Why should your acceptance of greater danger be accepted above those who want safer roads at the expense of more surveillance?
Well, I think that’s a worthwhile question, and I’d say a huge part of our relationship with the government is where we push the lines between freedom and safety. I guess to me it seems that traffic generally goes on without a hitch. Accidents happen, and sometimes folks get ticketed for driving unsafely without causing an accident. To have a system in place by which a person could concievably be ticketed anywhere for any traffic infraction just feels wrong… like the government is overstepping the trust it’s been given to enforce those laws.
But, I certainly can see other sides of this. I was mainly responding to the implication that safety trumps any argument against the lights, which is clearly not a viable way for a system to work. Oops, look it turns out that this questionable practice makes people ‘safer’. Guess that means it’s ok.
Let us say that the elected representatives of a particular city decide that street traffic is too dangerous, and they decide to install speeding/red light cameras. The sole reason for this decision is that they want to crack down on bad drivers, and the idea of revenue enhancement doesn’t ever pass their minds. Is that decision then okay?
I am unaware of any video monitoring of traffic that hands out tickets for drivers going 2 mph over the limit. That’s just silly, because there should be a reasonable margin of error before a ticket is sent out. Ten miles per hour seems reasonable to me. Plus, I don’t think streets are made any safer by compelling drivers to slow down by 2 mph, but slowing them down by 10, in my opinion, makes a big difference. It has in my neighborhood.
OK, fair enough - any misuse of the system makes the system less credible. But I still don’t accept the claims in this thread that camera enforcement should be abandoned, purely due to its reputation. If the reputation is the problem, complain about the reputation, not the cameras. If you’ve got corrupt police, or corrupt city officials, etc., then you know where your problem is. Don’t blame traffic cameras for other problems
(In other threads here, I’ve ended up arguing that traffic cameras will remove the potential for corruption from police-enforced fines. Accept it, a corrupt culture is corrupt no matter what, and an honest one will be honest.
Crime in general could be reduced by a program of totalitarian surveillance. By your argument, failure to implement such a program is unfair to people who value safety above freedom.
That’s where the tainted record of the idea comes in. The analogy I mentioned before illuminates this nicely: If some jurisdiction decided to require voters to prove basic knowledge of the candidates and issues, they would get slapped down immediately even if racial discrimination were the furthest thing from their minds.
Reductio ad absurdum. The same argument could be made that we can only guarantee freedom by having no regulations or enforcement of rules. :rolleyes:
What the heck does the excercise of a constitutional right to vote have to do with traffic infractions? Those are in no way comparable. The example you mentioned restricts a fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitution, so of course it will be slapped down, and not for racial, but for constitutional reasons. What’s more, I question the equating “taint” of laws that are racially discriminatory with laws that simply raise money. Governments must raise money somehow, and have wide latitude in how they do it. Racial discrimination is not just a problem with our laws, but our society. There is simply no comparison bewteen qualms with alleged speed traps and the huge problem that our country has had with centuries of racism.
There is no right to speed and run lights. And you have yet to describe why the origin of so-called “tainted” laws or enforcement thereof has anything to with the non-discriminatory enforcement of those laws. As others have said, these traffic cameras are completely colorblind, so there’s no possibility of a car being ticketed for the infamous offense of “driving while black.”
If it’s truly about safety, then we should insist that
(1) The intersections with the highest number of accidents-per-car are targeted first,
(2) The financial penalties are set high enough to cover the cost of the cameras and their operation, but no higher,
(3) and the penalty for being caught driving unsafely through downtown D.C. is a revocation of driving privileges within D.C., period. Getting caught driving on a “punched” ticket could even cost you your Maryland or Virginia license.
I justify #3 as follows: set a fine high enough to deter someone from Bethesda or Chevy Chase, and it exceeds the weekly income of someone from Southeast. Since no fine will be equitable to all drivers, a revocation of privileges is more fitting as well as a better deterrent. It also eliminates the question of revenue as a motive.
There’s no better way to prevent accidents than removing the bad drivers from the roads.
These pro-surveillance as the price for safety posts show how how much times have changed
Though I wasn’t born when those words were first uttered, they definitely have a nostalgic ring to them.
Without a hitch? Aren’t there tens of thousands of traffic fatalities each year?
Anything to alleviate the carnage is worth it.
I live on a residential street with 30MPH signs clearly posted. I have children.
Assholes routinely fly down my road at >50MPH. I wish there was a way to photograph these scumbags too!!!
Our city installed red light cameras a while ago. They are placed at intersections with high accident rates, and, under provincial law, the owner of the vehicle is ticketed and (if convicted) fined, but no penalty points are applied, and his/her licence cannot be suspended nor he/she imprisoned as a penalty for the offense or for failure to pay the fine.
This seems to me to be a sensible compromise between the need to enforce the law and possible unfair penalties imposed on the owner, who may or may not have been driving at the time, given the almost impossible task of identifying and proving the identity of the driver through photographs.
I see red light cameras and photo radar as equivalent to the more traditional human eyeball observation and recording system (i.e. a traffic cop), but more reliable and less costly for specific limited purposes.
How about if any excess revenue (whether intentional or not) is ringfenced for other safety improvements, education, etc.?
Re. people describing this as ‘surveillance’ - you’re only being identified when you’ve drawn attention to yourself by breaking a rule. If you don’t object to carrying visible identification on your car (the number plate), then why object to it being used to identify you when you’ve been caught doing something wrong?
Why should mechanically generated speeding tickets be handled so much differently than hand-written tickets? That doesn’t make sense.