4 ms·

> Otherwise it has perverse incentives, or at least misincentivizes certain kinds of policing. Can you give specific examples? Because I can't think of any exc

by hannob 7y ago

> Otherwise it has perverse incentives, or at least misincentivizes certain kinds of policing. Can you give specific examples? Because I can't think of any except "enforcing traffic rules". And that's not a misincentive, it's a good incentive. And the reality I see is that enforcement of traffic rules is extremely lenient despite the profit cities could make, because it's unpopular with the car driving population. In my impression the vast comments of the form that fines are abuse come down to: "I don't want to follow traffic safety rules, because I think they don't apply to me."

citrablue 7y ago
How about when traffic rules are created not for safety, but to maximize revenue? 6 years ago, San Diego finally dropped red light cameras because they were installed as a revenue generation device, not a safety device. https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/watchdog/sdut-san-diego-red-light-cameras-filner-halts-2013feb01-story.html https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/watchdog/sdut-san-...
- denkmoon 7y ago
  That's not exactly creating a traffic rule to maximise revenue. The traffic rule, stop on red, previously existed. This is "just" about making revenue by electing to enforce the traffic rule. Which I have no problem with. Don't go through a red and the camera won't get you. I really cannot feel too bad about entitled drivers feeling they can sail on through because "it only just turned red".
  - mvid 7y ago
    What about yellow lights being shortened to catch drivers on reds?
  - master-litty 7y ago
    There's a disconnect in your understanding. While these cameras do catch blatant red light runners, they also trigger tickets for safe, benign, and legal behavior. It penalizes the human experience way too much and it's caused overwhelming frustration. There's often a line that you can't cross during a red light. If your vehicle even slightly tip toes over it, even if you're not impeding a crosswalk or the intersection in any way whatsoever, you get a ticket in the mail. Lots of people are surprised when they get a ticket for resting their front tires on this line, as it is normally permitted behavior. It does not put anyone in danger and it is reasonably interpreted as not entering the intersection. It's not as though they're fighting the law. In that way it does create "new" rules. Sometimes you have no idea where that trigger line is because it isn't labelled. Sometimes you do know but the camera is poorly calibrated, and the line becomes invisible once more. Sometimes you go up to the same line you always do every weekday on the way to work, but today it decided to issue you a ticket. Sometimes you're taking a legal right turn on red but have to stop midway through the turn because a person decided to start walking across the street randomly. The camera might get confused and trigger a ticket, for an action you took to obey another right-of-way law. Sometimes you're taking a left turn on a solid green light with no arrow. You have an opening and begin to take it, but someone else runs a red light, almost t-boning you in the process. You stop very suddenly to avoid the accident. They rightfully get a ticket. But your green light turns yellow and you quickly try to make it before it's red. You don't, and so you also get a ticket for someone else's wrongdoings. Imagine the same scenario except you didn't stop in time. Your car gets smashed and you face death in the eye. An ambulance arrives just in time and takes you to the hospital. Your job doesn't offer health insurance and you're barely living paycheck to paycheck, but thankfully the car insurance is going to cover some of your hospital bills. You're still left with a final bill that amounts to your yearly income. A couple weeks later you call someone at the hospital to haggle it down, as the internet suggested you could try to do with some success, but they won't budge. You agree to a long-term payment plan with the hospital. It cuts deep into your finances and you have to make some sacrifices. You decide to start working a second job instead of selling things off. Meanwhile there's a letter waiting in your mailbox. A traffic camera caught a picture of your accident and an automated system mailed it to you. It's quite a graphic picture of the incident in black and white. It claims you ran a red light. You've been fined $300. Attached is a brochure about being a safe driver, which touches on the consequences of running a red light. You could kill someone and change your life forever! The website on the ticket has all kinds of information about the camera system on the front page, claiming how accurate it is and how safe it will keep people. You get a popup about a randomly selected survey asking how you like the website. You can't seem to dismiss it on any page you go to. But anyway that's okay -- This is obviously all a misunderstanding, and with all the free time and money you have, you can go see a lawyer that will help you fight it. Maybe you can even contest it without a lawyer, you read on the internet. You think there might be an FAQ on the system's own website but you can't read it without taking the survey. It's really hard to type with the cast but you try. You write a short essay with some very poorly spelled words about how you don't like their website very much. You later learn there is no FAQ. You start imagining what life would be like if you had tons of money in this situation. You conclude you'd probably just pay the ticket and not waste your time fighting a wrongly issued ticket.
  - citrablue 7y ago
    San Diego and the Lockheed contract team determined where to put cameras based on where they thought the maximum revenue stream was, instead of danger to others. One light -- at an intersection that is frequently gridlocked because it's the most popular route out of the airport, which frequently has out of town visitors -- generated nearly 50% of the revenue from the red light systems. It was clearly not about safety, but about selectively enforcing laws to maximize revenue. That's why the city stopped doing it.
rtpg 7y ago
The problem is that people start making/enforcing traffic safety rules not to improve safety but to increase revenue. Things like setting up speed traps where you're almost guaranteed to be going over a certain speed limit. You also have messes like people getting tickets way over their ability to pay, leading to lots of issues for the driver. It's not that the driver didn't break a rule, but the best thing for society would be to _not_ throw someone in jail for the crime of not having $200 for a ticket. Stuff like ticketing quotas also add perverse incentives for police to try and generate arrests or ticketable situations. Combined with unfortunate "benefit of the doubt" issues, you get things like police planting drugs on people to arrest them. Think about it! Police giving themselves stuff to do by planting drugs on people during traffic stops. What sort of incentive structure leads to this? Full disclosure: I do think lots of people complain about traffic rules for pretty selfish "I'm the only safe driver" reasons. But I do think there's also lots of real issues in this system. Both sides can be wrong!
thephyber 7y ago
Off the top of my head: (1) Red light cameras which cause perverse incentives for the city to set the yellow light rotation to be shorter than the federal standard[1]. (2) Civil Asset Forfeiture[2] is used by police and prosecutors theoretically to seize funds that are "more likely than not to have been gained from the commission of a crime", but is in practice too low of a burden on the prosecution and too high of a burden on honest taxpaying citizens to defend their property (the property is guilty until proven innocent). There was a long piece in the New Yorker on the topic a few years ago. As I remember it, 60% of the annual budget of the Sheriff's Office in one Arizona county was from seized property. Can you imagine what a Deputy in a rural county will do if they are told that there will be 60% department layoffs unless seizures rise to previous levels? (3) I'm trying to find the thread, but someone posted on Reddit everything that is wrong with Ferguson, Missouri (and all of the other tiny cities in St Louis county). Basically the cities are revenue-starved so they end up creating speed traps and the jurisdictions are so small it's not clear when the speed limit changes. Also, the court hours are onerous and it's basically impossible to pay a fine without missing a day of work (especially difficult in blue collar areas where most work is hourly and low-skilled). I can't find the thread, but Curbed did an article[3] that largely overlaps with the content. Basically cities end up revenue-starved (usually because they are in a race to the bottom to give away tax incentives to woo / keep large employers) so they end up nickle-and-diming their residents and frequent commuters so much that it destroys any semblance of a quality of life. They purposefully streamline the infraction side and add friction to the challenge/defense side such that it becomes a poor tax (the wealthy can afford to pay the fine and move outside the city). [1] https://padailypost.com/2019/07/23/opinion-the-ugly-truth-about-red-light-cameras/ https://padailypost.com/2019/07/23/opinion-the-ugly-truth-ab... [2] https://www.acluaz.org/en/legislation/reining-civil-asset-forfeiture https://www.acluaz.org/en/legislation/reining-civil-asset-fo... [3] https://www.curbed.com/2018/5/24/17382120/tickets-fees-fines-criminal-justice-ferguson https://www.curbed.com/2018/5/24/17382120/tickets-fees-fines...

by hannob 7y ago

citrablue 7y ago

How about when traffic rules are created not for safety, but to maximize revenue? 6 years ago, San Diego finally dropped red light cameras because they were installed as a revenue generation device, not a safety device. https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/watchdog/sdut-san-diego-red-light-cameras-filner-halts-2013feb01-story.html https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/watchdog/sdut-san-...

denkmoon 7y ago
That's not exactly creating a traffic rule to maximise revenue. The traffic rule, stop on red, previously existed. This is "just" about making revenue by electing to enforce the traffic rule. Which I have no problem with. Don't go through a red and the camera won't get you. I really cannot feel too bad about entitled drivers feeling they can sail on through because "it only just turned red".
- mvid 7y ago
  What about yellow lights being shortened to catch drivers on reds?
- master-litty 7y ago
  There's a disconnect in your understanding. While these cameras do catch blatant red light runners, they also trigger tickets for safe, benign, and legal behavior. It penalizes the human experience way too much and it's caused overwhelming frustration. There's often a line that you can't cross during a red light. If your vehicle even slightly tip toes over it, even if you're not impeding a crosswalk or the intersection in any way whatsoever, you get a ticket in the mail. Lots of people are surprised when they get a ticket for resting their front tires on this line, as it is normally permitted behavior. It does not put anyone in danger and it is reasonably interpreted as not entering the intersection. It's not as though they're fighting the law. In that way it does create "new" rules. Sometimes you have no idea where that trigger line is because it isn't labelled. Sometimes you do know but the camera is poorly calibrated, and the line becomes invisible once more. Sometimes you go up to the same line you always do every weekday on the way to work, but today it decided to issue you a ticket. Sometimes you're taking a legal right turn on red but have to stop midway through the turn because a person decided to start walking across the street randomly. The camera might get confused and trigger a ticket, for an action you took to obey another right-of-way law. Sometimes you're taking a left turn on a solid green light with no arrow. You have an opening and begin to take it, but someone else runs a red light, almost t-boning you in the process. You stop very suddenly to avoid the accident. They rightfully get a ticket. But your green light turns yellow and you quickly try to make it before it's red. You don't, and so you also get a ticket for someone else's wrongdoings. Imagine the same scenario except you didn't stop in time. Your car gets smashed and you face death in the eye. An ambulance arrives just in time and takes you to the hospital. Your job doesn't offer health insurance and you're barely living paycheck to paycheck, but thankfully the car insurance is going to cover some of your hospital bills. You're still left with a final bill that amounts to your yearly income. A couple weeks later you call someone at the hospital to haggle it down, as the internet suggested you could try to do with some success, but they won't budge. You agree to a long-term payment plan with the hospital. It cuts deep into your finances and you have to make some sacrifices. You decide to start working a second job instead of selling things off. Meanwhile there's a letter waiting in your mailbox. A traffic camera caught a picture of your accident and an automated system mailed it to you. It's quite a graphic picture of the incident in black and white. It claims you ran a red light. You've been fined $300. Attached is a brochure about being a safe driver, which touches on the consequences of running a red light. You could kill someone and change your life forever! The website on the ticket has all kinds of information about the camera system on the front page, claiming how accurate it is and how safe it will keep people. You get a popup about a randomly selected survey asking how you like the website. You can't seem to dismiss it on any page you go to. But anyway that's okay -- This is obviously all a misunderstanding, and with all the free time and money you have, you can go see a lawyer that will help you fight it. Maybe you can even contest it without a lawyer, you read on the internet. You think there might be an FAQ on the system's own website but you can't read it without taking the survey. It's really hard to type with the cast but you try. You write a short essay with some very poorly spelled words about how you don't like their website very much. You later learn there is no FAQ. You start imagining what life would be like if you had tons of money in this situation. You conclude you'd probably just pay the ticket and not waste your time fighting a wrongly issued ticket.
- citrablue 7y ago
  San Diego and the Lockheed contract team determined where to put cameras based on where they thought the maximum revenue stream was, instead of danger to others. One light -- at an intersection that is frequently gridlocked because it's the most popular route out of the airport, which frequently has out of town visitors -- generated nearly 50% of the revenue from the red light systems. It was clearly not about safety, but about selectively enforcing laws to maximize revenue. That's why the city stopped doing it.

rtpg 7y ago

The problem is that people start making/enforcing traffic safety rules not to improve safety but to increase revenue. Things like setting up speed traps where you're almost guaranteed to be going over a certain speed limit. You also have messes like people getting tickets way over their ability to pay, leading to lots of issues for the driver. It's not that the driver didn't break a rule, but the best thing for society would be to _not_ throw someone in jail for the crime of not having $200 for a ticket. Stuff like ticketing quotas also add perverse incentives for police to try and generate arrests or ticketable situations. Combined with unfortunate "benefit of the doubt" issues, you get things like police planting drugs on people to arrest them. Think about it! Police giving themselves stuff to do by planting drugs on people during traffic stops. What sort of incentive structure leads to this? Full disclosure: I do think lots of people complain about traffic rules for pretty selfish "I'm the only safe driver" reasons. But I do think there's also lots of real issues in this system. Both sides can be wrong!

thephyber 7y ago

Off the top of my head: (1) Red light cameras which cause perverse incentives for the city to set the yellow light rotation to be shorter than the federal standard[1]. (2) Civil Asset Forfeiture[2] is used by police and prosecutors theoretically to seize funds that are "more likely than not to have been gained from the commission of a crime", but is in practice too low of a burden on the prosecution and too high of a burden on honest taxpaying citizens to defend their property (the property is guilty until proven innocent). There was a long piece in the New Yorker on the topic a few years ago. As I remember it, 60% of the annual budget of the Sheriff's Office in one Arizona county was from seized property. Can you imagine what a Deputy in a rural county will do if they are told that there will be 60% department layoffs unless seizures rise to previous levels? (3) I'm trying to find the thread, but someone posted on Reddit everything that is wrong with Ferguson, Missouri (and all of the other tiny cities in St Louis county). Basically the cities are revenue-starved so they end up creating speed traps and the jurisdictions are so small it's not clear when the speed limit changes. Also, the court hours are onerous and it's basically impossible to pay a fine without missing a day of work (especially difficult in blue collar areas where most work is hourly and low-skilled). I can't find the thread, but Curbed did an article[3] that largely overlaps with the content. Basically cities end up revenue-starved (usually because they are in a race to the bottom to give away tax incentives to woo / keep large employers) so they end up nickle-and-diming their residents and frequent commuters so much that it destroys any semblance of a quality of life. They purposefully streamline the infraction side and add friction to the challenge/defense side such that it becomes a poor tax (the wealthy can afford to pay the fine and move outside the city). [1] https://padailypost.com/2019/07/23/opinion-the-ugly-truth-about-red-light-cameras/ https://padailypost.com/2019/07/23/opinion-the-ugly-truth-ab... [2] https://www.acluaz.org/en/legislation/reining-civil-asset-forfeiture https://www.acluaz.org/en/legislation/reining-civil-asset-fo... [3] https://www.curbed.com/2018/5/24/17382120/tickets-fees-fines-criminal-justice-ferguson https://www.curbed.com/2018/5/24/17382120/tickets-fees-fines...