in dense urban areas, people believe guns add risk. In low density areas, people will need to drive themselves (I doubt as many people would buy self driving cars vs use as a taxi, roads will be less well mapped, etc ), while urban areas with increased risk of driving accidents will want to restrict access of roads from humans.

This urban/rural divide doesn’t make for good licensure policy. People who depend on driving themselves are less “sophisticated” - they won’t want to spend more time getting a license, because they live farther away, they’re less likely to take drivers classes, etc. We already see states with smaller urban population have easier driver’s license standards and age requirements. Pride in vehicle ownership and car culture is already geographic simply because urban residents are less likely to own a car. So rural-leaning elected officials will want to keep human-driving easy to access.

Have you spent any time living in rural areas?

> People who depend on driving themselves are less “sophisticated” - they won’t want to spend more time getting a license, because they live farther away, they’re less likely to take drivers classes, etc

You do realize a lot of these people have class A license already because there are a lot of those jobs out there and farmers often get one to move their own product? You couldn't be _more_ wrong.

> We already see states with smaller urban population have easier driver’s license standards

They also have wildly different politics. It turns out density has more than one impact. The largest one is suicide rates. Lowest in New York highest in Alaska. You can accidentally measure population density in all kinds of ways.

> So rural-leaning elected officials will want to keep human-driving easy to access.

It's going to come down to who controls access to the freeways. I'm actually on the rural peoples side, but the interstates as a whole are a little bit out of their typical zone of influence. Given that rural life is already very different, much more so than some people can even imagine, I would expect to be the most likely point of negotiation and the most likely outcome given the parties involved.

Reasonable people could differ I guess.

Admittedly, I didn’t know that.

> They also have wildly different politics.

Yes, I’m just assuming self driving will be a topic broken down by politics. Do you disagree?

My core thesis is that rural people won’t want self driving because it’s less compatible with their existing life, and the “saves lives argument is stronger in urban areas. I think, like guns and many other political topics, it’ll be polarizing, and the rural voters will get an outsized influence to fight it. Highways are an important part of the road system. I can’t imagine rural people being locked out nor forced to have two vehicles.

Some people hunt for sustainance, and we protect that right despite being irrelevant for 99.9% of people. Many more people use trucks or heavy equipment on their farm/homestead for work (or pleasure eg off-roading). I assume we’ll end up protecting that the same way.

As for urban vs. rural, I feel like rural will benefit just as much from self-driving as urban. I won't detail why, but it's pretty much the same reasons as urban. Economics will have to be better if it's going to be corporate-controlled cars, but, really, if Elon's right (huge if) and you can successfully have autonomy with a Model 3-level of hardware, then rural America may very well have widespread autonomous car access in the next couple of years.

Motorcyles? Great point. Not sure how that will shake out. RV's? Seems like a fantastic opportunity for autonomy. Sit in the captain's seat, beer in hand, actually watch the scenery as you drive on by. In fact I think the market for RV's will grow if folks don't have to drive them themselves because there are likely many people who wouldn't be comfortable driving an RV due to its size, but if it drives itself it could open up a whole new audience.

As for pedestrians, do you think pedestrians are being restricted more and more as the years go on? I see the opposite in both urban and rural areas in the US. Genuinely curious how your experience is different and where. I tend to think autonomous cars will make walking more pleasant. No more worrying about a car clipping you making a right turn, or a car driving unnecessarily fast and losing control, or a drunk driver losing control. All of those things may go away with autonomy (I say "may" because we're millions if not billions of miles away from anyone saying definitively that self-driving is safer/better/etc. In my limited experience riding in Waymos, though, I am incredibly optimistic about the technology. And I really look forward to us figuring out the privacy implications and other negatives that could come along with it because I think the benefits are so enormous that it'll be a massive shame if the tech does not work out long term).

Once that happens insurance companies will start charging more for people that drive themselves compared to people that let the car drive.

I can see some states outlawing that practice. Then it’s left to see who is still underwriting insurance in those states.

I think this is a long way away and will vary geographically.

For a long time, self driving cars will be more expensive because they’ll have expensive sensors on it. Not many people will want a $100K self driving car instead of a $30k Camry. This means the cost-per-mile goes up unless utilization rate goes up. The most effective way to do that is make it a Taxi.

The natural result of self-driving-taxis is that the people least likely to take a taxi but most dependent on a car (rural Americans) will drive themselves still and those cars will be cheaper because they’re sensor free. That will never be a luxury product.

In urban environments though, the poorest people will continue to own cars but be slowly priced out by insurance. But maybe insurance won’t go up for manual cars, but down for self driving cars. They’ve already priced the cost of manual driving, which won’t get more dangerous as less cars are human. States might try to protect them, but I think politicians and citizens will be persuaded by “safety” over “poor people need to afford transportation”.

I don’t think many people driving a 20 model years-old 2005 (including myself) are treating maintaining that car like it’s a classic car hobby.

What you said is true, but does not reflect reality.

Today The Model 3 is ~$40k, and once self driving is "solved", there is no reason a ~$40k car won't be capable of it.

I know Elon/Tesla can be a charged topic, but teslas don’t self drive today. It might be true, but I don’t think we can assume they’re capable with just a software update based on the info we have today.

I don’t think that is true. What costs a lot more? Lidar?

Call it $10k more on the very high end. So you have fully self driving cars for $50k. A very long way from your $100k

While I'm sure the prices can come down with mass production, the estimated BOM for a Waymo are speculated to be >200k per vehicle. Maybe we can that down to 100K, but I'd be very suspicious of a 50k vehicle anytime soon.

Seems like 10 years isn’t too out there for affordable self driving vehicles considering we have one working today at the high end of cost and another getting close at the lower end of cost.

But I bet they get a report of how often you manually drive and if you cross a specified threshold your rate increases.

Edit: Also why would you need to park on grass! Hop out of the car and it will park itself wherever in a nearby lot, or just drives around until you need it.

Your suggestion that all the cars should just e driving around waiting for you is fanciful, imagine something like a live music event with 100k people? Will there just be 100k cars circling the venue waiting for pick everyone up ?

Look at the 2020 covid vaccines. The freedom crowd said this was going to have massive privacy implications, there was a propaganda machine pushing those people as being crazy antivaxers (maybe many were, let's talk about the large subset who just had privacy concerns), and the net result is that most US citizens have their names, addresses, preferred vaccination locations, preferred vaccination times, propensity for following local regulations, ..., recorded in a database so broken it's basically public.

The freedom crowd didn't have a lot of power against a propaganda machine turning their neighbors against them. Tack in a few dozens of billions from Tesla or Google claiming their cars are safer than the average driver (in well-studied, dry, daylight, slow streets) and using that to push anyone unwilling to roll that tech out globally as a road-raged Luddite, and I'm not sure the freedom crowd are going to be able to do much to slow down our corporate overlords.

> left/right

Yes, many people care about freedom

> going to have a hard time accepting self-driving cars

I'm usually optimistic, but I don't think public sentiment matters here. To the extent it does, it'll be some sort of Faustian bargain, where the law says your car must have a backup camera (arguably useful) and as a byproduct brings in unwanted, undisclosed tracking and also remote takeover capabilities through radio bugs (buffer overflows plus poorly designed canbus access). However self-driving inflicts itself on the masses, it'll be in a series of small enough steps that the freedom crowd can't appropriately fight back.

Regarding bugs and remote takeover, the one thing that does feel like a mitigating factor is I expect for many car models it might be tough to find an exploit that enables the rear camera, but doesn't let the driver know that it's active. Usually when the rear camera is active, the infotainment display automatically switches to the rear view, and I wouldn't be surprised that there's no mode for "turn on rear camera but don't display the video feed to the driver" on most cars. Not as a security/privacy feature, but just because it's easier to write the code that links the two all the time rather than having it be conditional on something.

But yeah, as autonomous driving becomes more pervasive, there will be more cars with cameras recording everything around them at all times. I expect the manufacturers/operators of these cars to store that video for some time after capturing it, even just for quality control, bug tracking, and dispute resolution if there's a crash. And certainly law enforcement already has legal tools to compel the release of this kind of video.

I suppose this is just the next step of what's already the status quo, though. Many public places already have (stationary) cameras, either operated by the police or by private individuals, and police generally have the ability to access the latter, even. Cameras on autonomous vehicles just mean many more cameras over time, cameras that move around.

I don't really love this situation; I would like to see legislation that makes all of this data protected, and requires companies that store it to delete it after a relatively short amount of time (unless subject to a legal hold). But like most things, legal protections tend to lag behind technological progress.

The sin being committed is having too much code, especially too much untrusted, untested code (it's "just a radio") wired into the canbus. Toss in a little auto-update functionality and some always-on antennas, and you have all the makings of a nasty exploit. Last I checked, none of those have been known to be exploited in the wild, but they've also not been patched in the last decade. It's a fundamental design flaw that saves a few dollars, so it persists.

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If even a small subset of users did this, and insurers did something with this information, it would substantially disincentivize driving like a complete maniac.

Are insurers unable to use this information? Are they afraid of the backlash from being the first to accept this information? Is there some legal reason this isn't doable?

Obviously you capture some craziness on the margin that you want to capture, but also on the margin is the fudging that makes the whole thing work at all.

Setting automated speed traps where drivers don't respect the limit, physically forcing lower speeds where traps didn't work or closing whole streets to regular cars to get rid of the problem altogether.

The main issue isn't just the rules, and if the infrastructure has to be adapted as well, it's often cheaper to get rid of traffic than to rethink a system that work better in adversarial situations.

Better needs to mean something other than gather revenue. And it don't with automated things.

Making perfect rules is basically impossible, they'd be millions of pages long to fully capture all the caveats and exceptions. The world is fractals complex and so we rely on intelligent prosecutors and police not bothering to pursue things that are illegal but fine.

It's just not worth it to try and make perfect laws.

I agree that brief minor parking infringements may occasionally make people’s lives more efficient; but I can’t think of any examples where traffic lights and speed limits need to be routinely disregarded?

Life will be shittier for everyone if an army of self-empowered rule-loving busybodies get to expand their current powers beyond the realm of the HOA.

In fact, if you were in the street and a car hit you, the car driver had to prove that it was unavoidable to miss you, otherwise the driver was at fault.

It was also illegal to intentionally block traffic as a pedestrian unless you were at a crosswalk. But there was no law that made it illegal to cross the street anywhere.

Seems like the best of all worlds. And it’s easy to fully enforce the whole “blocking traffic is illegal” part.

Of course, the loophole is large enough to drive a truck through: if a cop wants to, they can decide you're walking "dangerously" as a pretense to hassle you. And most of the time it'll be the cop's word against yours as to whether or not you were being safe or not, and the courts will always side with the cops absent other evidence.

I always thought jaywalking laws were just stupid. The way I looked at it was always: my parents taught me when I was a kid to look both ways, and only cross if it's safe. To me, that suggests that I should always be allowed to cross if I determine it's safe, regardless of other considerations.

(The history of such laws are quite interesting and -- spoiler alert -- surprise, surprise, they were driven by automakers.)

All things being equal though this doesn't even sound inherently bad. If every jaywalking infraction was cited we might democratically re-decide how much we want that law to be on the books.

Roads where planners have a literal blank sheet is where roads need to be designed better to slow down drivers to the desired speed limit. Sometimes it's as simple as adding traffic islands for pedestrians, narrowing the road or planing trees next to the road.

I live in the middle of Sydney. This is an urban road. It is directly off a major highway in a suburban residential area.

It is a regular residential suburban street. No amount of "clever planning" will undo the natural topography of the region. It is a paved, well maintained road and that's the problem - people's judgement of what "feels right" depends on numerous factors they can't see and which don't matter.

They're in the middle of a recently resurfaced, asphalt road with a footpath down the side and what looks like trees and bush on side, and a cliff cut on the other. But it's relatively steep, winds a fair bit due to the climb, but also looks isolated when you're at the bottom because it runs through a state park area.

From street level you cannot tell how slippery it might be when wet (which people just plain suck at), how wet "wet" actually has to be (i.e. partially wet roads are more dangerous then when it's a hard downpour because the surface becomes slick), and unless you paid close attention to the area you can't know that there's no real protection along the side of the road (which shouldn't even be a factor: no one should be driving in a way where they depend on crash severity safety measures).

Observably, people's judgement of "feels right" sucks because as noted: there's been a fair few crashes basically caused by people taking corners too fast (which is to say, maybe they were speeding but that again is the point - they think they can safely go faster, and no, they actually can't and aren't good at judging that) - one of which was a car which very luckily ploughed into a very sturdy tree stump and didn't send it's occupants down the drop into the gulley.

This is a common occurrence on this road and everyone seems to abide pretty well. Sure, there is the occasional "idiot" doing stupid things (weaving in out of traffic, speeding up / slowing down, etc.) but for the most part it just works.

The big problem is when a LEO is around. Everyone slows down to 55ish MPH and traffic backs up and people do weird things.

However, I don't know the solution. If we raise the speed limit to 70 MPH does that mean that people will then feel comfortable going 80 or 90 MPH? If we lower the speed limit to 30 MPH will that cause everyone to only go 55 MPH? This piece of road just feels right and natural at 70 MPH; everyone seems to think so, if unconsciously. Will changing the laws "fix" this piece of road?

Driver skill and reaction time also plays a factor, but of course people are not so great at judging what their own specific safe speed is all the time. And all other things being equal, you're more likely to get into a crash if you're driving faster rather than slower, and the injuries you sustain will be worse at a higher speed.

IIRC speed limits are often set at some percentile (85th?) of what all drivers would (theoretically) "naturally" drive if there was no posted limit. And, on highways, cops will often not pull people over for exceeding the speed limit by a moderate amount. Once, long ago, a cop told me that, absent adverse conditions or other unsafe behavior, he usually will not stop anyone unless they're going more than 10mph over the highway speed limit. And I expect if he were hiding in a speed trap that no one could actually see driving by, and everyone was going 70mph on your 55mph road, he'd probably just sit there and not bother anyone, unless they were doing something else that was unsafe.

I guess this is a long winded way to say that there really is no single safe speed that applies to everyone, in every road condition. The law acknowledges this, and police often let you do your thing unless they believe you're actually doing something unsafe. The discretion and judgment calls can be a problem (biases, etc.), but I don't think a society where unavoidably "fuzzy" laws were always prosecuted would be a great society either.

A human in the loop needs to be the first line of defense, if an officer isn’t willing to be in the field to issue the ticket and show up in court to defend it then there shouldn’t be a ticket in the first place, full stop

Either way I moved to a very rural and remote location. One of my many hopes is that it will buy enough time for urban and suburban areas to duke it out in courts for a couple decades before I have to deal with the fallout.

I think a solution would be to first implement this AI in a tech-only city. Tech billionaires were planning on building a tech city in California. That seems like a good test-bed to fail fast and fail often. The AI need first be installed around all the billionaires homes and the system must have full transparency. Or the system accidentally leak some interesting stats including to show if anyone was made exempt. The fines won't affect them but if their personal drivers get enough moving violations and lose their license it may affect their vendors or make them late for meetings. If they are confident in AI then they would agree to the concept of shared pain. If that tech city falls through then it should be implemented in San Fransisco for five years.

Rules aren’t meant to be cold hard algorithms to blindly punish people with; we wouldn’t automate a judge with an algorithm why is it somehow different to automate a police officer with one?

It’s estimated that we are effectively subsidizing drivers by close to a trillion dollars annually by not requiring adequate insurance to cover the full cost to victims. Just pay your ticket and drive better before you make a mistake you’ll never recover from.

The role of enforcing certain laws can be easily fulfilled with simple algorithms as the logic required is on early grade school level. In this case it's something like: if "stoplight is red" and "car doesn't stop", then "driver gets ticket." That's all the algorithm has to do, super easy to automate. Automation allows for enforcement where it would otherwise not be cost effective, like when it's 3am and no one else is around.

The judiciary, however, has to interpret all kinds of crazy edge cases that people come up with to try and get out of tickets for rolling stops or whatever legal case, for all laws, because every now and then someone has a valid case. That's a bit harder to do with a couple lines of code and some low cost hardware.

You violated a law and received a penalty. You're not disputing that you violated said law, but are instead trying to justify it with "barely didn't stop" and "it's 3am and there is no traffic".

Isn't the point that you got punished for doing something you would have gotten away with had no one been watching?

Nice twist to the premise at the end, but no, the point is that the person got punished for using sound and reasonable judgement in a situation where the regulation (not law) was ill thought out.

That still just seems like rationalization of bad behavior.

You're right that the basic premise of democracy is that citizens can be trusted as the source of the law, but it seems to me that this particular citizen can't actually be trusted? I mean, they're demonstrating a lack of integrity, are they not?

I think the issue is that you're taking as fact that "in order to be safe, you must come to a full stop at a red light before turning right", and that not doing so is, indisputably, "bad behavior". I dispute that. I think in many situations it is just as safe to nearly-but-not-completely come to a full stop before continuing, and it's entirely fine behavior.

The law has some difficulty encoding that. (Not that it's impossible, but it's difficult, and enforcement perhaps gets weirder if you try.)

Let's take a related example: jaywalking. In many places, you can get a ticket for crossing the street somewhere where there isn't a crosswalk, or crossing against a red light or a don't-walk sign. I was taught as a child how to look both ways and only cross when and where it's safe to do so. I don't need a sign or stripes on the road to tell me that (though I do appreciate those things as hints and suggestions). Hell, in some places (Manhattan comes to mind), if you don't jaywalk, everyone around you will look at you funny and get annoyed with you.

California, recognizing this, finally eliminated most jaywalking laws a year and half ago[0]. You can only get cited here if you've failed to do what your parents told you, and you're crossing when it's not safe to do so.

Stopping fully at a red light before turning right is, IMO, similar enough. For many (most?) intersections, you're only going to be a teeny tiny fraction of a percent safer coming to a full stop. So why bother?

[0] Let's also remember that jaywalking laws exist only because car manufacturers wanted them. Walking in the street!? How absurd! Streets are only for our beautifully-produced cars! Not you grubby plebeian pedestrians. Away with you!

I'm sure the multiple people that would have hit me if I hadn't jumped out of the way because they were looking the ither way to see if cars where coming thought the same.

> Let's take a related example: jaywalking.

When walking one is not impaired in one's vision of the surroundings, and you're not operating heavy machinery. The worst you can do is get yourself killed. With a car, the most likely scenario is to kill someone else.

I highly doubt this person would have rolled through the light if a cop were sitting at the intersection watching them, and they knew they were being observed.

To several other posters' points, the specific regulation in question exists for safety reasons. Those safety reasons don't go away just because you don't think they apply in the moment. I'm sure every person who has hit (or been hit by) another person when rolling through a right turn like that thought their judgement in the moment was reasonable, too. I'm also sure not every one of those would have been prevented by coming to a complete stop and looking at the turn, but certainly some of them would have, which is a net positive for everyone. This comes at a cost of a handful of seconds, which seems like the most trivial of inconveniences, and wholly worth paying every time.

I just don't believe violating the law is always wrong, always bad, or always unsafe. While I would agree that most people are bad at risk assessment, and most people are not good drivers, the law should be flexible enough to deal with cases where breaking it is absolutely fine to do.

As a perhaps weird and imperfect analogy, killing another person is illegal... except when it isn't. The law recognizes that sometimes, even if in rare cases, killing another person is justified. This is why we have different words: "homicide" is sometimes not "murder" or even "manslaughter"; sometimes it's "self-defense".

However, I don't think any violation is justified by what more or less amounts to laziness and the desire to save an inconsequential amount of time.

I don't know very many drivers who wouldn't recognize that camera behavior at 3:00 in the morning as unreasonable.

Because people don't. That's just a fact of life, and we even have silly names (like "California stop") for the all-too-common behavior of barely or not completely stopping at a stop sign before continuing on.

I'm not excusing this behavior (even though I do it myself), but it's a widespread fact of life. The world is squishy, and I don't think it's reasonable to punish everyone for not coming to a full stop every single time, even if it's 0.01% safer to do so.

It's also kinda hard to define a "full stop". Well, obviously there are some states that are very obviously a car at rest. But if you were to, say, graph my car's speed at an intersection with a stop sign, you might see a curve that flattens out to where the slope is zero. Maybe that zero-slope point is a teeny tiny fraction of a second, though. Did I come to a full stop? Yes! Can a cop actually realize I did come to a full stop? Often not. Ok, so I did stop, but did I give enough time while at a full stop in order to assess that it was safe to continue moving? Do I even need to do that after I've come to a full stop, or can I start that assessment when my speed is 3mph, and know by the time I've fully stopped that it's immediately safe to continue? I think so, yes.

It's just fuzzy. Humans are fuzzy. The law is fuzzy. Safety is not a yes/no binary, it's fuzzy. Many many people don't always come to a full stop. That's just a fact; asking why is probably pointless.

(Also, the kind of rolling stop I'm talking about isn't a 5mph roll, it's a near-stop that feels like a stop to the driver but technically doesn't actually bring the tires to stationary. Odds are even you have done this kind of stop pretty regularly without realizing it, and even a cop wouldn't even notice it as incorrect unless they were actively looking for someone to ticket.)

The second stop may actually be illegal in its own right depending on the state.

Anyway, you can drive however you want. I've been driving like this for over 30 years all across the United States and I have never been pulled over, cited, rear ended, or even, as far as I can recall, honked at while pulling this particular maneuver so I think some of the risks you are imagining may be overblown.

To use your phrasing, the risk of anything bad happening after a not-quite stop may be overblown.

Since the failure mode is an auto accident and the cost of the habit is marginal I feel comfortable promoting this behavior. I have definitely seen accidents and many near misses caused by people who failed to come to a complete stop and look around when conditions did warrant it.

Another lesson I learned in driver's ed is that traffic approaching from the left can be traveling at a speed that completely synchronizes with the A-pillar of your moving vehicle, causing it to be completely invisible to you right up until the moment it collides with your front driver's side fender. This is why I stop and move my head around while I look, to make sure I'm not missing anything. I'm just a stupid human after all.

You are correct that it's not compulsory to turn right on a red, however, if you are going to turn right you can't just stop in the middle of the intersection you either stay back or you go.

Put it this way would you feel comfortable having your phone just passively watching you and anytime you break any law that is on the books it calls the cops on you? If you can see that as over reaching you can understand why others don't want automated enforcement done to them.

Once you've been pulled over, a police officer is unlikely to change their course of action based on anything you say to them. Especially in this case, of not coming quite to a full stop at a red light before turning right. The cop knows it was safe to do so. They just want the ticket revenue or to fill up their quota for the month. Or they're just having a bad day and want to harass someone who can't fight back. Or, if I'm being charitable, they're an incessant rule-follower who doesn't understand how reality works.

> if an officer isn’t willing to be in the field to issue the ticket and show up in court to defend it then there shouldn’t be a ticket in the first place

I'm torn on this in general. The idealist in me really really really wants to agree with your statement, but the sheer number of cars on the roads means that cops see a teeny tiny fraction of things that happen. Driving-related injuries and deaths are disgustingly high, and I expect most of them are related to speeding, and running red lights and stop signs. That is, stuff cops are supposed to be policing.

No human-powered enforcement mechanism can watch for all of those. Yes, the usual deterrent factor applies: even if you are a butthole who doesn't care about safety, you might follow the rules because of the (relatively small) possibility that there just might be a cop nearby that sees you doing something bad. But clearly it's not really working all that well; car-related injury and death statistics are still (IMO) unacceptably bad.

I feel like this is sort of unique. Like, for other illegal behaviors, you can usually reduce them through other things. Like, have a healthy economy, low unemployment, under-control inflation, and housing that's affordable enough for everyone who wants to live in a place, and you have an environment where it's rare that people feel the need to commit property crimes. But drivers who speed are gonna speed. Drivers who run red lights and stop signs are gonna run red lights and stop signs.

Maybe -- like for many things -- better enforcement isn't the answer. Better road/traffic engineering, stiffer penalties for when people do get caught doing unsafe things... I dunno, maybe that will get us there. Perhaps we'll have some sort of a transit renaissance, and so many fewer people will opt to drive, and that will naturally make things better. Or maybe self-driving will get good enough (and be used pervasively enough, or perhaps even mandated) that riding in a car will become a lot safer, on par with train or even air travel. Who knows.

Regardless, though, I think my personal level of comfort is somewhere in the middle. I certainly don't want dystopian 100% panopicon-style enforcement of every single thing, where everyone is recorded everywhere they go to make sure they aren't breaking the law. But I think a light sprinkling of automated enforcement here and there is probably not harmful privacy/freedom-wise, but can indeed be a societal good. But I don't exactly trust law enforcement to stay within the lines of their mandate when it comes to these sorts of things. And I don't trust elected officials and judges to actually do something when law enforcement gets out of control.

Even with no posted speed limit, there is an implicit limit in CA (differs based on the type of road and surrounding locale), and "conditions" can again only reduce that.

The obvious answer to this proposal is that I believe that I have a right to not be monitored and penalized by autonomous algorithms, and I'm not ready to compromise on that right just because some people drive dangerously. All of the same arguments HN will reliably raise against algorithmic anything apply here, but apparently that all goes out the window when cars become involved.

I'd word it more like drivers who put me and others around me in danger should be punished for driving recklessly.

If you think that's worth it, that's up to you, but you do have to admit that your position helps those with antisocial goals. You'll probably argue that "massive surveillance nets are inherently antisocial", but we both know that's not any more true than saying that "absolute freedom of speech is inherently antisocial". Arguably true, but wholly subjective.

It's just an interesting insight into the collective tech consciousness.

The real money would be in giving civilians whose footage leads to a successful prosecution for moving violations a percentage of the fine. NYC already has something like this for people who catch too-long idling trucks and photograph/video record it.

I don't know where you live, but around me, the police are so disinterested in traffic safety that roads have turned into a Mad Max free-for-all. Red light running, stop sign running, lack of signaling, weaving in and out of lanes, and general belligerence on the road. That and 90% of drivers are playing on their smartphones. Police departments could get infinite money by just opening their eyes and pulling nearly anyone over.

I've heard lots of talk of civil war in this country, but this is the first serious plan I've seen for how to start one.

If the government was really contracting something out, then there's an argument to be made that it's on behalf of the government therefore it's government action and therefore it may be prohibited.

If nothing else, I'm pretty confident that my 3rd-amendment rights to not have soldiers crashing on my couch is safe from whatever my neighbor does with their dashcam.

Well, we saw this play out in the last couple years in Texas—they set up their laws so that abortion enforcement was performed by civilians (i.e. not cops, not the government), specifically to throw sand in the gears of any countervailing judicial efforts (i.e. making it impossible to sue anyone to force them to stop it, because it's just a game of whack-a-mole at that point).

A law [0] which, IMO, is a flat-out travesty of justice, kind of like if Texas Republicans had passed a law saying: "No private citizen shall be guilty of assault or liable in a civil trial for striking someone who spoke on the Ministry of Truth's totally voluntary prohibited ideas list."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Heartbeat_Act

I'm more afraid of the slippery slope. I'm less confident courts find state action if a government is merely encouraging private citizens to supply evidence via a bounty system. Even if it's plain that this citizen-provided evidence is horribly biased, a court might say that the prosecuting entity has the responsibility to sift through the bias, and this responsibility is the difference between the state (the government) and non-state (the citizen who happens to submit only footage of people of a certain race).

But eventually the flow of money effectively deputizes the citizen, replacing beat-cop budgets with crowd-source bounties, and years of abuse pass before the courts acknowledge that it's actually been state action for quite a while.

(Interesting reading: Yick Wo v. Hopkins, which established that a fairly written law can still violate constitutional rights if the administration of that law is unjust. The City of San Francisco required permits for laundries, which is fine, but in actuality they never granted permits for people of Chinese descent. The US Supreme Court said nope. I could see similar reasoning applying here.)

Many of them use solutions like LexisNexis Risk Solutions (which is like a 3rd party API that can return this data). How LNRS gets the data, I'm not sure.

For example, insurers also get data for stolen vehicles since it affects claims. I know this because in a previous (local government) job, I literally sat on calls about building an integration where we sent license plates of stolen cars (officially reported stolen to the police), if we wrote parking tickets for those cars, since we (another local gov agency) spotted the stolen car.

To me, even though I have strong feelings against privacy and surveillance, this felt like a totally pragmatic (and laser focused, it only affect cars that were currently designated stolen) use of the data.

I assume other states are similar

If you got a speeding ticket on week 10 of the year there is unlikely to be any increase on your insurance on week 35.

Like I said this was my perhaps incorrect understanding of how it works here in Canada.

This is 200% in the wrong direction.

We should be removing the incentive for the justice system to benefit from collected money at all let alone expanding it.

"Incentivized" justice is gigantic moral hazard. The system will invent "crimes" in order to keep the money flowing.

Also. Nothing is stopping Karen's from reporting things right now. So what if they do? If you've done nothing wrong then the reviewer would just trash it. And probably put Karen's reports in the "immediately discard" pile in the future if she sends in frivolous claims all the time.

Or, more likely, they'll just see it as a report and raise your rates, because you've been reported by someone. Because they can; all they need is a reason.

Plus, I don't like the idea that someone I don't like could editorially create a video of it looking like I was driving irresponsibly, and then my rates go up. Then they do it again and again.

Example: When I leave in the morning, I take my daughter to the bus stop. I then wait for her bus to get there, she gets on, and I wait to turn left onto the road. The bus driver waves me on, to take my left before they let the other traffic go, so I don't have to wait for 20+ cars. I turn left and off I go. I expect it wouldn't be hard to edit a video of that to make it look like I pulled up to a bus picking up children and then drove through the bus stop signal illegally.

> nothing is stopping Karens from reporting things

True, but when you provide a platform for that, you incentivize the behavior. As mentioned below, you might start getting “points” in the app for these reports, just like how you report gas prices and get points that might win you free gas.

I have used footage from my Tesla to get evidence and plate # that I could hand over to my insurance company and the police three times. 2 out of 3 were uninsured. This was during the past two years.

It really depends on the state on how strict they are with car insurance. My state is very lax and they don't even really check at the DMV. The fine for not having car insurance is also only ~300 bucks and a 90 day license suspension and it only goes up slightly until like the 4-5 time you get caught. It just honestly doesn't make sense to have car insurance with the cost/risk that low. People who pay $50-100 bucks a month for car insurance are morons btw. You can insure yourself for like $30k, and you don't have $30k lying around paying $100 bucks a month is a terrible financial decision.

Insurance in general is a whole racket. Its literally only works due to the fact people on average pay more than they receive. "Oh but what if a bad thing happens" way to live your life, disregarding economics and averages.

Take out a personal loan or save the money you would spend on insurance evry year in a liquid asset (not cash that's almost as bad as insurance). Buying insurance is for npcs.

Only insurance that makes sense to have is insurance that is government subsidized, but that isn't because its better its because you are forced to pay part of its cost with your taxes. Enjoy getting screwed sideways by big government, who literally paya middle man to help ensure their citizens get healthcare instead of directly to the actual healthcare facilities. Insurance offers no service, its a worse scam than banks and credit cards combined.

That's literally the _entire_ point of insurance. You pay a little more than the average you're expected to actually need so that, in the event of a catastrophic event, your not on the hook for an amount that would destroy you financially. The fact that any sane person would think that you should expect to collect, on average, more from insurance than you pay into it... is baffling to me. Just plain math would show that's impossible.

The only thing baffling here us your reading comprehension bud.

You missed my entire point. You think I think that? Well, if I was on another website I would say something about you as a person about the type of human being who can't even understand what they are reading but then replies with an ignorant comment.

Or take them to court. The average person will lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in their lifetime from required insurance for all type of dumb things.

We need the government to force everyone to pay an organization that does nothing but hold money in case of accidents and then release it back. We need this because people are too cowardly and fearful, so they accept financial sodomy in exchange for a very small piece of mind.

If we are going to force insuramce on people, why not just go all the way and start forcing people to not eat junky food. It costs the us citizen way more to pay for the obese and unhealthy than anywhere close to the average american will pay for an accident without insuramce. Might as well start restricting all freedoms. Take my money take my freedom, here let me bend over. That is all of you. Paying 30-50% i taxes to the government accepting that they can force you to buy a service i.e. health insurance, car insurance.

Weak people vote for more government control, because thwy are cowardly rats. They desire being controlled, read anti-oedipus and you'll understand that your little brain enslaves itself in a false prison. The mind of weak disgusting borderline subspecies humans have formed a societal prison, where freedom doesn't exist. And the strong non mentally ill are forced to accept this prison or will be insulted saying "they don't common sense" or "aren't practical".

Enough talk, the fact that a lesser human like you actually gets to determine how I live my life is disgusting. The wardens of the prison are everyday "people" who should be culled like cattle. I don't dislike the system, because its an illusion. The system is just a bunch of lesser humans who have drank the koolaid, you don't drink it and they will call you crazy. Reminds me of how Uncle Ted fought against the prison after escaping from the mind control of mass psychosis, so we locked him up. I wish with all my heart God exists, so when all you die you are judged and you have your face smashed into reality and truth at a million miles per second. The few sane are forced to fit in the sea of the mental midgets, who exist not ambivalent to slavery, but as its enablers.

What makes you think anyone wants to see your deranged diatribes?

You might feel better overall if you kept some thoughts like this to yourself (based on what you're saying seeking professional help might be a good idea as well).

Most states have a minimum of around $25K for bodily injury liability. You can't even step foot into a hospital without paying $20K, so WTF is the minimum supposed to pay for exactly?

I guess a lot of drivers have so little to their name that they are judgment-proof and just don't care if they get sued for $2M.

I had a surgery and was in the hospital for a week. The out of pocket cost without insurance was lile 20-30 thousand if I remember correctly. And that is without coupons discount you usually get from cash payment. I used insurance, so I don't know what the discount wiuld be, but usually its like at least 10-20%.

I don't know what hospitals you got to, but 20K for a hospital visit is something I have never heard of.

Certainly not here (Washington), you must have at least $60,000 AND it MUST be deposited with the DOL or State, unavailable to you, and you will not earn interest on it.

How do you propose people get to and from work to come up with $30-60K in savings that they can afford just to have sitting on account with the state?

> Take out a personal loan or save the money you would spend on insurance evry year

You're generally paying around 9-12% on this personal loan. Say it's over 5 years (that's assuming you can afford the $1,300/month payment), you're paying $21,000 in interest.

> Buying insurance is for npcs.

So your solution to NOT pay $50-100 a month for insurance is to pay a lender $1,300/mo for 5 years (assuming the amounts haven't increased then)? I don't think you've actually thought this through.

It literally would take you FIFTY YEARS to break even on this plan.

And in the meantime, you're only "insured" for the minimums, and if you're in a car accident at fault can easily be sued for more.

That said, if you expect 10% returns on equities and 5% interest on a CD, you still need to be paying around $3k/year for insurance for that to be a good deal on expectation. It could make sense if interest rates are really high, or I suppose if you use a loan to buy a CD, you'd just be paying the spread. Seems like a lot of work and extra liability to maybe save a few hundred dollars when presumably anyone doing this would consider that a rounding error.

That's an argument for automating the system, taking the biased human actor out of the process.

When people started getting higher insurance rates because a vigilante dashcam operator caught them driving 68 in a 65 three different times or because they only slowed to 1MPH instead of 0MPH at a 4-way stop, then it wouldn't seem like such a good idea any more.

For every mistake you get a point and with enough point a punishment.

Sounds familiar.

How you think this is the same as “being naughty while walking outside” is hilarious to me.

And walking comes with responsibilities too, a ruthless walker also endangers others, it's just harder to kill somebody by bumping into them, until you bump them in front of a car or train or down the stairs.

If it's not satire, driving as a right can be restricted (or even denied if you fail the driver's test) far more easily than walking. Because it's far more dangerous.

Even if it would be possible to identify people with a combination of cell phone area warrants and/or by following all cameras around, this level of effort would be far too high (and too invasive) for small crimes like theft and vandalism.

I think most camera operators make peace with the idea that randos / one offs probably can't be identified. What really aggravates people is repeated behaviour. Many people who install cameras particularly want to know "am I being targeted" vs "this is a random thing".

Billy the dumbass in Gary Indiana does something stupid there he should be held to account by people from there, not posted online and receiving massive attention from the rest of the planet as people get off to their outrage porn online.

Look at things like DMCA reporting on youtube and how it can be abused.

Yes I want those type of crimes punished and enforcement, no I do not want the masses to be working in an "all seeing eye" capacity for that to take place.

If you can't understand that the nuance there then I won't have much to discuss with you.

There's a million reasons why a dystopic snitch on your neighbours program isn't practical, as others have highlighted. I love the idea that insurance companies would be afraid of backlash lol. There's also easier options like I imagine asking car manufacturers to hand over data collected on driver behaviour would be. Don't US insurers already collect data like that from willing customers? Why not get that data from all customers regardless of consent? We've seen time and time again that most car manufacturers will throw all the data they can at whichever corporation asks for it. Even lower tech than that, speed and red light cameras have existed for a long time and they work on vehicles regardless of how many touchscreen tablets have been glued into it. Stupid(er) comment time: even lower tech again, the potential threat of gun violence in road rage incidents doesn't seem to disincentivise driving like a homicidal maniac, judging by how much worse US dash cam captured accidents seem to be compared to those from Europe or Australia. Maybe that's more to do with how many giant yank tanks there are on US roads and how much more effective they are at obliterating other road users and the sense of safety that comes with driving such huge things?

Jokes aside, road safety is a complex problem and insurance companies have other ways to protect their interests with significantly less effort.

- elasticity of laws. If all of a sudden every well-to-do law-abiding doctor, engineer and lawyer gets a fine on their daily commute for speeding 5 mph over the limit, there's going to instantly be a lot of pressure to change the speed limit to something reasonable.

- the amount of absolutely insane, dangerous behavior on the highways (people weaving in and out at 100 mph, etc.). It may be tough for an insurance company to act on a tip that someone changed lanes without using their blinkers, it certainly won't be tough if there's video evidence of them going 100 mph.

- the fact that insurance companies (presumably) do not need to know the identity of the driver to raise rates. If your car is regularly being driven by your brother at 100mph, it's still your insurance that's going to pay if he gets in an accident.

- while the police sound like they've given up on enforcing any traffic laws, it's in the insurance company's financial interest not to insure dangerous drivers. (And while that's sad, maybe private sousveillance is better than anarchy. People can have differing opinions.)

Not if your brother isn't listed as an insured party on your insurance. The insurance company will tell you to pound sand in that case. And if your brother is on your insurance, and you're paying for it and giving him a free ride, that's on you.

> And while that's sad, maybe private sousveillance is better than anarchy. People can have differing opinions.

::raises hand:: We shouldn't accept either. Private surveillance is not the solution to anarchically poor enforcement.

It's really the job of police forces to act on maniac drivers. And they stopped doing so in 2020 for the same reason.

Do you really think everyone is just insured because it's the law? If so, you're fairly naive. Try leaving the bubble you live in now and then. Oakland cops stopping responding to anything less than murder at lot sooner than 2020 lmao.

Probably the letter should be more specific, include pictures, and it should not be entirely anonymous. You should be able to find out if someone is trying to make trouble for you.

It might not even be legally possible anyway. Insurance companies have a lot of regulation.

You are presuming that the manics are otherwise legally entitled to drive and have valid insurance. It should be no surprise to learn that they, very largely, do not.

They already don't care about your incentive system.

Otherwise i'd spend some time 3d printing something that looks a LOT like my neighbors license plate and wait until 1 AM and just blow the same red light over and over and over.

Running ML on public footage of people who did not consent is a huge no-no.

Dashcams are already a problem and technically illegal although tolerated. The footage can't generally be used on court.

What has stopped you from doing that personally?

It took a while though. Maybe 10 minutes in total to pull the dashcam clip and upload it to YouTube.

In my country, most police forces accept dashcam evidence from other road users, and will prosecute on it. It’s seen be the police as a great road safety tool.

GM is already doing this, look it up.

I think you'll find too that a lot of people think laws are for other people. My speeding is totally justified.

Even better, not only notify insurance companies, but notify other drivers that the idiot in front of them is dangerous so they can react.

I can immediately think of half a dozen ways this would be abused.

The clique of brats in their daddies' Teslas at Sammamish High School bully the unpopular kid.

Black guy who drives through predominately white neighborhoods in the deep south.

Prius with a Harris/Walz bumper sticker in eastern Idaho.

Need I go on?

In the US, I could totally see that happening.

I wonder if folks could wear an emitter mask to prevent identification of their face? (like a hockey mask but covered in bright IR LEDs to confuse cameras)

There is nothing stopping them.

Which is why a privacy amendment must be passed and enforced with ruthless abandon if we don't want to pave the way for – and eventually become – an Orwellian panopticon in the service of authoritarians.

The other thing to remember is that governments don't operate red light cameras. They hire contracting businesses to install and operate them, and normally instead of paying a fixed rental/maintenance rate for the cameras those companies typically get paid a fraction of the fines. That means the designer/operator of the camera doesn't have much incentive to make the camera accurate or maximize safety, but to maximize how many cars it can issue tickets to (whether or not they're actually breaking the law or not).

When you take that to the extreme, the red light camera companies will even lobby local politicians to install more of them, and advertise them not as a tool for safety but for revenue. In some cases they've straight up bribed mayors and city officials with kickbacks from the ticket revenue.

All told, red light cameras are pretty shitty at making roads safer. What we really need are narrower roads with fewer lanes and smaller cars, but that's systemic. If we want to make specific intersections safer you can park a traffic enforcement officer at the intersection which will do more than any camera will.

It also penalizes driving behaviors that are objectively not very dangerous far more harshly than a human police officer would—a lot of the profit from a red light camera comes from rolling right turns on red, which is very often a perfectly safe behavior that actually helps traffic move more smoothly (for example, when you technically have a red but there's a left turn crossing in the opposite direction providing complete cover for your move).

People who drive like complete maniacs aren't doing so rationally. It's called "road rage" not "road reason."

Not if they're underestimating the risk. For instance, if they think speed limits are instituted by clueless bureaucrats, or they think they're better than the average driver and therefore can drive more aggressively.

I can't tell whether you wanted an opportunity to rant about unjust speed limits in your area, or are trying to get in a smug "well ackushally \u{1F913}" response. While it's true that speed limits can be arbitrary and driving above it doesn't magically make you a dangerous driver, it's pretty obvious when people say "driving like a complete maniac", that's not the sort of behavior they're referring to. Thinking "speeding" and "driving like a complete maniac" means driving 1 mile over the speed limit in an artificially low speed limit zone is about the least charitable way of interpreting that statement.

>Same with being better than another driver, it doesn't matter if you are or aren't better than another driver when they crash into you.

Again, I can't tell whether you're trying to be snarky. Being a better driver (however it's defined) might not fix your car when it gets into a crash, but I don't think anyone doubts that a professional driver is going to be able to avoid more accidents than the 90 year old granny that only drives every sunday to go to church, when put in the same situations.

>I appreciate you making my point for me.

Whatever you say, champ.

I have no idea how you came up with the hypothetical of the speed limits, and then went further to assume I'm making the argument that driving 1MPH over the limit was a good example. That's a ridiculous approach to this conversation.

>Again, I can't tell whether you're trying to be snarky. Being a better driver (however it's defined) might not fix your car when it gets into a crash, but I don't think anyone doubts that a professional driver is going to be able to avoid more accidents than the 90 year old granny that only drives every sunday to go to church, when put in the same situations.

But your example wasn't a professional driver, it was just someone who thinks they are a better driver. You were talking about people who were underestimating risks... how would that apply to a professional driver?

So this might be an effective (and cheap, compared to fiery auto crashes and arrests) way to discourage that behavior.

And if someone does not respond to the initial incentive, their insurance rates would continue to climb, so at some point in time they either end up uninsured (in which case, this sousveillance really ought to just inform the cops, but anyway, the opinion in this thread is that cops are useless, so YMMV) or fix their behavior.

The police don't want to enforce the laws that are written. They don't even pull over drivers without license plates.

I was a big believer of police reform, but realized the whole system was broken and police are just a symptom. And most actors are actually behaving somewhat rationally.

The sad part is criminals are finally realizing this. I have a cousin who hangs with a “crowd” and it’s amazing how prolific and bold some are. And how many people know about the crimes and no one really says anything. And apparently police know about a lot of it too, but apparently a case that prosecutors will take is an exceptionally high bar.