7 ms·

I've thought about this a lot as I see more and more reckless driving in the areas I live in. Surveillance is generally a net negative, but it's also bad when y

by yannyu 10mo ago

I've thought about this a lot as I see more and more reckless driving in the areas I live in. Surveillance is generally a net negative, but it's also bad when you see people speeding around schools, rolling through stop signs, and running red lights. We seem to have a worst of all situations where traffic is getting increasingly difficult to enforce, driving is getting more dangerous year by year, and we're terrified of government overreach if we add any automation at all to enforcement. I don't know the solution, but I do know that in the US we've lost 10-15 years of progress when it comes to traffic fatalities.

sodality2 10mo ago
These cameras are currently not used at all for traffic/speed enforcement. The best they would do is track more serious crimes like hit-and-runs by photographing cars in the area.
- yannyu 10mo ago
  Ah, that's helpful and something for me to learn more about. Thanks for the info.
chaps 10mo ago
> but it's also bad when you see people speeding around schools, rolling through stop signs, and running red lights. This is not what Flock seeks to curb.
- genewitch 10mo ago
  so what do they seek to curb? freedom of movement?
  - thatcat 10mo ago
    It's an opportunistic solution to a budget problem. Local governments have extra money from property price bubble increasing tax revenues. At the same time there are great open source image analysis models for companies to put on a pole using cheap android hw and a solar panel and make bold claims about solving all crime, then they can sell that data again to 3rd parties like insurance. Also can start buying access to more video feeds from ring cameras etc and resell that. They'll hire someone to make a ux to integrate it into PDs later, for a premium of course.
  - dole 10mo ago
    “Crime.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2025/09/03/ai-startup-flock-thinks-it-can-eliminate-all-crime-in-america/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2025/09/03/ai-st...
ruthie_cohen 10mo ago
[dead]
hamdingers 10mo ago
I agree. It's frustrating that we have ended up in a reality where vehicle movement is heavily tracked, but we're not using that technology to do the most obvious and productive thing. My city spent a few million dollars installing Flock cameras to all its municipal parking garages in a matter of months, but has been hemming and hawing over adding a few speed cameras for years, despite petitioning the state for an allowance do so back in 2023. Traffic enforcement cameras don't even have to become the networked surveillance system that Flock offers. Most are still cameras triggered by radar rather than perpetually recording all drivers.
MisterTea 10mo ago
I live in NYC. People used to be afraid of double parking. Like you I regularly see the same bat-shit driving and no one seems to care to say or do anything. It's bonkers.
- cons0le 10mo ago
  NYC should have been the model to follow. Instead of flock cameras, cities should have bounty systems: record a video of a speed violation with a plate, and get 10% of the ticket revenue. Enforcement would explode. We could of had a system where we used the technology we already had in our hands to democratize speed enforcement, instead of corporatizing it
  - Fnoord 10mo ago
    Interesting. 'But your honor, it is AI enhanced. I wasn't speeding.' 'Weird, I got this footage here from another angle and it shows you did. We also got the data from your car. You were speeding son.'
  - potato3732842 10mo ago
    Pitting people against each other in the service of the state is likely to cause problems at scale and in the long run. Frankly, I think it's a miracle that nobody has been beaten into a coma or killed over NYC's bounty program yet.
  - barnas2 10mo ago
    NYC already tried Snitching as a Service during COVID, and it went terribly. I grew up with a neighbor who would constantly record people and call the cops over every little perceived infraction. Everyone in the neighborhood hated her, including the cops. I do not want to live in a society that encourages those people.
    - cons0le 10mo ago
      I definitely agree it can go too far. Maybe only allow bounties for active, dangerous crimes like speeding, drunk driving, and racing?
quamserena 10mo ago
Part of the public pushback is that people almost always drive the “feels like” speed and not the posted speedlimit. We build 6 lane roads and then wonder why people go 50mph when it’s 35 posted, it’s because it’s 6 lanes and 35 feels slow. Cities profit from this in the form of speed cameras, which is why they’ve been outlawed in a lot of places.
- derektank 10mo ago
  If the speeds aren’t appropriate for the built environment, then the limits should be changed or the environment should be changed. Enforcement of the law should be consistent regardless of the quality of the law.
  - potato3732842 10mo ago
    The speeds are appropriate for the roads generally. I mean, at the lowest level speed limits are a matter of social consensus so the broad public is tautologically correct. The problem is that knocking the magic number on the sign down by 5-15 and then simply not enforcing it too seriously results in less screeching Karens harassing the politicians who then harass the bureaucracy than taking a hard line about "well akshually this is the engineered speed for the road".
- asdff 10mo ago
  The driver blithely keeping with the flow of traffic is not the one I am worried about. It is the one who is aggressively trying to cut through the flow of traffic while putting everyone and themselves in danger that I worry about.
  - dylan604 10mo ago
    I love when cities time their lights so that aggressive drivers just get hit with waiting at a red light while driving the speed limit means hitting greens for long stretches.
    - 10mo ago
ajross 10mo ago
> driving is getting more dangerous year by year Not over the long term, no. There may have been a recent uptick in the post-pandemic US but it's mostly just noise. Fatalities per mile driven have been going down markedly in recent decades. Driving was twice as dangerous in the 80's as it is now.
- standardUser 10mo ago
  That's thanks entirely to government-required safety features, not skilled drivers.
  - youngNed 10mo ago
    There is picture of a cyclist. He is holding a stick. The cyclist puts the stick between his spokes. The cyclist lies on the road, cursing the government, for causing this.
- hamdingers 10mo ago
  You are incorrect. Fatalities in the US leveled out in the early 2010s and have been climbing since then. In all other developed nations they continued trending downwards. This is not a statistical anomaly that can be handwaved by pointing out that things were worse 40 years ago. Roads in the US are uniquely lethal and getting moreso.
  - ajross 10mo ago
    > You are incorrect Sigh. I hate that phrasing. But OK, fine: you are misreading me, misanalysing the data, or just plain spinning to mislead readers. Fatalities per capita and per mile driven go steadily downward until covid, and maybe there's a bump after that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in... If you have numbers (you don't cite any) showing otherwise, they are being polluted by demographic trends (the US having higher population growth doesn't say anything about driver behavior). > Roads in the US are uniquely lethal and getting moreso. So spinning it is. Would you rather drive in Germany in 2002 or the US in 2025? Seems like "uniquely lethal" doesn't really constitute a good faith representation of the truth.
autoexec 10mo ago
> Surveillance is generally a net negative, but it's also bad when you see people speeding around schools, rolling through stop signs, and running red lights. The fact that these cameras are already pervasive and the problem of bad drivers hasn't been solved anywhere doesn't give me a lot of hope that these cameras are the solution to that particular problem. It seems like police can do a lot to increase enforcement without the need of these devices. We have evidence that they've been doing less traffic enforcement so maybe start there. Increasing our standards for driving tests (some of which were eliminated entirely over the first few years of the pandemic) would probably help. Automatically shutting off/disabling or limiting the use of cell phones (all of which come with sensors that can detect when you are going at speeds you'd expect while in cars) might help. Bringing physical buttons and dials back to cars instead of burying common functions in touchscreen menus might help. There's a whole lot of places to look for solutions to safer roads before we have to resort to tracking everyone's movements at all times.
- nerdsniper 10mo ago
  > Automatically shutting off/disabling or limiting the use of cell phones (all of which come with sensors that can detect when you are going at speeds you'd expect while in cars) might help. I can’t think of a way to implement this that wouldn’t ban passengers from using their phone while riding in a vehicle. Which could be even a bus or limousine.
  - LeifCarrotson 10mo ago
    I don't disagree, but I can totally imagine a society where this inability is perfectly acceptable because it severely reduces the #1 killer of people from 5-55yo. I don't think we live in that society, if Apple and Google flipped a switch tomorrow to do that people would freak out, but I could imagine a rational, fictional society that had different shared values.
  - mikem170 10mo ago
    A lot of people would be fine with that. Drivers are impaired while on the phone, even hands-free. Not to mention texting while driving! I kind of picture the cellular telcos doing this. Maybe buses and trains come with wifi hotspots allowed to connect. Otherwise auto passengers could use their devices offline, maybe read an ebook or something. Not the end of the world.
dylan604 10mo ago
We cracked down on driving under the influence with changes from DWI to DUI. In the 10-15 years you mention, the prevalence of distracted driving from mobile devices has gotten out of hand. There's no field sobriety test that can prove one was distracted by a device. That makes this much more difficult to crack down on.
- loeg 10mo ago
  Sure, though it is very easy to visually identify drivers looking at their phones. (Unless they have illegal tint.)
  - dylan604 10mo ago
    Only if you're driving next to the car. Speeding obviously can be detected from a distance. Driving under the influence also can be seen from a distance. I could see having a cop and a camera stationed in a place working as a spotter that then radios to other cops up ahead to pull over in an old school speed trap set up. However, that would take a lot of man power and coordination that I doubt most departments would care to do. We've seen plenty of YT videos of people trying to make a point of catching distracted drivers. The cops just need to give a shit, and want to do something about it.
    - loeg 10mo ago
      It doesn’t take a targeted trap or driving next to. It’s like 1 in 6 drivers at any time; it’s super easy to spot if you’re looking. One cop could pick off drivers no problem without any coordination.
aners 10mo ago
We have very few alternatives to driving in the US so we have very lax driver training and testing. Across the US we have roads and infrastructure that encourage speed right next to decaying pedestrian infrastructure. It's very difficult to get state DOTs to roll back or do traffic calming. They often prohibit the use of bollards or barriers near these roadways. In a lot, not all, physical changes to the environment could drastically reduce traffic fatalities without surveillance.
- shiroiuma 10mo ago
  Yep, the US has built itself a car-centric society over the last century, and there's essentially no way to change that now without burning everything down and starting over from scratch. They can't make driver training too strict because too many people would fail, and then have no way to get to work, and then who knows what those people would do. They can't turn cities pedestrian-friendly without tearing down everything there now and just the legal hurdles there are immense. I just don't see a way for this to change meaningfully in a lifetime, outside of a few little pockets here and there (like some towns or cities creating extremely limited pedestrian-only zones, which would then need a lot of parking to be useful for people, basically like an outdoor shopping mall).
- fusslo 10mo ago
  100% agree my local middle school has their school zone on: 1. four lane highway 2. dedicated turning lanes 3. major thru-way between shops, apartments, and the rest of the city 4. great visibility this is a recipe for 50mph. the speed limit is 25mph. If you do the speed limit, you WILL be tailgated. If you do ~35, you're risking a ticket. There will still be people doing 45-50 and weave through the lanes. also in my town, the main thru-way is a route dating back to the 30s. There are red lights at major intersections and they WILL turn red even if no one is there. They're designed to slow people down. HOWEVER if you speed and run a yellow light, you'll hit ALL the lights green! It shaves significant time off your trip, is easier on your car, is more enjoyable, and requires less attention. It's a system designed to make people speed and run reds. Where I used to live, I could get from one side of the city to the other in a maximum of 30 minutes. the lights were designed to keep traffic flowing at 30-35mph. It ENCOURAGED you to go no faster, or you'll have to slow down and come to a stop. This also kept traffic flowing so you felt like you HAD to focus on driving. They also did things to encourage bicycles and make things safer for pedestrians.
sgc 10mo ago
Your examples don't seem to represent the leading causes of fatalities from traffic accidents in the US, which remain distracted driving (phones and crappy touchscreen controls, etc) and drunk driving. People rolling through a stop sign / performing a 'California' stop are nowhere near the massive security concern to authorize the ideal surveillance state. To deal with the bigger issues you would have to film peoples actions in their cars and run it all through ai to accuse them of driving while drowsy. That would be an incredible and lazy failure. Also, fatalities per mile had a massive surge in 2020-2021, but they have been steadily dropping since then (2024 in wikipedia estimated a 1.27 per 1m miles, about the same as 2008). If the trend continues, in a year or two we will be back to the early 2010s lows without draconian measures. The solution, as always, is better infrastructure and support at multiple levels, not beating everybody with a stick.
- potato3732842 10mo ago
  I get the vibe from his comment that the visible deviance from rules of the state is what he's really concerned with and that the death and destruction is just the reason everyone else is suppose to care.
jldugger 10mo ago
On my way home, I noticed at a stoplight across the street from Apple Park that the driver in the lane next to me had his phone mounted up high in landscape mode and was watching the Simpsons. Just absolutely unhinged behavior lately.
chiefalchemist 10mo ago
Eventually we’ll have autonomous vehicles which will mitigate many of these issues, but will the surveillance infrastructure then be reduced? Probably not. War is peace. Surveillance is safety.
mschuster91 10mo ago
> Surveillance is generally a net negative, but it's also bad when you see people speeding around schools, rolling through stop signs, and running red lights. Speeding and running red lights can be combated without affecting the privacy of innocents on the road. A debate can and should be had about the placement of radar traps though, many are straight off highway robberies trapping people who don't notice a speed-limit sign that is visually hard to notice.
potato3732842 10mo ago
The solution is to have you abused by the system so that you realize that petty deviance is not something the dragnet should be brought to bear on if it must exist at all. Your opinions are directly counterproductive on these petty issues. You ask for the state to use the jackboot. The jackboot just makes people hate the state and think in terms of "will I get caught". If not for you people trying to force compliance on this, that and the next thing the state would be in higher standing in people's minds and voluntary "when it matters" or "because it's the right thing to do" compliance would be higher. Sure, we could add more jackboot, but that costs money and no democratic-ish system is gonna allocate a bunch of money to do stuff everyone hates.
drunner 10mo ago
A camera doesn't stop those acts though, it may only discourage those who know about it at a huge cost of privacy and rights. How about we build better infrastructure and regulate vehicles since those do actually stop this behavior. Most of those red lights and stoplights in the US should be roundabouts. Narrower lanes and other traffic calming measures should be much more pervasive. Vehicle size, specifically bumper height is out of control. Compare US traffic and pedestrian deaths to the rest of the world, or at least a lot of EU countries. Its embarrassing. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/74/wr/mm7408a2.htm#F1_down https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/74/wr/mm7408a2.htm#F1_down
- mrb 10mo ago
  Thanks for this CDC link! So the pedestrian death rate and the overall road traffic death rate is about three times higher in the US compared to other high-income countries... Mind-boggling.
- tristor 10mo ago
  > Vehicle size, specifically bumper height is out of control. Many manufacturers are now selling pre-lifted trucks. Here in Texas around a third of the vehicles on the road are pickup trucks, and about half of those have been lifted beyond standard height either from the factory or aftermarket, another third of vehicles are SUVs, most of which are significantly larger than necessary to be fit for purpose for the driver and occupants. This situation was /caused/ by government regulation and it can be fixed by government regulation. It's absolutely absurd the gargantuan vehicles most people drive in the US, and the fact that we let people turn their vehicles into monster trucks and then operate them on public roads with impunity. I don't care how small someone's dick is, they don't get the right to drive a truck down the highway that can literally drive /over/ a modern standard sedan/hatchback. The continuing absurdity has turned into an iterated prisoner's dilemma which has resulted in more and more people buying SUVs and crossovers who by every measure do NOT need them. Absolutely is out of control, and it negatively impacts everyone, including the drivers of these vehicles.
privacypoet 10mo ago
I agree. And Flock doesn’t help one bit with reducing reckless driving.
gosub100 10mo ago
I would actually be for civil asset forfeiture in these cases. The laws of physics don't care about due process; sue the car and save the video. Let the owner pay the fines and if they can prove some other driver did it, let them file civil suit against them to recoup the fines. Driving on public property is not a right.
tristor 10mo ago
> driving is getting more dangerous year by year My observation has been that the danger increase is a combination of three things: 1. Lack of situational awareness/awareness of surroundings. This manifests in various ways like improper merging, improper turns into traffic, turning across multiple lanes, and left-lane hogs. 2. Frustration becomes aggression. This also manifests in multiple ways, but primarily is seen through tail-gating (in response to left-lane hogs) and swimming through traffic (in response to left-lane hogs), as well as road-rage (mostly in response to the other misbehavior). 3. Constant distraction. I have seen SO MANY drivers literally watching videos on a tablet, playing games, or otherwise driving at high rates of speed (70mph+) while fully engaged in something other than driving. It's at epidemic proportions. The issue is, by and large, not people doing rolling stops (which by the way have never been proven to cause an increase in accidents when performed properly) or speeding (generally, some exceptions like school zones do matter). Running red lights is definitely a problem that is more common place, and is likely a part of all 3 of these these. I feel like to a large degree all of this is a symptom of a wider societial issue where everyone acts in selfish and self-centered ways, completely ignoring their impacts on others, and moving from moments to moments where they can engage with their phone/social-media, to the exclusion of all else. I don't think phones/social-media /caused/ the problem, I think it exacerbates it though. Every aspect of our society is worsening because the revealed behavior of our population is one of lack of care or outright disdain for everyone else around them and an absolute obsession with serving their own interests above all else. That this manifests in driving is unsurprising.
lunias 10mo ago
IMO the issue is that there's little to no enforcement outside of speeding. I see people get pulled over for speeding in a straight line even if it's relatively safe to do so, but never for talking on their phone, messing with the touch screen in their vehicle, left turns from the right lane and vice versa, failure to keep lane, failure to yield, failure to signal, cutting people off, driving a vehicle unfit for the road, etc. It usually takes about 5 minutes of driving to observe someone doing something that I would pull them over for. I don't think cops need all this automated surveillance, they just need to drive around and be proactive.
Breza 10mo ago
Here in Washington DC we've set up many different types of traffic cameras. One side effect is a reduction in the number of negative interactions the average person has with the police. There are communities where the cops treat people like piggy banks and spend tons of time aggressively enforcing minor traffic violations. That has negative effects on trust, not to mention the number of fatal interactions that have stemmed from traffic stops. Other jobs that can be done by the police in other places are handled by Parking Enforcement, the Department of Buildings, etc. The recent presence of federal agents and soldiers has reversed some of the hard-fought gains in trust, but my broader point still stands: more automated enforcement of traffic laws has positive effects in how people interact with the police. This effect needs to be balanced against the harms of increased surveillance. [1][https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/transportation/police-crack-down-on-drivers-on-the-shoulder-of-dc-295/3774405/ https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/transportation/poli...]

by yannyu 10mo ago

sodality2 10mo ago

These cameras are currently not used at all for traffic/speed enforcement. The best they would do is track more serious crimes like hit-and-runs by photographing cars in the area.

yannyu 10mo ago
Ah, that's helpful and something for me to learn more about. Thanks for the info.

chaps 10mo ago

> but it's also bad when you see people speeding around schools, rolling through stop signs, and running red lights. This is not what Flock seeks to curb.

genewitch 10mo ago
so what do they seek to curb? freedom of movement?
- thatcat 10mo ago
  It's an opportunistic solution to a budget problem. Local governments have extra money from property price bubble increasing tax revenues. At the same time there are great open source image analysis models for companies to put on a pole using cheap android hw and a solar panel and make bold claims about solving all crime, then they can sell that data again to 3rd parties like insurance. Also can start buying access to more video feeds from ring cameras etc and resell that. They'll hire someone to make a ux to integrate it into PDs later, for a premium of course.
- dole 10mo ago
  “Crime.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2025/09/03/ai-startup-flock-thinks-it-can-eliminate-all-crime-in-america/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2025/09/03/ai-st...

ruthie_cohen 10mo ago

[dead]

hamdingers 10mo ago

I agree. It's frustrating that we have ended up in a reality where vehicle movement is heavily tracked, but we're not using that technology to do the most obvious and productive thing. My city spent a few million dollars installing Flock cameras to all its municipal parking garages in a matter of months, but has been hemming and hawing over adding a few speed cameras for years, despite petitioning the state for an allowance do so back in 2023. Traffic enforcement cameras don't even have to become the networked surveillance system that Flock offers. Most are still cameras triggered by radar rather than perpetually recording all drivers.

MisterTea 10mo ago

I live in NYC. People used to be afraid of double parking. Like you I regularly see the same bat-shit driving and no one seems to care to say or do anything. It's bonkers.

cons0le 10mo ago
NYC should have been the model to follow. Instead of flock cameras, cities should have bounty systems: record a video of a speed violation with a plate, and get 10% of the ticket revenue. Enforcement would explode. We could of had a system where we used the technology we already had in our hands to democratize speed enforcement, instead of corporatizing it
- Fnoord 10mo ago
  Interesting. 'But your honor, it is AI enhanced. I wasn't speeding.' 'Weird, I got this footage here from another angle and it shows you did. We also got the data from your car. You were speeding son.'
- potato3732842 10mo ago
  Pitting people against each other in the service of the state is likely to cause problems at scale and in the long run. Frankly, I think it's a miracle that nobody has been beaten into a coma or killed over NYC's bounty program yet.
- barnas2 10mo ago
  NYC already tried Snitching as a Service during COVID, and it went terribly. I grew up with a neighbor who would constantly record people and call the cops over every little perceived infraction. Everyone in the neighborhood hated her, including the cops. I do not want to live in a society that encourages those people.
  - cons0le 10mo ago
    I definitely agree it can go too far. Maybe only allow bounties for active, dangerous crimes like speeding, drunk driving, and racing?

quamserena 10mo ago

Part of the public pushback is that people almost always drive the “feels like” speed and not the posted speedlimit. We build 6 lane roads and then wonder why people go 50mph when it’s 35 posted, it’s because it’s 6 lanes and 35 feels slow. Cities profit from this in the form of speed cameras, which is why they’ve been outlawed in a lot of places.

derektank 10mo ago
If the speeds aren’t appropriate for the built environment, then the limits should be changed or the environment should be changed. Enforcement of the law should be consistent regardless of the quality of the law.
- potato3732842 10mo ago
  The speeds are appropriate for the roads generally. I mean, at the lowest level speed limits are a matter of social consensus so the broad public is tautologically correct. The problem is that knocking the magic number on the sign down by 5-15 and then simply not enforcing it too seriously results in less screeching Karens harassing the politicians who then harass the bureaucracy than taking a hard line about "well akshually this is the engineered speed for the road".
asdff 10mo ago
The driver blithely keeping with the flow of traffic is not the one I am worried about. It is the one who is aggressively trying to cut through the flow of traffic while putting everyone and themselves in danger that I worry about.
- dylan604 10mo ago
  I love when cities time their lights so that aggressive drivers just get hit with waiting at a red light while driving the speed limit means hitting greens for long stretches.
  - 10mo ago

ajross 10mo ago

> driving is getting more dangerous year by year Not over the long term, no. There may have been a recent uptick in the post-pandemic US but it's mostly just noise. Fatalities per mile driven have been going down markedly in recent decades. Driving was twice as dangerous in the 80's as it is now.

standardUser 10mo ago
That's thanks entirely to government-required safety features, not skilled drivers.
- youngNed 10mo ago
  There is picture of a cyclist. He is holding a stick. The cyclist puts the stick between his spokes. The cyclist lies on the road, cursing the government, for causing this.
hamdingers 10mo ago
You are incorrect. Fatalities in the US leveled out in the early 2010s and have been climbing since then. In all other developed nations they continued trending downwards. This is not a statistical anomaly that can be handwaved by pointing out that things were worse 40 years ago. Roads in the US are uniquely lethal and getting moreso.
- ajross 10mo ago
  > You are incorrect Sigh. I hate that phrasing. But OK, fine: you are misreading me, misanalysing the data, or just plain spinning to mislead readers. Fatalities per capita and per mile driven go steadily downward until covid, and maybe there's a bump after that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in... If you have numbers (you don't cite any) showing otherwise, they are being polluted by demographic trends (the US having higher population growth doesn't say anything about driver behavior). > Roads in the US are uniquely lethal and getting moreso. So spinning it is. Would you rather drive in Germany in 2002 or the US in 2025? Seems like "uniquely lethal" doesn't really constitute a good faith representation of the truth.

autoexec 10mo ago

> Surveillance is generally a net negative, but it's also bad when you see people speeding around schools, rolling through stop signs, and running red lights. The fact that these cameras are already pervasive and the problem of bad drivers hasn't been solved anywhere doesn't give me a lot of hope that these cameras are the solution to that particular problem. It seems like police can do a lot to increase enforcement without the need of these devices. We have evidence that they've been doing less traffic enforcement so maybe start there. Increasing our standards for driving tests (some of which were eliminated entirely over the first few years of the pandemic) would probably help. Automatically shutting off/disabling or limiting the use of cell phones (all of which come with sensors that can detect when you are going at speeds you'd expect while in cars) might help. Bringing physical buttons and dials back to cars instead of burying common functions in touchscreen menus might help. There's a whole lot of places to look for solutions to safer roads before we have to resort to tracking everyone's movements at all times.

nerdsniper 10mo ago
> Automatically shutting off/disabling or limiting the use of cell phones (all of which come with sensors that can detect when you are going at speeds you'd expect while in cars) might help. I can’t think of a way to implement this that wouldn’t ban passengers from using their phone while riding in a vehicle. Which could be even a bus or limousine.
- LeifCarrotson 10mo ago
  I don't disagree, but I can totally imagine a society where this inability is perfectly acceptable because it severely reduces the #1 killer of people from 5-55yo. I don't think we live in that society, if Apple and Google flipped a switch tomorrow to do that people would freak out, but I could imagine a rational, fictional society that had different shared values.
- mikem170 10mo ago
  A lot of people would be fine with that. Drivers are impaired while on the phone, even hands-free. Not to mention texting while driving! I kind of picture the cellular telcos doing this. Maybe buses and trains come with wifi hotspots allowed to connect. Otherwise auto passengers could use their devices offline, maybe read an ebook or something. Not the end of the world.

dylan604 10mo ago

We cracked down on driving under the influence with changes from DWI to DUI. In the 10-15 years you mention, the prevalence of distracted driving from mobile devices has gotten out of hand. There's no field sobriety test that can prove one was distracted by a device. That makes this much more difficult to crack down on.

loeg 10mo ago
Sure, though it is very easy to visually identify drivers looking at their phones. (Unless they have illegal tint.)
- dylan604 10mo ago
  Only if you're driving next to the car. Speeding obviously can be detected from a distance. Driving under the influence also can be seen from a distance. I could see having a cop and a camera stationed in a place working as a spotter that then radios to other cops up ahead to pull over in an old school speed trap set up. However, that would take a lot of man power and coordination that I doubt most departments would care to do. We've seen plenty of YT videos of people trying to make a point of catching distracted drivers. The cops just need to give a shit, and want to do something about it.
  - loeg 10mo ago
    It doesn’t take a targeted trap or driving next to. It’s like 1 in 6 drivers at any time; it’s super easy to spot if you’re looking. One cop could pick off drivers no problem without any coordination.

aners 10mo ago

We have very few alternatives to driving in the US so we have very lax driver training and testing. Across the US we have roads and infrastructure that encourage speed right next to decaying pedestrian infrastructure. It's very difficult to get state DOTs to roll back or do traffic calming. They often prohibit the use of bollards or barriers near these roadways. In a lot, not all, physical changes to the environment could drastically reduce traffic fatalities without surveillance.

shiroiuma 10mo ago
Yep, the US has built itself a car-centric society over the last century, and there's essentially no way to change that now without burning everything down and starting over from scratch. They can't make driver training too strict because too many people would fail, and then have no way to get to work, and then who knows what those people would do. They can't turn cities pedestrian-friendly without tearing down everything there now and just the legal hurdles there are immense. I just don't see a way for this to change meaningfully in a lifetime, outside of a few little pockets here and there (like some towns or cities creating extremely limited pedestrian-only zones, which would then need a lot of parking to be useful for people, basically like an outdoor shopping mall).
fusslo 10mo ago
100% agree my local middle school has their school zone on: 1. four lane highway 2. dedicated turning lanes 3. major thru-way between shops, apartments, and the rest of the city 4. great visibility this is a recipe for 50mph. the speed limit is 25mph. If you do the speed limit, you WILL be tailgated. If you do ~35, you're risking a ticket. There will still be people doing 45-50 and weave through the lanes. also in my town, the main thru-way is a route dating back to the 30s. There are red lights at major intersections and they WILL turn red even if no one is there. They're designed to slow people down. HOWEVER if you speed and run a yellow light, you'll hit ALL the lights green! It shaves significant time off your trip, is easier on your car, is more enjoyable, and requires less attention. It's a system designed to make people speed and run reds. Where I used to live, I could get from one side of the city to the other in a maximum of 30 minutes. the lights were designed to keep traffic flowing at 30-35mph. It ENCOURAGED you to go no faster, or you'll have to slow down and come to a stop. This also kept traffic flowing so you felt like you HAD to focus on driving. They also did things to encourage bicycles and make things safer for pedestrians.

sgc 10mo ago

Your examples don't seem to represent the leading causes of fatalities from traffic accidents in the US, which remain distracted driving (phones and crappy touchscreen controls, etc) and drunk driving. People rolling through a stop sign / performing a 'California' stop are nowhere near the massive security concern to authorize the ideal surveillance state. To deal with the bigger issues you would have to film peoples actions in their cars and run it all through ai to accuse them of driving while drowsy. That would be an incredible and lazy failure. Also, fatalities per mile had a massive surge in 2020-2021, but they have been steadily dropping since then (2024 in wikipedia estimated a 1.27 per 1m miles, about the same as 2008). If the trend continues, in a year or two we will be back to the early 2010s lows without draconian measures. The solution, as always, is better infrastructure and support at multiple levels, not beating everybody with a stick.

potato3732842 10mo ago
I get the vibe from his comment that the visible deviance from rules of the state is what he's really concerned with and that the death and destruction is just the reason everyone else is suppose to care.

jldugger 10mo ago

On my way home, I noticed at a stoplight across the street from Apple Park that the driver in the lane next to me had his phone mounted up high in landscape mode and was watching the Simpsons. Just absolutely unhinged behavior lately.

chiefalchemist 10mo ago

Eventually we’ll have autonomous vehicles which will mitigate many of these issues, but will the surveillance infrastructure then be reduced? Probably not. War is peace. Surveillance is safety.

mschuster91 10mo ago

> Surveillance is generally a net negative, but it's also bad when you see people speeding around schools, rolling through stop signs, and running red lights. Speeding and running red lights can be combated without affecting the privacy of innocents on the road. A debate can and should be had about the placement of radar traps though, many are straight off highway robberies trapping people who don't notice a speed-limit sign that is visually hard to notice.

potato3732842 10mo ago

The solution is to have you abused by the system so that you realize that petty deviance is not something the dragnet should be brought to bear on if it must exist at all. Your opinions are directly counterproductive on these petty issues. You ask for the state to use the jackboot. The jackboot just makes people hate the state and think in terms of "will I get caught". If not for you people trying to force compliance on this, that and the next thing the state would be in higher standing in people's minds and voluntary "when it matters" or "because it's the right thing to do" compliance would be higher. Sure, we could add more jackboot, but that costs money and no democratic-ish system is gonna allocate a bunch of money to do stuff everyone hates.

drunner 10mo ago

A camera doesn't stop those acts though, it may only discourage those who know about it at a huge cost of privacy and rights. How about we build better infrastructure and regulate vehicles since those do actually stop this behavior. Most of those red lights and stoplights in the US should be roundabouts. Narrower lanes and other traffic calming measures should be much more pervasive. Vehicle size, specifically bumper height is out of control. Compare US traffic and pedestrian deaths to the rest of the world, or at least a lot of EU countries. Its embarrassing. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/74/wr/mm7408a2.htm#F1_down https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/74/wr/mm7408a2.htm#F1_down

mrb 10mo ago
Thanks for this CDC link! So the pedestrian death rate and the overall road traffic death rate is about three times higher in the US compared to other high-income countries... Mind-boggling.
tristor 10mo ago
> Vehicle size, specifically bumper height is out of control. Many manufacturers are now selling pre-lifted trucks. Here in Texas around a third of the vehicles on the road are pickup trucks, and about half of those have been lifted beyond standard height either from the factory or aftermarket, another third of vehicles are SUVs, most of which are significantly larger than necessary to be fit for purpose for the driver and occupants. This situation was /caused/ by government regulation and it can be fixed by government regulation. It's absolutely absurd the gargantuan vehicles most people drive in the US, and the fact that we let people turn their vehicles into monster trucks and then operate them on public roads with impunity. I don't care how small someone's dick is, they don't get the right to drive a truck down the highway that can literally drive /over/ a modern standard sedan/hatchback. The continuing absurdity has turned into an iterated prisoner's dilemma which has resulted in more and more people buying SUVs and crossovers who by every measure do NOT need them. Absolutely is out of control, and it negatively impacts everyone, including the drivers of these vehicles.

privacypoet 10mo ago

I agree. And Flock doesn’t help one bit with reducing reckless driving.

gosub100 10mo ago

I would actually be for civil asset forfeiture in these cases. The laws of physics don't care about due process; sue the car and save the video. Let the owner pay the fines and if they can prove some other driver did it, let them file civil suit against them to recoup the fines. Driving on public property is not a right.

tristor 10mo ago

> driving is getting more dangerous year by year My observation has been that the danger increase is a combination of three things: 1. Lack of situational awareness/awareness of surroundings. This manifests in various ways like improper merging, improper turns into traffic, turning across multiple lanes, and left-lane hogs. 2. Frustration becomes aggression. This also manifests in multiple ways, but primarily is seen through tail-gating (in response to left-lane hogs) and swimming through traffic (in response to left-lane hogs), as well as road-rage (mostly in response to the other misbehavior). 3. Constant distraction. I have seen SO MANY drivers literally watching videos on a tablet, playing games, or otherwise driving at high rates of speed (70mph+) while fully engaged in something other than driving. It's at epidemic proportions. The issue is, by and large, not people doing rolling stops (which by the way have never been proven to cause an increase in accidents when performed properly) or speeding (generally, some exceptions like school zones do matter). Running red lights is definitely a problem that is more common place, and is likely a part of all 3 of these these. I feel like to a large degree all of this is a symptom of a wider societial issue where everyone acts in selfish and self-centered ways, completely ignoring their impacts on others, and moving from moments to moments where they can engage with their phone/social-media, to the exclusion of all else. I don't think phones/social-media /caused/ the problem, I think it exacerbates it though. Every aspect of our society is worsening because the revealed behavior of our population is one of lack of care or outright disdain for everyone else around them and an absolute obsession with serving their own interests above all else. That this manifests in driving is unsurprising.

lunias 10mo ago

IMO the issue is that there's little to no enforcement outside of speeding. I see people get pulled over for speeding in a straight line even if it's relatively safe to do so, but never for talking on their phone, messing with the touch screen in their vehicle, left turns from the right lane and vice versa, failure to keep lane, failure to yield, failure to signal, cutting people off, driving a vehicle unfit for the road, etc. It usually takes about 5 minutes of driving to observe someone doing something that I would pull them over for. I don't think cops need all this automated surveillance, they just need to drive around and be proactive.

Breza 10mo ago

Here in Washington DC we've set up many different types of traffic cameras. One side effect is a reduction in the number of negative interactions the average person has with the police. There are communities where the cops treat people like piggy banks and spend tons of time aggressively enforcing minor traffic violations. That has negative effects on trust, not to mention the number of fatal interactions that have stemmed from traffic stops. Other jobs that can be done by the police in other places are handled by Parking Enforcement, the Department of Buildings, etc. The recent presence of federal agents and soldiers has reversed some of the hard-fought gains in trust, but my broader point still stands: more automated enforcement of traffic laws has positive effects in how people interact with the police. This effect needs to be balanced against the harms of increased surveillance. [1][https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/transportation/police-crack-down-on-drivers-on-the-shoulder-of-dc-295/3774405/ https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/transportation/poli...]