- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
We live in the dumbest timeline
Is this bad? I thought cameras would help reduce people running red lights etc
Cops and ICE are just going to use this to surveil citizens unjustly (arguably against their 4th amendment right).
Traffic cameras are revenue generators for police departments. Better road infrastructure is the way to make the roads safer. Traffic calming makes cars drive safer without requiring enforcement.
Hello! The consequence for going too fast over a speed bump is you get jostled around a bit and you decide how much of that you can tolerate. The consequence of running a red light can either be nothing or a collision. Red light cameras add an incentive for you to avoid a potential collision. We can have speed bumps and cameras :)
Would you feel better if 100% of the revenue collected from red light infractions went back to better road infrastructure?
There are better forms of traffic calming than speed bumps. Building an overly wide and smooth high speed road and then putting a speed bump in the middle of it is the kind of stupidity that typifies american road infrastructure. Rough, narrow, and curved mixed use streets causes traffic to drive slowly. Traffic cameras and school zones only exist because american roads are intentionally designed to be dangerous.
Money raised from road fines and tolls should go to public transport, like busses, and light rail.
I worked for the city government in Houston, TX for a bunch of years. I shared an automation lab with the traffic division (just a really big room with public works gear on one side and traffic gear on the other). We would test programming changes on hardware in there before field deployment. I got to know them pretty well and got to mess with their stuff. It was interesting because of how differently they approached the question of automation than I did. Whereas my programs and gear were more focused on local control with manual override for local operators, their gear was hyperfocused on timing across controllers in a region, backup controller switching, and file verification. The process they had to go thru to change timing was exhausting and I’d read stories in media about citizens being pissed about traffic lights not being right while their engineers had been going thru the struggle to validate timings at that exact location for weeks and months. They were an unloved bunch but that’s what you gotta do when a single timing or programming error kills people.
Anyway.
Houston decided to try to save its taxpayers money by doing a public/private with a red light camera company. They’d share the revenue generated and they started with (I think it was 6?) intersections that were the worst for red light running results in serious injury and property damage. One was near my house and I was really happy about it because if you know Houston, 610 south loop feeder at Stella Link is terrifying.
The citizen response was ferocious. People (including city workers and cops) were just straight up spouting bullshit about the cameras and the traffic department, the most common being that traffic lowered the time of the yellow in order to trap people into more tickets because the real purpose of the cameras was revenue generation. Even my close family were convinced traffic fucked with the yellows.
So I roll over to their side of the lab to ask traffic and you could tell they were super pissed off about it. They brought out all programming change documentation to that signal going back a decade. Maintenance records for the gear. SCADA communication records. Everything. They had already put together their data to defend themselves and it was iron clad. They even dug out the bluetooth data showing the average speed had gone down approaching the red light proving that driver habits were responding to the camera, resulting in fewer accidents with less lethality when it did happen. The Stella Link “short yellow” became the most complained about light in the greater Houston metro. They told me they got more complaints on that yellow in a week than they had gotten on that light for any reason in any 12 month period.
After a big political fight, the cameras were turned off. In the seven day period after they were turned off, no complaints against the Stella Link yellow were made. It just magically stopped being a problem. And my father in law told me that I had been lied to by traffic and that no matter what I said or saw, he knows they changed the timing.
anyways, yes to red light cameras