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Asking police officers to enforce traffic violations is a very expensive use of their time. Police offers cost a lot of money to employ, and we have a lot of pu

Asking police officers to enforce traffic violations is a very expensive use of their time. Police offers cost a lot of money to employ, and we have a lot of publicly accessible road space. Having officers even regularly stationed at 50% of the most common routes would probably take up a lot more manpower than they have now and that means more taxes to pay for them. Creating a dedicated traffic enforcement division is probably more doable/cheaper, but again, the amount of people needed is large. The problem is fundamentally that the US has a lot of extremely lightly regulated public space designed for high speed and that's why our pedestrian and auto safety record is so much worse than any other developed country.

xnx 3y ago
> Asking police officers to enforce traffic violations is a very expensive use of their time. Is it? Seems like heavy enforcement could pay for itself in terms of fines.
- Karrot_Kream 3y ago
  The average police officer in the Bay Area costs $200k with benefits. Can each police officer bring $200k worth of fines in per person? Moreover, what kind of a system will you create if you incentivize officers to pay their own salary through fines?
  - hnbad 3y ago
    If you're saying the police is massively overfunded, yeah. Officers also already often face quotas in many places, so you already know the answer to that question. But the better question is why would you need to have overpaid humans drive around in cars to catch speeding violations? In most of Europe you almost never get stopped by cops for traffic violations. Most speeding violations are caught by stationary radar traps, a machine can run the plates and send you the ticket by mail, including a pretty picture of the driver of the car if you want to dispute who drove it. Sometimes there are similar traps activated by passing a red light. It'll even tell you how the long the light had been red when you passed it.
    - Karrot_Kream 3y ago
      The reason that doesn't happen in the US is privacy regulations and because generally speaking lower income areas are less pedestrian friendly than higher income areas, so lower income areas will probably have more speeding. Not saying I agree with these reasons but it is why the political calculus in the US exists.

xnx 3y ago

> Asking police officers to enforce traffic violations is a very expensive use of their time. Is it? Seems like heavy enforcement could pay for itself in terms of fines.

Karrot_Kream 3y ago
The average police officer in the Bay Area costs $200k with benefits. Can each police officer bring $200k worth of fines in per person? Moreover, what kind of a system will you create if you incentivize officers to pay their own salary through fines?
- hnbad 3y ago
  If you're saying the police is massively overfunded, yeah. Officers also already often face quotas in many places, so you already know the answer to that question. But the better question is why would you need to have overpaid humans drive around in cars to catch speeding violations? In most of Europe you almost never get stopped by cops for traffic violations. Most speeding violations are caught by stationary radar traps, a machine can run the plates and send you the ticket by mail, including a pretty picture of the driver of the car if you want to dispute who drove it. Sometimes there are similar traps activated by passing a red light. It'll even tell you how the long the light had been red when you passed it.
  - Karrot_Kream 3y ago
    The reason that doesn't happen in the US is privacy regulations and because generally speaking lower income areas are less pedestrian friendly than higher income areas, so lower income areas will probably have more speeding. Not saying I agree with these reasons but it is why the political calculus in the US exists.