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Estonia has a new way to stop speeding motorists
- rightbyte 7y agoFor some reason I like the idea. You don't speed to save money but to save time, so paying the fine in time seems ... appropiate?
- jaytaylor 7y agoI like the idea, too. One exception where it might not be very effective is in cases where the speeder doesn't consider their time as valuable vs. paying money, e.g. teenagers.
- rightbyte 7y agoMaybe, but it might be embaressing unless it is on purpuse. You could still withdraw the license etc. In practice the cops probably need to be able to handle teens "playing" and on purpose getting wait fines some way. It wouldn't be unmanageble.
- clarry 7y agoIt would be a shame if people got from place A to place B too fast.
- Bilters 7y agoI can totally stand behind this idea. It’s way more equal than money. Every single person get 24 hours a day, but not everybody has €200 (or however high the fee may be) free at hand. Although I think there should be still an upper limit. Saying if you speed more than X there’s more consequences involved rather than time and/ or money.
- toxicFork 7y agoThe other dimension, space. They will take away a room of your house.
- Spare_account 7y agoI know you're joking, but removal of space already exists in the form of incarceration (limiting the space you're allowed to roam within).
- sunir 7y agoWhy be so classical? We could also lower your probabilities or increase your improbabilities.
- toxicFork 7y agoBut then I would get a lottery ticket
- Hamuko 7y agoWe Finns have figured out how to equalise the money part as well. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland-home-of-the-103000-speeding-ticket/387484/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland...
- ramblerman 7y agoA progressive tax is a nice start, albeit less original. The problem is some extremely rich folk don't necessarily have a high salary. Punishing with micro-timeouts like this is much more interesting imo.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Escapado 7y agoI would like that in Germany too. Here it's fixed but if you get caught speeding beyond a threshold your driver's license gets suspended we also get points and with a certain amount of points you are not allowed to drive anymore at all.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kranner 7y agoThe article addresses that. Apparently Estonians consider Finland's system inferior to theirs. > Estonians have praised the idea for being more egalitarian—monetary fines are not adjusted according to income, as in neighbouring Finland, but everyone has the same number of hours in the day
- jacobush 7y agoOk, so here is the diplomatic Swede interfering in the affairs of others: why not combine the two? Pay a progressive fine or wait by the roadside.
- minikites 7y agoPeople in the USA who are money-poor are often time-poor as well, so this may still unfairly impact the poor. I'm not sure how true that is for Estonia.
- loeg 7y agoIf you give people a choice, the super wealthy mostly will pay a relatively small fee and go about their day, and you'll end up temporarily incarcerating the very poor for the same social malfeasance. (With some distribution of behaviors in the middle.) Is that better? The main cost of a traffic ticket today isn't the ticket; it's the (much larger) uptick in insurance costs afterwards. If you could just pay $80-120 on the off chance you occasionally got a ticket, without impacting insurance premiums, I'd speed a lot more often.
- fyfy18 7y agoAt least where I am in Europe, insurance premiums and speeding tickets are completely separate. It makes sense that people who get caught have to pay higher premiums though, as I assume they are more likely to be involved in accidents.
- Merrill 7y agoTickets for all violations result in points. Speeding points depend on the amount over the limit. Total points in last 3 years are one factor that goes into insurance pricing. It's a social anti-credit system.
- wjnc 7y agoIt is a little dream of mine to mine videos for crazy traffic behavior and sell the license plate numbers to insurers. Should be pretty simple, the uploaders even do the tagging for you. How to do that while complying with GDPR is a little nugget to be solved. I'd need a method for take down and a method for checking the vehicle hasn't been sold (that's public at least).
- 14 7y agoYes perhaps but we don't all get to spend that 24 hours equally in a day so is it really fair? A poor person may have to work 2 jobs at minimum wage and still barely get by working 16 hour days. This person already has to spend most of their day working. Now for the person making millions off investments literally making making money while they sleep and only has to work 8 hours a day is it really the same for these 2 people to take a 1 hour time out? The only way I can see this system work would be ever increasing time frames each time you get pulled over and since people can't spend 8 hours on the side of the highway with no bathroom or food, they should just make people come sit in a classroom where they could also educate on the dangers of speeding. As a person who struggles with sleep, I am on a regular basis pulling over on the side of the read for a half hour to catch some sleep. This would hardly be a punishment for me and I would not be deterred from doing it again. Make it several hours long, cut the internet and then we are getting somewhere.
- llampx 7y agoAh yes, the hypothetical poor person who works 16 hour days, at 2 or 3 minimum wage jobs, can not afford public transport or a car, and depending on what's being debated, doesn't have time, money or mental faculties to register for a particular service that's being talked about (most often a picture ID). also known as, a strawman.
- burntwater 7y agoHow is this a hypothetical person?
- ddingus 7y agoThere are millions of these people.
- tybit 7y agoThe suggestion isn’t that every poor person suffers all of these, it’s that many suffer from a few. Any punishment will likely affect a subset of those people much more than everyone else.
- 7y ago
- andrepd 7y agoConversely, for some people 200€ is peanuts, money that can throw away without a second thought. For them, it's not a deterrent.
- pkulak 7y agoExcept that you're not repaying the cost to society. At the very least, you owe for the time the police had to spend to catch you. At most, for the endangerment of those around you. A "time out" is just a waste. Just make fines progressive.
- Daishiman 7y agoI doubt that small speeding fines do more than pay for themselves. You need a bureaucracy in place for fine payment, fines can end up getting contested in court at a huge cost, etc.
- pkulak 7y agoEntire cities fund themselves with speeding tickets: https://www.npr.org/2019/10/18/771371881/episode-945-the-liberty-city https://www.npr.org/2019/10/18/771371881/episode-945-the-lib...
- mcv 7y agoAppropriate, but it requires more active enforcement than the automated radar speed detectors with cameras and automatically mailing you the fine.
- dannyw 7y agoManual speed traps are nice. Often, you don’t get pulled over for going a little over the limit, especially if everyone around you is going the same speed.
- perlpimp 7y agoPragmatic nordic countries drive practical solutions, however often other counties take fear driven approach, signaling that person might be endangering public safety and who know what that is worth. In Canada you can get slapped with dangerous driving fine and have your license be suspended for a year, at a discretion of a police officer.
- xxs 7y agoThe approach has significant downsides in the winter, esp. if there are any passengers. Although it makes for top of hackernews, there is very little pragmatic, especially since the amount of road police is extremely limited.
- bb123 7y agoThe article quickly mentions that speeding tickets don’t have a cumulative effect like they do in other countries, but doesn’t explain why. Surely this would also make the system more egalitarian - if you’re caught 3 times you lose your licence. Doesn’t matter who you are.
- archi42 7y agoPrecisely. In Germany I could afford the speeding tickets - losing my license (for some time) would be the real punishment for me. (Disclaimer: I don't speed)
- xxs 7y ago>(Disclaimer: I don't speed) Germany has one of the better/higher quality roads and highest speed limits in Europe, though.
- tluyben2 7y agoYes, it feels you are standing absolutely still when one of those mercs or porsches rocket past you (while I'm driving 130-140 km/h it still feels like standing still when some of them pass).
- Glawen 7y agoGermany is also among the most congested country in europe. It is a pain to drive there, as the germans are constantly rebuilding their roads, generating endless trafic jams. A8 karlsruhe- munich has never had a day without road works in 30 years. I find british motorway better, the best being french motorway, but you have to pay quite a lot to drive them
- TomK32 7y agoThe English have pleny of jokes about their own motorways, but the also have a symphony for the M1. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0009qyz https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0009qyz
- dullgiulio 7y agoVery fond of the idea. Italy does something related in the "Tutor" system that fines based on a long average speed (average measured in a long segment using licence plate recognition). This avoids the trick drivers use to avoid a single speeding camera. The fines system is more traditional, however. The system works because the toll roads in Italy have exclusively guarded entrances and exits.
- neiman 7y agoThis is literally micro-imprisoning, and I can so easily see how this can be abused. We should be careful who give the power to imprison others.
- close04 7y agoThere are many countries that apply such a “punishment by delay” system ad-hoc. Police know a fine might not hit the sweet spot so when they see aggressive or speeding drivers they don’t just apply the fine but also an arbitrary delay: you’ll hand around by the police while they do checks, re-checks, verifications, more checks. This is far more frustrating than the fines and a good deterrent for those who consider any fine chump change.
- Aeolun 7y agoIf it’s something the drivers choose, it suddenly becomes more like they’re being paid €200 to sit still for an hour. That’s a pretty good deal.
- skrebbel 7y agoI don't know how this works in other countries, but in the Netherlands, police can nearly always find a reason to make you spend a night in jail. We have laws against public drunkenness, against "unlawful assembly", etc. It's mostly used to break up bar brawls without having to gather too much evidence. Stuff like this only works if the police is not terribly corrupt of course. But if the police force is corrupt (or, like in the US, continuously afraid of their lives + racially biased), then I'd wager there are bigger dangers to society than the ability to make someone stand by the highway for a while.
- darchws 7y agoI think there is another perspective of the speeding needs. Not everybody drives in high speeds just because they want to be at somewhere sooner. Most of time it can be just the desire to feel of the speed. For example in the some highways in the some countries, the speed average is calculated between two tolls and people resets their odometer in the first toll and if they above the limit, they pull over and wait until the average goes below the limit. So I am in doubt if it decreases or increases driving in high speeds in the long term.
- IshKebab 7y agoI've never seen anyone do that in the UK. It would be illegal anyway but people don't even speed up and slow down. Which countries are you talking about?
- Fronzie 7y agoFrance is one. Speed on a long stretch between boots, go to the gas station. Average speed is ok, still quicker at the destination. Can't particularly recommend it, but it does happen. Pro-tip: bring enough cash to pay the fine, because the police will drive you (slowly) to an ATM if you don't have enough to pay the fine.
- tiborsaas 7y agoItaly is one country they implemented it, I asked my friend in his BMW if this is the best this bad boy can do and he said with a sad Italian voice, "There's no point Tibor"
- IshKebab 7y agoYeah that's exactly what I was saying. People don't pointlessly speed and then stop and wait when there are average speed checks.
- JoelTheSuperior 7y agoTo be fair the UK absolutely does have average speed checks on many of its motorways.
- kurtisc 7y agoCool idea but they'd never do it here (UK) because they couldn't spare the police time.
- mellosouls 7y agoYeah that's the problem with the overuse of speed cameras. No decent policing of the roads - as there are hardly any police doing it - focusing entirely on speeding instead of unsafe or poor driving.
- kurtisc 7y agoExactly. Sometimes there's someone else on the road driving so badly that the safest thing to do is get away from them. It's much more difficult if you're on a road with lots of speed cameras and no cruise-control because then you have to stare at your speedometer.
- hmexx 7y agoThis is like being put in the "naughty corner", for adults. ... and since most adults experienced this form of punishment during their formative years, it's bound to be super effective. Brilliant!
- siliconunit 7y agoI find it quite disturbing that in the US you have this insurance/tickets connection, it has been said clearly by many city halls and police forces that most ticketing and regulations are rigged to be just another city income stream, nothing much to do with safety or concern (just cap car speed from manufacturers you really care about safety). Glad here in Europe it's completely separated afaik.
- t34543 7y agoIt has very little to do with safety and it’s mostly a cash grab. Check out a company called Redflex, they operate many red might camera systems and are corrupt. https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/arizona-based-redflex-photo-radar-firm-to-pay-20-million-to-chicago-for-bribery-scheme-9059028 https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/arizona-based-redflex-p... https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/redflex-traffic-systems-enters-non-prosecution-agreement-united-states https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/redflex-traffic-systems-enter...
- xhedley 7y agoUK police forces have an option to offer drivers who speed a speed awareness training course. This costs money but less than the fine and insurance rise from the points. A friend of mine did one after being caught at 33mph in a 30mph zone. (The police never used to pull you over for that sort of error but with automated speed cameras it is cheap to detect.) The impact assessment indicates that it reduced repeat offending compared to fines. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-speed-awareness-course-impact-evaluation https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-speed-aw...
- TamDenholm 7y agoJust a note, the speed awareness course is not available in Scotland.
- baloki 7y agoDon’t you have to report that you’ve attended the course nowadays and Insurers generally increase the premium by the same amount as if you had points?
- viseztrance 7y agoI've taken the course. I mentioned it to my insurer, and they didn't care.
- cs02rm0 7y agoThis costs money but less than the fine and insurance rise from the points. In some circumstances, sometimes not, even more so if you have to miss any work to attend the course. A friend of mine did one after being caught at 33mph in a 30mph zone. ACPO guidelines mean they wouldn't be pinged until 10% +2mph over. So 35mph in a 30. That's also the minimum speed to be offered a speed awareness course.
- exegete 7y agoI like the idea but I think it would have a legal problem in the US. My understanding is that when you get a speeding ticket it is actually a court summons where most people just plead guilty and pay the fine. If the punishment is instead immediate without an opportunity to go to court I can see it as a violation of due process. I’m not a lawyer though.
- Jemm 7y agoI like the idea but fear that it will be abused by people who need an excuse to be 45 minutes late, such us exsm takers who feel unprepared and could use an extra day (or 45 minutes0 to study.
- WD-42 7y agoThat doesn’t make a lot of sense. You could go steal a bag of chips from a gas station now and get detained by the police for an hour. Would that excuse work?
- ReptileMan 7y agoCan we just go away with speeding in non residentials areas and make driving licence harder to obtain skill wise? There is no point in speed limits and modern cars have much better handling characteristics when such speed limits were introduced. 140 km/h is like standing still in modern executive car.
- randomb_1979 7y agoGiven how far computer vision has advanced nowadays, I would be interested to know if anyone has done an analysis of the frequency and delta of over-speeding vs the make of the car as a (not so great) proxy for how rich a person is. That might be an additional data point to consider when formulating these laws.
- el_don_almighty 7y agoplease, oh please... pull me over and make me take a nap on the side of the road for an hour.
- mikece 7y ago"Slow is steady, steady is fast"...
- m_herrlich 7y agoI've always assumed speeding tickets are more about income than safety, since speed is a very rough measure of safe driving when you ignore the vehicle and driver skill. This approach costs more (cops babysit speeders) and the state doesn't get paid. Doesn't seem practical from a policy standpoint.
- goodmachine 7y agoYour assumption might be wrong, though. It costs a lot of money to scrape people off the road and put them back together. And more if the person cannot be reassembled. Whether the state pays or insurers do (or both), it all makes for cost that gets spread across society to some degree. I don't know the exact amount a life is worth, but https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-value-of-life/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-value-of-life/ Secondly, a rough metric like speed is exactly how one should interpret safety. Given a wide distribution of skills (mutually interacting driver competencies), and a wide distribution of vehicle capabilities and parameters (stopping distances, tyre pressures, safety features) and an even wider distribution of actual road-types & weather conditions it makes 'obey the damn speed limit: everybody, always' the simplest possible thing for drivers to understand, and for the cops to enforce. This approach seems pretty cool. I assume the Estonians will publish the results either way.
- black_puppydog 7y agoso then you should advocate for a more progressive income tax, and a complete abolition of speeding tickets. not sure that most people would agree that has no impact on safety though...
- mendelmaleh 7y agoThis is awesome! 1 hour lunch break, I will pack a sandwich and a laptop, plan my trips accordingly xD edit: someone suggested a nap too
- Waterluvian 7y agoAny time I watch a fool weave through traffic on the highway I think about how after all that risk of murdering other people's children, they get maybe one extra YouTube video in the day. And often not even that. I find a sick amount of satisfaction when I get to coast up to one of these maniacs who sped into traffic and just sit right on their bumper.
- goodmachine 7y agoIn Japan, sober passengers get penalised if a driver is over the alcohol limit. The limit is not high (BrAC 0.15 mg/L -equivalent to 0.03%) to start with. The good thing about this policy (as a disincentive to drunk-driving) is it is designed to socialise responsibility and blame: while a passenger can reasonably claim not to know how drunk the driver was, it makes no difference to the fine. One could extend this idea to speed limits, perhaps. Or maybe: multiply the driver's fine relative to the number of passengers aboard, so as to diminish the guy-showing-off-to-his-mates/ girlfriend effect. If you're risking lives other than your own, pay more.
- usaphp 7y agoYou have a choice when getting into a car with a drunk driver. You don’t have a choice to not let a driver speed up when you are already in a car.
- muzani 7y agoI think the idea here is that a drunk driver might not mind risking a fine for himself, but thinks twice about risking a fine for his passenger too.
- andrei_says_ 7y agoAnd multiply by a wealth coefficient like they do in Finland. Because if a fine is the equivalent $0.00000450 then it’s not much of a motivation.
- belltaco 7y agoHow is wealth calculated? It's kind of hard in many countries including USA, since there is no wealth tax.
- sandworm101 7y agoDead simple. Bluebook or insured value of the vehicle being driven. Speed in a semi-truck, or lambo, expect to pay more than the guy delivering pizzas in a civic.
- hourislate 7y agoThis wouldn't work in the USA since police are revenue driven. Safety is not the primary focus of traffic police. Their only concern is generating enough revenue to ensure their jobs and help support the coffers of the city they work for. Giving people an option to sit out a fine would cost them and the city too much.
- steverb 7y agoHeh. We used to use this technique in the Military Police. Speeding tickets on base (at that time in Germany) did not result in a fine. They resulted in what amounts to the person's commander getting a notification and then deciding what to do with it. It usually resulted in a butt chewing for the service member. The military spouses tended to be less impressed by this. So for spouses we always took a lot of time filling out the paperwork. For the spouses who proclaimed how "important" their husband was, I liked to be especially obsequious and insist that they talk to my supervisor, and make them wait by the side of the road until said supervisor could make it to the scene (or have better things to do and tell me to quit screwing around). Young me was a jerk sometimes.
- Scapeghost 7y agoI only keep hearing good things about Estonia. What is it actually like to live there?
- dullgiulio 7y agoCold and dark in winter. But it also has disadvantages...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- neonate 7y agohttp://archive.is/jJgwH http://archive.is/jJgwH
- wolrah 7y agoI like the concept, especially if as discussed by others in the thread it were to be combined with the progressive fine system used in some countries. The thing is, before any discussion of stricter enforcement of speed laws, we need to fix the speed limits to match the roads (or vice versa, as may be desirable in some scenarios). Anywhere that has a "speeding problem" doesn't actually have a problem with people violating the law, it has a problem with the law being wrong. Most major traffic engineering guidebooks suggest that limits be set based on the 85th percentile speed or something similar to that. In free-flowing traffic conditions and without strict speed enforcement, every combination of road, driver, and vehicle has a natural speed they'll settle in to. The general principle is that the speed limit should be high enough that the vast majority of drivers are not speeding, If the 85th percentile natural speed of a road is higher than desired for whatever reason, the correct answer is to redesign the road to reduce its natural speed, not to strictly enforce an artificially low limit. Unfortunately at least in the US while these principles are in our traffic engineering guidelines they are overridden by statutory limits. Certain classes of road are never allowed to have a speed limit above a certain level. When combined with the fact that we tend to build roads to be as wide, flat, and straight as we can get away with, the natural speeds on a huge number of roads exceed the statutory limits. I've driven a significant portion of the American Interstate system as well as a small part of Canada's highway network. I still have yet to see a single controlled-access highway where the majority of free flowing traffic wasn't traveling above the posted speed limit. Seriously, get on the highway anywhere in the US outside of rush hour, get in the right lane, and set your cruise control to the posted limit. Roughly everyone will pass you. There are a few outliers, but on the average free-flowing highway I'd be willing to bet the 85th percentile rule actually applies backwards, over 85% of traffic is ignoring the limit because it's stupidly low. --- Eliminate all statutory limits, require all limits be set by the 85th percentile rule, and maybe learn from the Germans' demonstration that flat, straight, highly visible stretches of high quality highway don't really need limits at all. Then and only then should we talk about stricter enforcement. --- What we really need is stricter driver training and stricter enforcement against those who are actually bad at driving. We basically hand out licenses in a Cracker Jack box and have no meaningful classifications for personal use. The license I got on my 16th birthday by driving a compact sedan through a half-ass not even parallel parking thing and then going around the block in a small town also allows me to pilot a literal semi truck pulling a 53' trailer around most of North America as long as it's not for commercial purposes. In most states those retirees driving massive RVs have no additional training or testing. Unfortunately given that outside of a few major cities it's pretty much impossible to live a fully functional life without being able to drive or be driven it's really hard to change that. Taking away someone's ability to drive is literally taking away their freedom in a large part of the US.
- kleton 7y agoBut how does the county collect revenue from this?
- newnewpdro 7y agoInteresting approach, but those struggling to make ends meet have substantially less time than the wealthy. It isn't a class normalizing panacea.
- sandworm101 7y ago>>Making drivers wait requires manpower. The team acknowledges that the experiment is not currently scalable, but hopes that technology could make it so in the future. Every motorcyclist who gets pulled over by a cop is morally obligated to keep that traffic cop occupied in conversation for as long as possible. My record was over an hour. Every second they spend 'supervising" you beside the road is a second they aren't handing a ticket to someone else. So I am all for this plan. Make all the cops stand beside the road for an hour every time they ticket a speeding motorcyclist. That will certainly stop all the inane tickets being handed to sportbikes doing 55 in a 50 as schoolbusses rush by at 70.
- wool_gather 7y agoThere's clearly some context behind this comment that I think is completely missing for those of us who don't ride motorcycles, because this is just antisocial. I'd be interested to read some expansion on that very last little phrase that seems to be your justification.
- soledades 7y agoI'm pretty sure the context here is particular to the intricacies of this individual's mind. As a motorcyclist myself, the only thing I've been pulled over for is going the wrong way down a four lane one-way street, and even for that I didn't get a ticket.
- stinos 7y agoWould you still consider your 'keep cop occupied' a good idea knowing those cops could just as well be doing things which actually matter? Getting drunk drivers out of the traffic, just to name something. Is that morally ok? Also: 55, just like 70, is also more than 50 so if 50 is the limit set, then even though one is worse than the other, both are wrong so it's a bit silly to complain about it imo. And yes I've been caught speeding myself already, also for rather small violations. Fair? That's a bit besides the point: thing is, if the sign says 50, and I willingly go over that, I'll deal with the consequences. Not complain about people enforcing them. If anything, I could complain about the limit. But that's about it.
- nkjoep 7y agoThat is an alternative way to see it, I appreciate the effort. However, we shouldn't forget the reasons why we have speed limits: safety. It is just not safe to drive 80mph in the city center, for instance. And should be just avoided. A different story is 190mph on the highway. It can be ok under certain circumstances: low traffic, good weather, good car, your age, new tires, just an odd example. So no, some speed limits should be enforced at all costs.
- robocat 7y agoIt is a shame we measure a symptom (speeding) rather than a cause (dangerous driving) to measure safety. I regularly see dangerous driving: near misses; aggressive tactics that work because other drivers compensate to make safe; too close to cyclists; etcetera. It would also be nice if we could have a way to carrot or stick "discourteous" driving. (Yes: without speed limits I think we would all choose to drive faster all the time and be dangerous. Also driving in Australia on open road is comfortable because the speed limit is strictly enforced so there is no overtaking).