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Red light cameras were put in Houston. (I know this article is about speed cameras)
They seemed to cut down on running red lights in general, and they decreased t-bone accidents (which are extremely dangerous) but increased rear-end\hit-from-behind accidents which are less dangerous. When the cameras were in place and people got used to them, fewer accidents overall happened which was good and far fewer people ran the lights.
All of this sounds good, but that is where the problem came in - fewer people ran the lights.
See, like most things in the US, the cameras were put up on a profit basis - namely that the company running them were expected to earn a certain $ amount for each ticket sent out. But with fewer people running the lights, the number of tickets declined and so the company was losing money every month.
So then Houston ‘played’ with the traffic lights and decreased the time the Yellow stayed up, driving up the number of tickets.
But watchdogs were tracking this and presented evidence that the signals were being manipulated and eventually the cameras were voted out.
Lesson? Not everything should be done on a profit motive. The cameras were effective at decreasing injuries, accidents, and running-of-lights in general but didn’t generate enough profit.
I firmly believe that all income from tickets and fines should be handed over to another department that has no oversight over the people handing out the punishment (ie give it to schools, or use it for making new parks).
I live in a town that was infamous for being a speed trap. When I was a teenager I would get pulled over every time I drove through the town, because I drove an old Volvo and looked like a hippy. I never got a ticket, but they sure loved to search my car for drugs. The police should not have been incentivized to maximize stops, but to reduce damage (lower fatalities, etc)
It’s a little more complex than ticket revenue being directly to the police department; but the short version is “Yes”.
(If this subject is of interest to you, I would propose reading up on the subject of civil forfeiture - another law enforcement process that has been subverted in certain jurisdictions, and to similar ends.)
I firmly believe that all income from tickets and fines should be handed over to another department that has no oversight over the people handing out the punishment (ie give it to schools, or use it for making new parks).
This is a popular idea that generally doesn't work, because money is fungible. It's the same problem as "earmarks".
The schools and police still ultimately get funded by the same government. If the schools get $100 more from fines, that means the government doesn't need to put as much toward the school budgets, which means it has more money for the police.
You can increase the "distance" of the incentive, but it's hard to get rid of the incentive entirely. To do that, you'd have to literally give the money away. Do something like put all fines into an account and cut an annual check to every citizen. Of course, then you have issues like identifying "every citizen", and incentives based on locals vs visitors, and citizenship boundaries.
I agree, but any distance is better than none. When the manger can directly raise there budget by having everyone meet a higher quota, it is very difficult to remain objective.
Put the money in a state trust, then mix it up and give it back to the individual districts based on population. There are many ways to greatly reduce the incentive for one town to become a speed trap.
I got pulled over for driving too close to a semi on a multi lane highway, which I was but it was temporary as I was merging lanes, In a safe manner to make sure I was positioned for an upcoming exit. I was probably behind that semi for 45 seconds, and still had probably 4 car lengths infront of me before changing lanes again. I was then pulled over 2 minutes later. Didnt get a ticket, He just wanted to let me know I was driving in a potentially "unsafe" situation. Really I think that cop was just fishing for non white people to give bs tickets to, with out of state plates. It was omaha nebraska after all.
In some places, they structure the contract such that the (usually private) company that installs the cameras and determines who has run a red light gets a certain percentage of the fine revenue. This is generally a bad idea, as it creates a perverse incentive to find more people guilty.
Notably, NYC has recognized this is bad and does not structure their contracts this way.
The problem is they were getting paid (and measuring) the wrong datapoint. They should have been paid to maintain a reduction of traffic light violations.
Or just don’t run government programs as revenue generators for either a private business or the government unless it’s specifically about taxing since it usually ends badly. Especially when it is safety related.
FDA gets funding from medical companies and it’s worse and has created perverse incentives instead of focusing on “is this Food and/or Drug safe”.
Police getting to keep civil forfeiture and it’s immediately abused.
Red light cameras, speeding ticket, parking meters, etc etc etc
As soon as the government’s goal (or private company it’s contracted out to) becomes revenue generation the “service” it provides becomes worse because making money and providing service are generally opposite goals.
Governments have to generate revenue to provide services. Trying to tie revenue to the service via things like usage fees or fines seems more fair than taxing everyone to pay for e.g. speeding enforcement. Fines send a price signal to people that encourage different behaviors, while also paying for the requisite services.
You can collect fines and usage fees without the goal being revenue generation.
Red light cameras can exist, speeding tickets can still get paid, parking meters can be installed etc etc
You just need a strong barrier between the people/department collecting and where the money actually goes.
If the people issuing fees and fines rely on those to fund themselves, it creates incentives for abuse.
Civil Forfeiture of ill gotten gains? Not an inherently bad idea, but what can be seized needs to change and where the money goes needs to change. Police departments being able to spend seized money is insane, it gives them incentive to seize stuff. If it all went into a victims compensation fund, police wouldn’t be incentivized to steal from random people.
It makes perfect sense for speeding tickets to pay for road use in some way, sending that to the general fund encourages politicians to pursue more punitive fines to generate more revenue. It’s famously how small towns in Illinois work and it creates awful incentives.
So you think fines that go to the general fund will be abused by politicians trying to get more money but fines that go directly to the police department directly won’t get abused by police trying to get more money?
Did I say anything about fines that go directly to a police department? I very specifically did not. Things like asset forfeiture are clearly not serving any legitimate purpose for the public and are already constitutionally dubious. I'm talking about using red light camera funds to pay for safety improvements, road infrastructure, and so on. I was quite clear.
I think you misunderstood me because I never said fees shouldn’t exist or that they shouldn’t fund things.
I just said revenue generation should not be the goal of any of the programs.
The person who controls the length of a yellow light should not be paid by fees from red light tickets, otherwise we get situations where safety is a secondary concern to revenue when the goal should be safety.
City still saves money from fewer police responses to traffic accidents, public domain cleanups after accidents, health insurance claims under Medicaid, loss of income tax from extended leave due to disability, etc etc
The extra ticket revenue is revenue they wouldn't have gotten without the traffic cameras. The savings on reduced accidents are permanent.
Lesson? Not everything should be done on a profit motive
We have to hammer this constantly because for whatever reason people seem devoted to the notion that governments should be run like for-profit businesses. Some government programs will take a facial financial loss. That doesn’t mean they’re creating societal loss.
And this is why studies like this are so important: to remind people that we can quantify the societal value and we should account for that when deciding how to govern ourselves.
Even the way you are framing it is honestly kind of problematic, I hate using the phrase financial loss in connection to government services becauseservices have a cost plain and simple. Paying those costs is in no way a financial loss it's just what a government is supposed to be doing with the money it gets from taxes. The only time the idea financial loss even really comes into play is when we start talking about times when the costs have ballooned well beyond the value of the service provided at which point you reevaluate the system
Nobody complains the fire department is losing money despite the fact that they bring in effectively no revenue. How much revenue does the president generate despite earning $400,000 a year? How far in the red is the department of defense or war or whatever we've decided the current name is?
Somehow people want to complain that we need to run the government more like a business and that these services shouldn't be running at a loss when in fact the IRS on its own collects something upward of 95% of the total government revenue so if we got rid of everything that wasn't making money we basically only have the IRS left
For government programs involving direct “payment”—here, via financial penalty/ticket, and for public transit, via tickets, for the postal service, via stamps and package fees—people tend to expect that to cover all operating costs. So when I characterize it as a net “financial loss” it’s because there is cashflow in and out. But it wouldn’t be profitable to have these cameras, or to have our extensive networks of public transit and postal coverage, which is precisely why we have a government to do this instead.
Completely agree with the rest of your comment, just explaining those terms.
It's bad policy to have a financial incentive to punish people.
Fines should only exist to dissuade people from breaking the law. Put that money into the community pizza party fund, or something that doesn't need to exist.
This is very similar to what's happened in my city with speed cameras. For one thing they were put up in places where having drivers speed up right afterwards was not ideal (an intersection where I cross almost daily was right after a camera where people speed up like crazy). For another, the city promised it would never spend the money on anything other than traffic safety measures, but then after only a couple years it diverted the money out. Then there were cameras making millions of dollars where it was obvious the road needed to be changed to make it safer but the city now had an incentive not to. In theory a good idea but in practice it's ripe for corruption.
People in the US need to understand this. Healthcare, prisons, and even traffic light cameras. It is not capitalism because there is no "supply and demand" or completion. Its just people allowed to maximize profits off the suffering of others while paying politicians to eliminate any oversight.
I agree that government should not be run with a profit motive.
I do think red light tickets should come with a financial fine, or points towards a driver losing their license. The revenue can go towards maintaining the cameras or something else like vision zero safety improvements where we fund things like raising crosswalks to sidewalk height (speed bump where pedestrians are) and daylighting so that cars don't park right in front of crosswalks so that both pedestrians and drivers can see each other sooner.
The thing is though, that losing a license would be unpopular because some people are reckless drivers that also depend on their car to earn a living and buy groceries.
Community service as an alternative to paying is fine by me.
I do not know another form of punishment that would be both effective and fair and overcome perverse financial incentives.
they'd be fine if the cameras were not so expansive that cities didn't need to drive up tickets and start decreasing the yellow-light timing, but that's what always seems to happen.
No, they do not. Go and look at the other areas that had speed cameras. Such as the Phoenix greater metro speed camera trial that they did on our freeways. It was HORRIBLE. Led to tons of near accidents as people smashed on their breaks at specific windows where cameras were known to be and you'd be nearly blinded whenever it took a photo. Speed cameras on roads are a horrible idea.
You'd live in a surveillance state out of fear of people going 10 mph over the speed limit? I'm good on that. My experience with driving in a time of speed cameras all over the freeways was that it was disastrous.
The better example is to point out "return to the mean" statistical pattern. Intersections have a statistical distribution of crashes every year. Some have more or less crashes based off of pure chance. The intersections that happen to get more crashes, then have cameras installed, and then have fewer crashes only because the amount of crashes returned to a more average amount of crashes. It has been known for at least a decade that red light cameras do not reduce collisions, they only appear to.
Incorrect. The data has been very clear that red-light cameras do reduce dangerous crashes and injuries. The data from multiple cities show they cut the most serious collisions, especially T-bone crashes, by 30–40%, and those are the ones that put people in the hospital or worse. You do sometimes see a small uptick in minor rear-end bumps, but those rarely cause injuries, while the life-threatening crashes drop significantly. Cities that removed their cameras saw serious and fatal crashes climb right back up, which pretty clearly shows the safety benefit. So whatever people think about the fines, the cameras absolutely make intersections safer for drivers, kids crossing the street, and everyone else using the road.
Your own post defeats itself. If an intersection that has more crashes then returns to average crashes after cameras are installed then the cameras were effective.
Source? Because everywhere they're used eventually gets better. Gets worse initially as people try and game the cameras but eventually everyone adjusts.
School zone cameras for example. Decreased instances of drivers hitting children. I'll take a hundred fender benders compared to a single child getting hit.
I don't think enforcing traffic laws are bad. Some of these laws are more needing of enforcement than others. Red light running as an example and drinking and driving. I think that utilizing camera systems to blanket enforce laws is bad. Someone going 10 mph over a speed limit is not bad nor should it be something they are financially penalized for. Speeding under criminal level should be something that is a reason to pull someone over, but not in itself an instant penalization. That seems like common sense to me though.
Ok. Now show the statistics of how many low income, below poverty level residents these tools affect. And don’t tell me take the train there are single mothers out here with 4 kids and a broken down car trying to get them to 3 different places every morning. This is an illegal tax that hurts the most vulnerable among us not the rich on the upper east side. They can pay a 1000 ezpass bill. I’m talking about that person who’s struggling to get through today with no viable options on how to get through tomorrow.
1) automated enforcement lowers racial and economic disparities in enforcement, all else being equal. This is because it removes the ability of cops to selectively not ticket people. If you think cameras are not placed equitably that’s fine but then the answer is to deploy them everywhere.
2) those individuals have the easy answer of not breaking the law. There is no necessity to break speed laws outside of a very small number of circumstances. I live by the church ave/ocean parkway intersection in Brooklyn that has all sorts of automated enforcement. I’ve never gotten a single ticket because I follow traffic laws.
3) traffic violations should be on a sliding scale related to income, but we absolutely need to enforce speeding laws as speeding kills people.
Why does being poor have any bearing on you being fined for speeding and breaking the law. Your example of a single mother with 4 kids rushing around would imply they shouldn't be speeding as they have 4 kids in the car...
Calling a fine for a civil/criminal offence an illegal tax is a ridiculous statement, breaking the law and being fined is not a tax by any acceptable definition.
Regardless, the easy solution is to just scale the fines based on income with a fixed minimum and a percentage system based on your income bracket. In the UK speeding fines are fixed up to a threshold of how much you exceeded the limit and then they become income based with the fine being based on your income.
Low-income communities experience far higher rates of traffic injuries and deaths, so safety tools like speed cameras and red-light cameras disproportionately protect the people who are currently harmed the most. In NYC, speeding drops over 70% where cameras are installed, and serious injuries fall by 14–15%, especially around schools in poorer neighborhoods. Because only about 22% of households below the poverty line own a car, most low-income residents aren’t the ones paying fines, but they are the ones most likely to be hit by speeding drivers. For the struggling parent with an old car and no margin for disaster, a crash is financially devastating in a way a ticket is not. Traffic-safety measures aren’t an illegal tax; they’re one of the most effective ways to keep vulnerable families alive, mobile, and economically stable.
And in neighborhoods where more low-income residents do rely on cars, safety tools reduce the exact kinds of crashes that cause job loss, medical debt, and long-term financial instability. These measures make daily driving more predictable and less dangerous, which especially helps parents juggling multiple trips with limited time and unreliable vehicles. The goal is sure everyone and their kids actually get home safely every day.
I have to say I constantly see measures to increase traffic enforcement or decrease parking or whatever in NYC described as measures that will hurt the poor.
The poor in NYC overwhelmingly don’t own cars. Hell, the middle class don’t own cars.
Speed camera tickets are $50, so they're dramatically less expensive than police-imposed tickets (often around $300 depending). As u/blp9 notes, income-adjusted fines are ideal and have precedent in NYC (staten island day fines pilot in the 80s).
With respect to poverty, we can't observe the income of motorists in this study, but we can observe the aggregate statistics of areas near intersections:
"Additionally, buffer zones [i.e. intersections with cameras] had a lower poverty rate than the citywide average (12% vs. 14%, p < 0.001)"
I personally would much rather speed and die then be subjected to a camera sending tickets to my house for going 7 over. NYC is uniquely congested and these cameras are being implemented in many areas where the difference would be nowhere near this high.
Again my concern is being able to speed. Tracking meaning scanning my license plate and sending me a ticket in the mail when no cop was anywhere in sight is what I care about. I didn't buy a fast AWD car with good tires and safety features to be stuck behind an elderly person with a 30 year old car and bald tires.
You have to admit that it makes little sense to have all vehicles able to travel at the same speed. You have small tiny 3 cylinder engine cars, huge trucks, cars with great tires and cars with terrible tires, cars with racing brakes and cars with worn malfunctioning brakes, cars with zero safety features and driving assists and cars with a ton. The speed limits are more of a simplicity choice rather than being indicative of a "safe" speed for all vehicles
I don't think what you are talking about is workable at all, how are people meant to know when their breaks are about to malfunction?
A lot of the point of the speed limit is also not about you stopping in time but people having time to see you or mitigating the consequences of a crash. Though I'd agree that larger vehicles could be made to go slower, I don't think the majority of drivers would support it and they make up relatively little of the total traffic
I've personally replaced pads for friends and family that were metal on metal. After talking to some mechanics over the years you would be shocked at what people are actually driving around. Especially in US states with minimal/ no inspections. Brake systems can also vary a lot. There's terrible drum brakes, undersized brakes for a heavy vehicle, pad material options, 2 vs 4 piston calipers, various kinds of rotors, ect.
I don't understand what you are trying to say here, people don't know anything about brakes, but those same people should be in charge of judging their own personal speed limit based on their breaks? It doesn't make sense
I'm simply saying that the speed at which someone can safely drive completely depends on that person and their vehicle. The speed limit is not a good indicator for safe speed because it has to account for a half blind 90 year old's with ancient cars that have terrible braking performance, munervariability, and traction.
I feel like the only examples you are bringing up are symptoms of other problems that are better solved in other ways.
Half blind 90 year olds probably shouldn't be driving at all, cars that have terrible braking performance also shouldn't be on the road. Likewise anyone who isn't confident in them selves or their car is free to drive at any speed under the limit, the system you are asking for already exist just not in the direction you want.
You also haven't mentioned the point about other people having time to see you coming or mitigating the consequences of a crash. Neither of those depends on breaking performance at all, do you expect people to know both the speed limit and the motivation for the limit on any stretch of road.
Our currently system allows people to travel based on what feels safe to them. People go the speed they feel conformable with and if they're a younger person with a decent car they generally go above the speed limit. This works only because getting pulled over is infrequent and requires a cop to actually prove it. If it becomes impossible to speed without receiving a ticket in the mail you're going to have people not paying attention because they're forced to travel at 25 & 30 MPH in some areas, commutes will be longer, and honestly life will get a little more grey. It's a bad change for anyone but the most dull people
The current system of random enforcement is bad for everyone, you are right that it doesn't stop people speeding, but it also severely punishes people at random.
You are right that young people go faster, that is why they have such high insurance bills for the damage they will cause.
I paraglide and rock climb with my spare time, there are better times to seek your thrills than the commute and ways to do it that don't endanger other people's lives.
I wonder if cities/states could improve road safety more effectively and efficiently by focusing on drivers license requirements instead of speed cameras. Drivers licenses are handed out like candy on Halloween, and it really shows when driving with people who can’t seem to grasp even the simplest of road rules
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Red light cameras were put in Houston. (I know this article is about speed cameras) They seemed to cut down on running red lights in general, and they decreased t-bone accidents (which are extremely dangerous) but increased rear-end\hit-from-behind accidents which are less dangerous. When the cameras were in place and people got used to them, fewer accidents overall happened which was good and far fewer people ran the lights.
All of this sounds good, but that is where the problem came in - fewer people ran the lights.
See, like most things in the US, the cameras were put up on a profit basis - namely that the company running them were expected to earn a certain $ amount for each ticket sent out. But with fewer people running the lights, the number of tickets declined and so the company was losing money every month.
So then Houston ‘played’ with the traffic lights and decreased the time the Yellow stayed up, driving up the number of tickets.
But watchdogs were tracking this and presented evidence that the signals were being manipulated and eventually the cameras were voted out.
Lesson? Not everything should be done on a profit motive. The cameras were effective at decreasing injuries, accidents, and running-of-lights in general but didn’t generate enough profit.
When metrics become targets they lose their inherent usefulness as a metric
I firmly believe that all income from tickets and fines should be handed over to another department that has no oversight over the people handing out the punishment (ie give it to schools, or use it for making new parks).
I live in a town that was infamous for being a speed trap. When I was a teenager I would get pulled over every time I drove through the town, because I drove an old Volvo and looked like a hippy. I never got a ticket, but they sure loved to search my car for drugs. The police should not have been incentivized to maximize stops, but to reduce damage (lower fatalities, etc)
[removed]
It’s a little more complex than ticket revenue being directly to the police department; but the short version is “Yes”.
(If this subject is of interest to you, I would propose reading up on the subject of civil forfeiture - another law enforcement process that has been subverted in certain jurisdictions, and to similar ends.)
This is a popular idea that generally doesn't work, because money is fungible. It's the same problem as "earmarks".
The schools and police still ultimately get funded by the same government. If the schools get $100 more from fines, that means the government doesn't need to put as much toward the school budgets, which means it has more money for the police.
You can increase the "distance" of the incentive, but it's hard to get rid of the incentive entirely. To do that, you'd have to literally give the money away. Do something like put all fines into an account and cut an annual check to every citizen. Of course, then you have issues like identifying "every citizen", and incentives based on locals vs visitors, and citizenship boundaries.
I agree, but any distance is better than none. When the manger can directly raise there budget by having everyone meet a higher quota, it is very difficult to remain objective.
Put the money in a state trust, then mix it up and give it back to the individual districts based on population. There are many ways to greatly reduce the incentive for one town to become a speed trap.
I got pulled over for driving too close to a semi on a multi lane highway, which I was but it was temporary as I was merging lanes, In a safe manner to make sure I was positioned for an upcoming exit. I was probably behind that semi for 45 seconds, and still had probably 4 car lengths infront of me before changing lanes again. I was then pulled over 2 minutes later. Didnt get a ticket, He just wanted to let me know I was driving in a potentially "unsafe" situation. Really I think that cop was just fishing for non white people to give bs tickets to, with out of state plates. It was omaha nebraska after all.
In some places, they structure the contract such that the (usually private) company that installs the cameras and determines who has run a red light gets a certain percentage of the fine revenue. This is generally a bad idea, as it creates a perverse incentive to find more people guilty.
Notably, NYC has recognized this is bad and does not structure their contracts this way.
The problem is they were getting paid (and measuring) the wrong datapoint. They should have been paid to maintain a reduction of traffic light violations.
Or just don’t run government programs as revenue generators for either a private business or the government unless it’s specifically about taxing since it usually ends badly. Especially when it is safety related.
FDA gets funding from medical companies and it’s worse and has created perverse incentives instead of focusing on “is this Food and/or Drug safe”.
Police getting to keep civil forfeiture and it’s immediately abused.
Red light cameras, speeding ticket, parking meters, etc etc etc
As soon as the government’s goal (or private company it’s contracted out to) becomes revenue generation the “service” it provides becomes worse because making money and providing service are generally opposite goals.
Governments have to generate revenue to provide services. Trying to tie revenue to the service via things like usage fees or fines seems more fair than taxing everyone to pay for e.g. speeding enforcement. Fines send a price signal to people that encourage different behaviors, while also paying for the requisite services.
You can collect fines and usage fees without the goal being revenue generation.
Red light cameras can exist, speeding tickets can still get paid, parking meters can be installed etc etc
You just need a strong barrier between the people/department collecting and where the money actually goes.
If the people issuing fees and fines rely on those to fund themselves, it creates incentives for abuse.
Civil Forfeiture of ill gotten gains? Not an inherently bad idea, but what can be seized needs to change and where the money goes needs to change. Police departments being able to spend seized money is insane, it gives them incentive to seize stuff. If it all went into a victims compensation fund, police wouldn’t be incentivized to steal from random people.
It makes perfect sense for speeding tickets to pay for road use in some way, sending that to the general fund encourages politicians to pursue more punitive fines to generate more revenue. It’s famously how small towns in Illinois work and it creates awful incentives.
So you think fines that go to the general fund will be abused by politicians trying to get more money but fines that go directly to the police department directly won’t get abused by police trying to get more money?
Did I say anything about fines that go directly to a police department? I very specifically did not. Things like asset forfeiture are clearly not serving any legitimate purpose for the public and are already constitutionally dubious. I'm talking about using red light camera funds to pay for safety improvements, road infrastructure, and so on. I was quite clear.
I think you misunderstood me because I never said fees shouldn’t exist or that they shouldn’t fund things.
I just said revenue generation should not be the goal of any of the programs.
The person who controls the length of a yellow light should not be paid by fees from red light tickets, otherwise we get situations where safety is a secondary concern to revenue when the goal should be safety.
But the city gets that money, so they would be paying to have less income.
Which would be good if the people running the city were sensible but that’s not the world we live in
Not where I live in upstate NY. The city gets a third ... the vampire company gets two thirds.
City still saves money from fewer police responses to traffic accidents, public domain cleanups after accidents, health insurance claims under Medicaid, loss of income tax from extended leave due to disability, etc etc
The extra ticket revenue is revenue they wouldn't have gotten without the traffic cameras. The savings on reduced accidents are permanent.
We have to hammer this constantly because for whatever reason people seem devoted to the notion that governments should be run like for-profit businesses. Some government programs will take a facial financial loss. That doesn’t mean they’re creating societal loss.
And this is why studies like this are so important: to remind people that we can quantify the societal value and we should account for that when deciding how to govern ourselves.
Even the way you are framing it is honestly kind of problematic, I hate using the phrase financial loss in connection to government services becauseservices have a cost plain and simple. Paying those costs is in no way a financial loss it's just what a government is supposed to be doing with the money it gets from taxes. The only time the idea financial loss even really comes into play is when we start talking about times when the costs have ballooned well beyond the value of the service provided at which point you reevaluate the system
Nobody complains the fire department is losing money despite the fact that they bring in effectively no revenue. How much revenue does the president generate despite earning $400,000 a year? How far in the red is the department of defense or war or whatever we've decided the current name is?
Somehow people want to complain that we need to run the government more like a business and that these services shouldn't be running at a loss when in fact the IRS on its own collects something upward of 95% of the total government revenue so if we got rid of everything that wasn't making money we basically only have the IRS left
For government programs involving direct “payment”—here, via financial penalty/ticket, and for public transit, via tickets, for the postal service, via stamps and package fees—people tend to expect that to cover all operating costs. So when I characterize it as a net “financial loss” it’s because there is cashflow in and out. But it wouldn’t be profitable to have these cameras, or to have our extensive networks of public transit and postal coverage, which is precisely why we have a government to do this instead.
Completely agree with the rest of your comment, just explaining those terms.
It's bad policy to have a financial incentive to punish people.
Fines should only exist to dissuade people from breaking the law. Put that money into the community pizza party fund, or something that doesn't need to exist.
This is very similar to what's happened in my city with speed cameras. For one thing they were put up in places where having drivers speed up right afterwards was not ideal (an intersection where I cross almost daily was right after a camera where people speed up like crazy). For another, the city promised it would never spend the money on anything other than traffic safety measures, but then after only a couple years it diverted the money out. Then there were cameras making millions of dollars where it was obvious the road needed to be changed to make it safer but the city now had an incentive not to. In theory a good idea but in practice it's ripe for corruption.
People in the US need to understand this. Healthcare, prisons, and even traffic light cameras. It is not capitalism because there is no "supply and demand" or completion. Its just people allowed to maximize profits off the suffering of others while paying politicians to eliminate any oversight.
I agree that government should not be run with a profit motive.
I do think red light tickets should come with a financial fine, or points towards a driver losing their license. The revenue can go towards maintaining the cameras or something else like vision zero safety improvements where we fund things like raising crosswalks to sidewalk height (speed bump where pedestrians are) and daylighting so that cars don't park right in front of crosswalks so that both pedestrians and drivers can see each other sooner.
The thing is though, that losing a license would be unpopular because some people are reckless drivers that also depend on their car to earn a living and buy groceries.
Community service as an alternative to paying is fine by me.
I do not know another form of punishment that would be both effective and fair and overcome perverse financial incentives.
Let Chicago selling their parking meters be a shining example of this.
This basically happens everywhere.
I'm fine with speed cameras. Not fine with municipalities letting private companies do it for a big cut of the profits.
People drive like such assholes these days I wish these speed cameras were at every intersection.
Hope they’re coming to Long Island next tbh.
they'd be fine if the cameras were not so expansive that cities didn't need to drive up tickets and start decreasing the yellow-light timing, but that's what always seems to happen.
Seen two comments about yellow light timing in a post about SPEED cameras. You guys just hate the idea of any enforcement
Or just replace lights with roundabouts which reduce fatal and serious injury crashes by up to 82%.
Plus nothing is worse that hitting a red light with almost no traffic and having to wait a couple minutes.
No, they do not. Go and look at the other areas that had speed cameras. Such as the Phoenix greater metro speed camera trial that they did on our freeways. It was HORRIBLE. Led to tons of near accidents as people smashed on their breaks at specific windows where cameras were known to be and you'd be nearly blinded whenever it took a photo. Speed cameras on roads are a horrible idea.
Yea, that's why you put speed cameras all over town and not only specific points.
You'd live in a surveillance state out of fear of people going 10 mph over the speed limit? I'm good on that. My experience with driving in a time of speed cameras all over the freeways was that it was disastrous.
Only for the people driving dangerously, everyone else following the laws weren't being dangerous
The better example is to point out "return to the mean" statistical pattern. Intersections have a statistical distribution of crashes every year. Some have more or less crashes based off of pure chance. The intersections that happen to get more crashes, then have cameras installed, and then have fewer crashes only because the amount of crashes returned to a more average amount of crashes. It has been known for at least a decade that red light cameras do not reduce collisions, they only appear to.
Incorrect. The data has been very clear that red-light cameras do reduce dangerous crashes and injuries. The data from multiple cities show they cut the most serious collisions, especially T-bone crashes, by 30–40%, and those are the ones that put people in the hospital or worse. You do sometimes see a small uptick in minor rear-end bumps, but those rarely cause injuries, while the life-threatening crashes drop significantly. Cities that removed their cameras saw serious and fatal crashes climb right back up, which pretty clearly shows the safety benefit. So whatever people think about the fines, the cameras absolutely make intersections safer for drivers, kids crossing the street, and everyone else using the road.
This is nonsense.
Your own post defeats itself. If an intersection that has more crashes then returns to average crashes after cameras are installed then the cameras were effective.
See Figure 3 in the paper — should address this concern.
Source? Because everywhere they're used eventually gets better. Gets worse initially as people try and game the cameras but eventually everyone adjusts.
School zone cameras for example. Decreased instances of drivers hitting children. I'll take a hundred fender benders compared to a single child getting hit.
So to be clear you are saying enforcing traffic laws leads to more accidents?
The right answer is even more speed cameras.
Some of you sound like people who never drive and are terrified while driving.
Nope! Owned a car here for years, although I did sell it recently.
Can you explain why you think enforcing traffic laws is bad? Should we just get rid of them? If not, shouldn’t we enforce them impartially?
Seems like common sense to me.
I don't think enforcing traffic laws are bad. Some of these laws are more needing of enforcement than others. Red light running as an example and drinking and driving. I think that utilizing camera systems to blanket enforce laws is bad. Someone going 10 mph over a speed limit is not bad nor should it be something they are financially penalized for. Speeding under criminal level should be something that is a reason to pull someone over, but not in itself an instant penalization. That seems like common sense to me though.
If people going over the speed limit isn’t bad then we shouldn’t have the speed limit set there.
You’re saying we shouldn’t enforce the law.
Ok. Now show the statistics of how many low income, below poverty level residents these tools affect. And don’t tell me take the train there are single mothers out here with 4 kids and a broken down car trying to get them to 3 different places every morning. This is an illegal tax that hurts the most vulnerable among us not the rich on the upper east side. They can pay a 1000 ezpass bill. I’m talking about that person who’s struggling to get through today with no viable options on how to get through tomorrow.
The problem with speed cameras, as you've pointed out, is that they're applied equally to everyone.
The solution is to scale traffic fines to your income, not to continue the paradigm of non-enforcement.
Three things:
1) automated enforcement lowers racial and economic disparities in enforcement, all else being equal. This is because it removes the ability of cops to selectively not ticket people. If you think cameras are not placed equitably that’s fine but then the answer is to deploy them everywhere.
2) those individuals have the easy answer of not breaking the law. There is no necessity to break speed laws outside of a very small number of circumstances. I live by the church ave/ocean parkway intersection in Brooklyn that has all sorts of automated enforcement. I’ve never gotten a single ticket because I follow traffic laws.
3) traffic violations should be on a sliding scale related to income, but we absolutely need to enforce speeding laws as speeding kills people.
Why does being poor have any bearing on you being fined for speeding and breaking the law. Your example of a single mother with 4 kids rushing around would imply they shouldn't be speeding as they have 4 kids in the car...
Calling a fine for a civil/criminal offence an illegal tax is a ridiculous statement, breaking the law and being fined is not a tax by any acceptable definition.
Regardless, the easy solution is to just scale the fines based on income with a fixed minimum and a percentage system based on your income bracket. In the UK speeding fines are fixed up to a threshold of how much you exceeded the limit and then they become income based with the fine being based on your income.
Low-income communities experience far higher rates of traffic injuries and deaths, so safety tools like speed cameras and red-light cameras disproportionately protect the people who are currently harmed the most. In NYC, speeding drops over 70% where cameras are installed, and serious injuries fall by 14–15%, especially around schools in poorer neighborhoods. Because only about 22% of households below the poverty line own a car, most low-income residents aren’t the ones paying fines, but they are the ones most likely to be hit by speeding drivers. For the struggling parent with an old car and no margin for disaster, a crash is financially devastating in a way a ticket is not. Traffic-safety measures aren’t an illegal tax; they’re one of the most effective ways to keep vulnerable families alive, mobile, and economically stable.
And in neighborhoods where more low-income residents do rely on cars, safety tools reduce the exact kinds of crashes that cause job loss, medical debt, and long-term financial instability. These measures make daily driving more predictable and less dangerous, which especially helps parents juggling multiple trips with limited time and unreliable vehicles. The goal is sure everyone and their kids actually get home safely every day.
I have to say I constantly see measures to increase traffic enforcement or decrease parking or whatever in NYC described as measures that will hurt the poor.
The poor in NYC overwhelmingly don’t own cars. Hell, the middle class don’t own cars.
Speed camera tickets are $50, so they're dramatically less expensive than police-imposed tickets (often around $300 depending). As u/blp9 notes, income-adjusted fines are ideal and have precedent in NYC (staten island day fines pilot in the 80s).
With respect to poverty, we can't observe the income of motorists in this study, but we can observe the aggregate statistics of areas near intersections:
"Additionally, buffer zones [i.e. intersections with cameras] had a lower poverty rate than the citywide average (12% vs. 14%, p < 0.001)"
Tell me you're not from NYC without telling me you're not from NYC. The average car owner makes 90k, whereas the average non-car owner makes 45k. Only 45% of people in all boroughs own a car (that dips to 22% in Manhattan). https://www.hunterurban.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Car-Light-NYC-Infographics-May-2024.pdf
Don’t speed maybe? I don’t understand your argument here.
I personally would much rather speed and die then be subjected to a camera sending tickets to my house for going 7 over. NYC is uniquely congested and these cameras are being implemented in many areas where the difference would be nowhere near this high.
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Again my concern is being able to speed. Tracking meaning scanning my license plate and sending me a ticket in the mail when no cop was anywhere in sight is what I care about. I didn't buy a fast AWD car with good tires and safety features to be stuck behind an elderly person with a 30 year old car and bald tires.
Great now you just need to get everyone else to agree to the added risk so you can drive faster and you can change the law.
You have to admit that it makes little sense to have all vehicles able to travel at the same speed. You have small tiny 3 cylinder engine cars, huge trucks, cars with great tires and cars with terrible tires, cars with racing brakes and cars with worn malfunctioning brakes, cars with zero safety features and driving assists and cars with a ton. The speed limits are more of a simplicity choice rather than being indicative of a "safe" speed for all vehicles
I don't think what you are talking about is workable at all, how are people meant to know when their breaks are about to malfunction?
A lot of the point of the speed limit is also not about you stopping in time but people having time to see you or mitigating the consequences of a crash. Though I'd agree that larger vehicles could be made to go slower, I don't think the majority of drivers would support it and they make up relatively little of the total traffic
I've personally replaced pads for friends and family that were metal on metal. After talking to some mechanics over the years you would be shocked at what people are actually driving around. Especially in US states with minimal/ no inspections. Brake systems can also vary a lot. There's terrible drum brakes, undersized brakes for a heavy vehicle, pad material options, 2 vs 4 piston calipers, various kinds of rotors, ect.
I don't understand what you are trying to say here, people don't know anything about brakes, but those same people should be in charge of judging their own personal speed limit based on their breaks? It doesn't make sense
I'm simply saying that the speed at which someone can safely drive completely depends on that person and their vehicle. The speed limit is not a good indicator for safe speed because it has to account for a half blind 90 year old's with ancient cars that have terrible braking performance, munervariability, and traction.
I feel like the only examples you are bringing up are symptoms of other problems that are better solved in other ways.
Half blind 90 year olds probably shouldn't be driving at all, cars that have terrible braking performance also shouldn't be on the road. Likewise anyone who isn't confident in them selves or their car is free to drive at any speed under the limit, the system you are asking for already exist just not in the direction you want.
You also haven't mentioned the point about other people having time to see you coming or mitigating the consequences of a crash. Neither of those depends on breaking performance at all, do you expect people to know both the speed limit and the motivation for the limit on any stretch of road.
Our currently system allows people to travel based on what feels safe to them. People go the speed they feel conformable with and if they're a younger person with a decent car they generally go above the speed limit. This works only because getting pulled over is infrequent and requires a cop to actually prove it. If it becomes impossible to speed without receiving a ticket in the mail you're going to have people not paying attention because they're forced to travel at 25 & 30 MPH in some areas, commutes will be longer, and honestly life will get a little more grey. It's a bad change for anyone but the most dull people
The current system of random enforcement is bad for everyone, you are right that it doesn't stop people speeding, but it also severely punishes people at random.
You are right that young people go faster, that is why they have such high insurance bills for the damage they will cause.
I paraglide and rock climb with my spare time, there are better times to seek your thrills than the commute and ways to do it that don't endanger other people's lives.
Damn that’s crazy the government would outsource something that basic
I wonder if cities/states could improve road safety more effectively and efficiently by focusing on drivers license requirements instead of speed cameras. Drivers licenses are handed out like candy on Halloween, and it really shows when driving with people who can’t seem to grasp even the simplest of road rules