If these cameras were smart enough to issue citations when pedestrians or cross-traffic is present I could support it. But issuing a citation at a deserted intersection when no risk is created is just absurd.
I think the right fix here isn't total enforcement nor relaxed enforcement, but relaxed signage. If sight lines are good enough that it's safe to roll through, that should be a yield, not a stop. Stop should mean, you actually need to come to a complete stop to safely navigate this intersection. Then you can enforce it without qualms.
They are
“I can drive a car therefore I understand traffic design better than traffic designers” is obviously an absurd statement when you just say it outright instead of condescendingly implying it.
> HN commentator revolutionizes traffic design with groundbreaking insight: consider the sight lines
Often on EU roads they will use "sharks teeth" yeild markers where a side road enters or crosses a main road. The requirement there is essentially "proceed if clear" a full stop is not required. I have rarely (maybe never) seen a US-style 4-way stop there (my experience is limited to Scandinavia and Germany).
There are too many failure points there to trust mediocre meat sacks to follow that process correctly. Remember that driving rules and restrictions are not written assuming an alert, effective, and skilled driver operating a well maintained vehicle, they are written assuming an average person who has successfully completed a driver's test driving something that passes basic road worthiness checks.
E.g. in the Netherlands or Germany there's no need for 4-way stops and such. If no other signage applies, then whoever is on the "right" side has priority over the people on the "left" side. And exceptions do apply, i.e. it's not "that simple" either. It does depend on whether both roads are on the same level or not. A road to your right that has a sidewalk border stone running across it does not give them the right of way, while if the sidewalk border stops and both roads intersect directly at the same level, then the road to your right does have right of way.
So e.g. if you take a typical urban development with lots of little streets and houses, where you'd see a lot of rolling stops in America, nobody's gonna stop at every intersection, rolling or not there. This does go as far as when cars from all directions arrive at the same time, then nobody has automatic right of way and one of them has to wave the person to their right through and will be the last allowed to proceed.
I do disagree about the rolling stop though. After drunk driving, drivers getting too relaxed and working off of predictive execution has to be the biggest cause of road accidents. A driver rolling past a stop at high speed in a school zone cant react fast enough to kids running past or even just walking on predictive execution themselves because they think the car will stop.
Obviously there are degrees to rolling stops. one so slow that the driver can react easily (and is scanning so they can see the thing they need to react to) is fine, but some of the "rolling stops" ive seen in residential neighborhoods are crazy. Those definitely need to be made an example of.
Obviously thats when police discretion comes in. The police officer is the one issuing the ticket at the end of the day, so you need to trust that law enforcement wont be corrupt and pedantic. No amount of technology is gonna fix that
Of course if there are pedestrians waiting to cross, or the sight lines are bad, you behave accordingly.
you as a human of course know not to hit a person walking thru an intersection. But a drunk person might think "eh I never fully stop and I don't see anyone".
We must all follow the rules to a TEE, ie; stopping even if completely clear, to signal to the lowest common denominators "this is the rule, you must stop regardless."
If this where not the case, by your logic, you can blow thru red lights, make left turns on red, drive against traffic etc. "as long as it's clear."
I personally am okay with enshittification of AI traffic cams if it promotes more aggressive traffic compliance. The police sure aren't.
Why bother rolling the stop, it should be ok to blow through it at full speed if you're sure it's clear.
I could support this if you combined it with criminal and civil liability when you guess wrong and run someone over while blowing your stop-sign. Right now, that's a $500 ticket at best, and it happens every day.
The whole problem is that people don't look for pedestrians -- they look for another car that might hit them. So they are looking the wrong way. And then they tell the cops some sob-story about how the dead pedestrian "came out of nowhere".
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/oakland/comments/4wdd57/whats_the_d...
There is a clear need to change a lot of things, whether it be (automatic) enforcement, redesigning infrastructure, and driver mentality.
[1] https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...
[2] https://transport.ec.europa.eu/news-events/news/eu-road-fata...
In the US a 15 year old can get a learner's permit and start driving (with an adult) the same day. They can be licensed to drive on their own at 16 by passing a fairly cursory written exam and a short road test. No formal/classroom instruction is required.
Sadly it will be next to impossible to implement re-testing at a certain age as old people are the majority of the voters.
Another part is truck design. Same reason: American trucks have elongated noses for the engine, whereas European trucks have the driver sitting directly above the engine.
On top of that, European countries have much more strict testing requirements on vehicles. Basically, every 2-4 years you have to have your vehicle inspected for roadworthiness - foundational stuff such as structural rust, worn-down tires or brakes gets caught much, much earlier than in the US.
But also we have a serious problem where taking away someone's license to drive is to sentence them to poverty if not homelessness and starvation. We don't have decent public transit and there are very few jobs within walking distance of most residential areas. Those jobs that do exist don't pay a living wage because pegging minimum wage to inflation or even the poverty line is "communism" and an "attack on businesses".
Our problems with car fatalities is really only one small symptom of the ongoing collapse of American society.
Given the way American streets are set up, rigorously enforcing stop signs is probably beneficial, but I think other factors about how streets are arranged and how people drive are more important.
Most of shops i visit , other family members, my job , parks etc are all within about 5km of me.
The longest drive i do to visit a family member is 90km, every few months.
Anytime i've visited the US even going to the nearest shop seemed like a very long drive.
So if all other things are equal, theres just more opportunity for accidents.
For example, the risk of a car crash should be near zero if the distance driven is also zero. But even in the safest of vehicles, driving 100KM, 1,000KM, or 10,000KM+ each are going to have higher rates of accidents assuming real-life road conditions.
In the US, on average, people need to travel further to get to their destinations, and so on average I'd expect car accident and death statistics to likewise be higher.
I'm very in favor of reducing urban sprawl, utilizing public transit, etc., but in present state the US has vast quantities of existing road networks which can't be consolidated or mitigated overnight, so the next best way to improve those statistics would be improving traffic controls, vehicles, safety features, etc.
But state and federal governments should absolute zero-in on reducing sprawl and travel distances and those actions should've started yesterday and they should stay laser focussed on reducing driving distances (especially for non-leisure reasons)
Many of the most effective and efficient measures to reduce traffic fatalities work by reducing traffic. For example, promoting public transit. However, if you measure fatalities per kilometer these highly effective mechanisms have no effect on the metric.
In the USA, I have a friend who will do a tour visiting family every few months that takes him 1400 km outbound.
The error in agreeing to automatic enforcement lay in the indirect failures that naturally follow within centrally structured systems, when those automatic systems stop working correctly, or worse selectively work; the world will be worse off than not having the solution in place at all.
There are dramatically more risks of this becoming a component of a panopticon prison in a fascist state, something the US is degrading into right now with the slow erosion; and stress fractures to our rule of law, it might very well suddenly fail overnight.
What impact will these solutions have in breeding discontent if everyone has the boot of the government on their neck every time they roll through an empty stop-sign where no one is there..., or worse when they did stop and the AI mis-categorized it as a rolling stop. What feedback systems correct a faulty running system? Government and government apparatus have trouble getting sufficient benefits to legitimate welfare recipients, what makes you think they'll do this any better? Competency is not a common trait for government workers.
Who do you think will be most impacted, the people with less awareness, or the people with more awareness. Lower IQ/cognitive speed vs. Higher IQ/cognitive speed. Would this result in an evolutionary filter against intelligence?
Would these dramatic changes drive the intelligent people which society rests upon (dependently so), so crazy that they end themselves, don't have children, or end their children and themselves? Is there any hope for a future under such repressive and stagnant systems. No there isn't. Intelligent thought is largely based in cognitive speed, and multiplied by education. There are some very educated people who are not necessarily sufficiently intelligent to stand in for these people. Their words and ideas often cause more harm, the more complex the system becomes.
The moment you rest an argument on do it for the dead people, or do it for the children, which is what %, you dismiss all the failures of the proposed system. Those failures still occur, those harms still happen, and the type of people you have left are less capable of adapting, or rather become enraged with each additional reminder that they are not people, they are slaves or animals.
A nation becomes strong only as a result of its strong people in unity.
When you make people necessarily dependent on the imagined detriment of what could happen, prevent them from acting, and do this at the expense of what is actually happening, you get a weak fragile complacent brittle people who break and are parasitically dependent on a pool of people that shrinks to nothing.
These detrimental characteristics spread over time both laterally among people but also generationally, and eventually circumstances occur where your people simply cannot adapt to what the environment requires as needed, and in that existential threat you face oblivion as a species, extinction.
Complacency, and a blindness or reactance to the risks, breed delusion which takes root spreading to those that remain, as a contagion.
The moment you think you can make people better by treating them like animals or slaves, or prisoners, is the inflection point towards your people's ultimate destruction; although it may be many years between. Every person is dependent on every other person indirectly, and some carry more than others.
How do you suppose such camera's of an all seeing eye will change the populace for the worse, might it make them more animalistic, ugly, violent... just as Sauron did as described by Tolkien, and much of the basis for Tolkien's works is based on the bible.
The only way to win a game of thermonuclear war is to not play the game. The same can be said about a lot of decisions which pigeonhole your future into a box without a future.
The dead giveaway to all these blatantly dishonest "safety" measures is they always, nearly without fail invoke safety "for the children." After all, who could be against that?
What incentive structure could make these things be more benficial than just money grabbing? Laws that revenue from citations must be spend for direct public benefit only? With public audit?
(note/edit) I'm talking about flashing lights in the cab like when my car thinks I need to break. Forcing me to break unless I'm about to kill someone. Or just re-thinking the stop sign. The point of stop signs is they're effing cheap. If you're going to put AI cameras on all of them that is no longer cheap, could you not just turn them into lighted intersections that give the green to the right person and remove confusion and detect or have slappers for the pedestrians and just smooth out traffic everywhere? Or is the unsaid thing that stop signs are actually smoother because well you can roll them using your human brain to make decisions?
This isnt alot better, but at least its a provate vendor that gets data to the government who then decide to cite whats supposed to be dangerous behavior. Theres obviously corruption there, but these people are at least somewhat beholden tp the public through local elections and stuff. The toyota executives are not
IIRC, California abandoned automated traffic enforcement systems like these in the past because at the end of the day they were revenue negative. Having a human in the loop reduces the false positive rate, but drives up operating expenses to the point that it isn't sustainable.
[1] https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/05049/
So they set a speed limit of 20mph on any mixed use street, and create separated pedestrian/cyclist infrastructure for any street with higher speed limits.
The latter is super expensive, but it's what you need if you want usually zero fatalities and to go faster than 20mph.
Actually zero all the time is impossible, of course. It's possible that a 5mph collision with a frail pedestrian will kill them. So Norway and Sweden sometimes have a fatality. But a goal of "zero pedestrian fatalities most years" is actually feasible for polities with fewer than 10 million citizens.
"One must know when it is enough. Those who know when it is enough will not perish."
I think it's good to aim for zero traffic deaths, as in many countries the situation is so bad that a lot of improvement is feasible.
The long tail would definitely be much harder to tackle, but I don't expect this to be a serious problem in practice.
People don't want automated ticketing, so governments don't implement it.
In addition, there are many laws that aren't enforced and would generate instant outcry if they were. For example: it's illegal for someone of any age to ride a bicycle on the sidewalk, as opposed to the roadway, in many cities (in some cities it's the opposite).
Red light cameras foundered on that obligation since they were generally run out of State and fly the camera operators in was not cost effective.
Also, just because your car broke the law doesn't mean you did, which was another defense that worked.
I'm surprised that the citations aren't thrown out...
Moving something into evidence that isn't testimony from a living breathing human is commonplace. A lawyer has someone attest to the authenticity and/or provenance of the item.
They may, but once something becomes a revenue stream, their successors won't.
Self driving cars are the real solution to this problem and the only solution to this problem. And maybe also teach your kids to look both ways.
mindslight•6h ago
There's also the general problem with stop signs that if you do stop before the line as you're technically supposed to, then most times you can't actually see oncoming vehicle traffic. So most people stop over the line where they will be able to see, which means they're not planning on stopping where pedestrians walk. But fixing intersections is expensive meticulous work, while fining drivers for dealing with what they've been given is profitable.
If this were targeted at flagrant violations with warnings for a percentile of marginal cases (ie getting people who don't stop at all, and warning those who strain the idea of a rolling "stop"), then I could see it. But as it's worded, and as speed/red light cameras have been implemented, it just seems like another dynamic of a dystopian hellhole.
TheJoeMan•5h ago
For example see fig. 71 at https://highways.dot.gov/safety/other/older-road-user/handbo...
kenjackson•5h ago
In these cases there's usually some other violation that is occurring, e.g., cars parked too close to the intersection, or shrubbery not properly cut back. As you note, the result is often they have to go beyond the stop sign. Even worse, I often end up so far in the street that if there was a car that was within its lane, but on the right-most side of it, they'd hit me (fortunately most drivers are aware enough to stop).
mindslight•5h ago
I think the general problem is that the presence of the stop sign and the 80-99% case (depending on the area/intersection) being to only worry about cars creates a type of blindness to pedestrians when they are there. Rather than these devices, I would say it would be more effective to install flashing lights on or around the stop sign, that turn on to signal a pedestrian is crossing.
(of course that would now be a bit of an uphill battle owing to the signs with the lights that flash all the time)
ryandrake•4h ago
mindslight•4h ago