9 ms·
I got a ticket for one of these types of things, some local ordinance prohibiting through traffic during rush hour. It's a great revenue generator for the loca
by rhinoceraptor 10y ago
I got a ticket for one of these types of things, some local ordinance prohibiting through traffic during rush hour.
It's a great revenue generator for the local PDs. Lots of one-off traffic laws that people passing through won't (and really, can't) know about.
- mikeash 10y agoDon't things like that usually have signs?
- zyxley 10y agoI'm sure they do, somewhere that nobody actually driving on one of the streets in question will ever see it. > "But the plans were on display..." > "On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them." > "That's the display department." > "With a flashlight." > "Ah, well the lights had probably gone." > "So had the stairs." > "But look, you found the notice didn't you?" > "Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'"
- mikeash 10y agoIn my experience, they're usually posted fairly prominently (like, at the same height as other signs, next to the road, looking like a street sign) and people are just oblivious.
- coldpie 10y agoI once got a no parking ticket on a huge, wide open residential street with no posted signs. Turns out the city population sign at the city limit, half covered with cattails, had a small "no parking 2 AM - 5 AM within city limits" sign. Pure revenue generation from non-citizens.
- mikeash 10y agoThere certainly are cases like this. There's one little town I drive through sometimes which for a long time dropped the speed limit directly from 55MPH to 35MPH coming into town, and where the 35MPH limit sign was hidden behind a tree until you were about 3ft away from it. In what I am sure is a complete coincidence, this town has a $200 fine for speeding above the state penalty. Thankfully I never got hit with it, and they finally trimmed the tree after many years. But most places display it prominently, and people just don't care. For every case like yours, there are a hundred places with obvious signs like "No turn on red" where people still turn on red.
- ellyagg 10y agoI've obeyed dozens of "No turn on red" signs in my life, but I rarely see "No thru traffic" signs and until this thread, didn't really understand what the point of them was. I'm surely not hyper-vigilant about spotting and obeying them. You could blame me for this, or we could ponder the implications of the different probabilities of various sign types being obeyed, and whether high rates of disobedience might indicate fairness issues that should be carefully managed.
- mikeash 10y agoYou don't need to understand the point, you just need to comprehend and obey. I'm sympathetic to the idea that a law which is frequently broken may be a bad law, but "reading and obeying traffic signs" is not a particularly high bar to clear. If such signs get ignored, it's because the average driver is horrendous at driving. The only solutions to that are vastly better driver training and testing than we have now, or autonomous cars. I'm not sure there is a high rate of disobedience here, though. The article seems to be talking about places where such laws don't exist, although the residents may try to change that.
- jws 10y agoOnce Waze integrates that law into their dataset the problem is solved. No sign required. I suppose they can't crowdsource that information or people would lie. There must be a system for getting traffic information from municipalities to the road databases. Apple Maps told me there was no way to drive home a couple days ago, on examination the street in front of my house was marked as closed for the day, they were paving. That is essentially a zero traffic street in a grid area but bisected by rail road tracks without a crossing, so no one uses it except the people who live on it.
- Piskvorrr 10y agoSign still required for those w/o Waze, but you bring up a fair point: not all municipalities are willing to open their data. Having a countrywide open database - updated by the municipalities directly, not crowdsourced like OSM - would help with many things, not just routing.
- justin66 10y agoAt the municipal level, plenty of governments are still using papyrus or cuneiform tablets. Not going to happen.
- dragonwriter 10y ago> I'm sure they do, somewhere that nobody actually driving on one of the streets in question will ever see it. Improperly posted signage is generally a defense against an offense of disobeying a sign.
- morninj 10y agoThere's no way that the trickle of revenue is greater than the cost of enforcement. Officer salary and benefits, equipment maintenance, and all the costs associated with the court system...
- EGreg 10y agoHow do you know there's no way? At the very least, it might be paying for itself....
- aggie 10y agoThe marginal cost of those items, for the police anyway, might be close to 0.
- superuser2 10y agoSuburban PDs tend to be vastly overstaffed for the level of serious crime and bored most of the time. Mine spends the majority of its hours on mall shoplifters and dogs at the park.
- mikeash 10y agoThe use of traffic tickets as supplemental revenue is a time-honored tradition with many real-world examples. Some places fund their entire police department this way. I don't know why you'd think it couldn't be greater than the cost, either. It takes, what, five minutes to write a ticket, which might average $100? That's $1,200/hour of revenue. No way the officer costs that much, even including benefits and equipment. Most people just pay tickets, they don't contest them, so court costs will be small.
- HillaryBriss 10y agoIn LA, for example, most of the driving infractions are violations of the California vehicle code, not city-specific vehicle codes. And so it turns out that a very substantial portion of ticket revenues go to the state, not the city. California even has a law preventing cities from creating these kinds of local vehicle code laws that could generate local revenue.
- underwater 10y ago"No Thru Traffic" signs are enforceable!? What law does that fall under?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- forrestthewoods 10y agoA law that says "no thru traffic"? The real question would be "what law prevents that from being written into law". To which the answer is probably nothing.
- ctdonath 10y agoEven having such a law preventing certain laws does little. There's a well-known top-level law stating a particular right "shall not be infringed". Infringing laws abound nonetheless, with most judges disinclined to invalidate them.
- knieveltech 10y agoAlas if they'd only left out the word "militia"...
- protomyth 10y agoMilitia had a specific meaning to the founders. Alas, if people today would study what the words they used actually meant.
- knieveltech 10y agoConversely, if folks got treatment for their paranoia and compensation issues we wouldn't be literally awash in guns so there'd be nothing to debate.
- 10y ago