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> There’s an argument to be made that fighting parking tickets just takes money from the community. There's no good argument along these lines. The social goo

> There’s an argument to be made that fighting parking tickets just takes money from the community. There's no good argument along these lines. The social good of tickets is as a punitive measure to keep order. Tickets as a revenue mechanism is a social ill, full stop: it promotes the creation of bad law and corruption specifically designed to raise revenue. It's the same awfulness which results in speed traps, permanent toll roads, and red light or speeding cameras.

DanBC 13y ago
I have never quite understood the problem with speed traffic cameras. There's a problem if they're set too close to the speed limit for that road, but other than that they only catch people committing a criminal offence. The problem there is not the speed camera, it is either an inappropriate limit on a particular stretch of road or the speed limit law in total. In England speed cameras have gone through a few weird changes. The first is that they must only be put up in accident blackspots. The second, following from the first, is that the cameras must be highly visible. So now instead of grey cameras installed on many roads helping keep all drivers under the speed limit we have a few very visible cameras in known locations that many drivers can slow down for, but driving fast at all other times. Frankly, anyone getting caught by a UK camera deserves the fine.
- eigenvector 13y ago
  Opposition to speed-limit cameras exposes the absurdity of most speed-limit laws: it's a law so bad many (most?) people are opposed to having it strictly enforced. If that's not a bad law, then I don't know what is.
  - velis_vel 13y ago
    > Opposition to speed-limit cameras exposes the absurdity of most speed-limit laws: it's a law so bad many (most?) people are opposed to having it strictly enforced. If that's not a bad law, then I don't know what is. Not all laws that are heavily disliked are bad laws, and not all laws that most people like are good ones.
    - eigenvector 13y ago
      True, but as someone who considers myself a safe and considerate driver, my opposition to strict enforcement of speed limits comes from this: when the police can easily enforce something numerical, they optimize for maximum revenue and devote nearly 100% of their traffic enforcement resources to speed traps. This leaves all manner of unsafe drivers free to proceed with making illegal and unsafe maneuvers on the road without a snowball's chance in hell of ever being prosecuted for it. In most North American jurisdictions, what do you think the ratio of speeding tickets to tickets for all other traffic offenses is? Do you think someone doing 55 km/h in a 50 km/h zone is more dangerous that the person who always plays chicken with left-turn traffic by blazing through the tail end of yellow lights at intersections? The person who stops traffic to make an illegal left turn in the same place every day? The person who doesn't turn on their lights on the freeway driving 100 km/h at night when it snows?
  - DanBC 13y ago
    I'm not sure how you can claim that most people are opposed to speed limits being enforced. Especially in the UK.
    - eigenvector 13y ago
      I think most people would like speed limits enforced with some sensible discretion. To give an extreme example, you shouldn't receive a $150 fine for going 1 km/h over the limit. Before photo radar, there were a limited number of police officers to enforce speed limits, so most limits weren't enforced most of the time. Police focused on catching the worst offenders, so going, say, 60 km/h in 50 km/h zone or 110 km/h in a 100 km/h zone was unlikely to be prosecuted. With photo radar thresholds set in many places as low as 3 km/h over the limit, the dynamic is totally different, especially since many speed limits are set comically low, and often times photo radar is placed in locations where the limit decreases for a short distance, or at the bottom of a big hill. To my mind, the goal of speed limits is to promote road safety by encouraging drivers to proceed at a safe speed that is suitable for road conditions. This is undermined when authorities build an expressway-style road that you'd find rated for 80+ km/h in a traffic engineering handbook and then set a much lower limit and have it enforced with radar traps. This is about collecting revenue, not promoting safety. I visited Norway, which has photo radar, but also warns you that you're approaching it. The intention seems to be to get you to slow down rather than to stick you with a ticket. It works and I agree with photo radar when it is used this way.
      - cjrp 13y ago
        In the UK, most cameras allow 10% + 1mph. So in a 30mph zone, 35mph is the speed at which you'll get prosecuted.
- LukeShu 13y ago
  > I have never quite understood the problem with speed traffic cameras. Here are reasons that (if true) make a lot of sense. It sounds like where you live, the laws around them are very reasonable; for many people that's not the case. I don't have sources for these claims, I'm only repeating what I've heard/read, since you asked. I don't have real feelings about them either way, as we don't have them where I live. - Red-light cameras actually increase accidents and injuries. More people slam on the breaks to avoid tripping them, instead of being slightly past the stop bar or entering when the light is yellow. - When they are hidden (as many are), they do not effectively slow people down; they don't make the roads safer. - As conditioning for future behavior, they are ineffective; studies show that when the punishment is after the misbehavior, the mind doesn't link the two together as well.
- poulsbohemian 13y ago
  Your milage may vary depending on local laws, etc. Disclaimer: I don't live in Seattle any longer so the situation I am about to describe may have changed in recent years (but I doubt it). Story: There's a 5-way intersection near the University of Washington campus. The city put up cameras and started collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in fines. Problem: city ordinance stated something like any ticket resulting from a photo must come from a camera mounted at a 90 degree angle to the street. Notice the bit about it being a 5-way intersection? None of the roads came together at a 90 degree angle. Point was, the city continued to violate their own ordinance for years because that single intersection was a cash cow - the whole system was automated so the pictures were taken, cars identified, tickets mailed. THAT is why there is so much outrage about cameras in the US - it's the Man kicking us around.
lostlogin 13y ago
Agree with all the above except the red light camera thing. Running red lights has a non-zero risk of killing someone and while I can construct a scenario where my bad parking kills someone, its pretty unlikely.
- ceejayoz 13y ago
  > Running red lights has a non-zero risk of killing someone and while I can construct a scenario where my bad parking kills someone, its pretty unlikely. Most of the folks getting red light tickets are getting them from rolling forwards at 1mph while they look for oncoming traffic, though.
  - khuey 13y ago
    [citation needed]
    - toomuchtodo 13y ago
      http://blog.esurance.com/are-red-light-cameras-actually-causing-accidents/ http://blog.esurance.com/are-red-light-cameras-actually-caus...
    - cobrausn 13y ago
      http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2011/nov/11/red-light-cam-vendor-sues-knoxville/ http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2011/nov/11/red-light-cam-vendo... TL;DR - One particular city stopped issuing violations when the camera caught someone turning right on red with a 'rolling stop' because those don't really affect accident rate, revenue drops by 90%, the maker of the cameras sues the city. In other words, abject evidence that the makers and marketers of these cameras only care about revenue.
  - eli 13y ago
    I'm not sure about that, but there have been complaints in some jurisdictions that it creates an incentive to shorten yellow lights, thus catching people who barely missed getting through the intersection in time. To me, just missing a yellow light feels like a far less serious crime than blowing a light that has been red for a while, but I guess the real issue there is the yellow light is timed incorrectly.
stinkytaco 13y ago
>Tickets as a revenue mechanism is a social ill, full stop I never buy an argument that is so simple. Tickets are a revenue source and that keeps taxes lower on the backs of people who flaunt the law. If the alternative is New York where parking is such a cluster it's an impediment to business, I think I might take the corruption. It's a far more nuanced problem than you're making it. Political oversight of revenue sources is necessary, yes, but to say they are an unmitigated bad is to be ignorant of most local budget processes.
- bitwalker 13y ago
  Tickets being a revenue source because some people value the convenience of parking illegally over the cost of the ticket is one thing. Tickets being given deliberately as a means of increasing revenue is another. I've been given tickets for parking illegally when I was parked in my own residential parking lot, while displaying the required parking tag on my dash. It was done deliberately in the off chance that I might be too lazy to fight it. It's that kind of blatant disregard for the spirit of the law that they are arguing against, not tickets being a source of revenue in the more general sense. Granted, I'm not them, so maybe they were - but that was what my impression was from their comment.
- awjr 13y ago
  Aberystwyth (UK) had a weird year where they had no parking officers. Apparently caused complete parking chaos. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-mid-wales-18267009 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-mid-wales-18267009
- scarmig 13y ago
  Political oversight is the issue: to supply revenue, a politician is given a choice, between raising taxes and issuing more fines. Raising taxes is always a difficult battle, while jaywalkers or people who speed on the highway make a convenient target. So the latter happens more than it should. These tickets disproportionately target the poor, who have the hardest time paying them on short notice, leading to additional fines that accumulate and build on each other. So officials are incentivized to either game the system by doling out tickets more than is socially productive or by targeting people who are most likely to pay back the most in fines. The revenue has to go somewhere, but it absolutely should not go into the pockets of the agency issuing the fines. Where should it go? Best case would be to reimburse the people harmed by the social ill that's being fined: that level of targeting is hard, leaning toward impossible. Next best is to give everyone an equal share of the fines: this is also difficult, and overly costly for what would amount to a couple bucks. Third best would be to have it go into the government's general fund, to the exclusion of the agency issuing the fines. Fourth best would be going straight to the general fund. Second worst is giving it to the agency issuing the tickets, which is where we're at now. Worst of all would be allowing the officers issuing the fine to pocket it themselves, which leads to the lowest levels of ability to audit and the most perverse and misaligned incentives.
dvanduzer 13y ago
The social good of parking tickets involves the supply and demand of a constrained resource in dense urban areas. This is quite different than the deterrent aspects of a speeding ticket. Tickets as a revenue mechanism is a social ill because it's usually a regressive tax in practice. Most people don't seem to have a problem with "luxury tax"-style revenue generation. Do you have a negative view of "permanent toll roads" because it happens to be regressive since poor people often have to drive, even though it's a more usage-based tax?

DanBC 13y ago

I have never quite understood the problem with speed traffic cameras. There's a problem if they're set too close to the speed limit for that road, but other than that they only catch people committing a criminal offence. The problem there is not the speed camera, it is either an inappropriate limit on a particular stretch of road or the speed limit law in total. In England speed cameras have gone through a few weird changes. The first is that they must only be put up in accident blackspots. The second, following from the first, is that the cameras must be highly visible. So now instead of grey cameras installed on many roads helping keep all drivers under the speed limit we have a few very visible cameras in known locations that many drivers can slow down for, but driving fast at all other times. Frankly, anyone getting caught by a UK camera deserves the fine.

eigenvector 13y ago
Opposition to speed-limit cameras exposes the absurdity of most speed-limit laws: it's a law so bad many (most?) people are opposed to having it strictly enforced. If that's not a bad law, then I don't know what is.
- velis_vel 13y ago
  > Opposition to speed-limit cameras exposes the absurdity of most speed-limit laws: it's a law so bad many (most?) people are opposed to having it strictly enforced. If that's not a bad law, then I don't know what is. Not all laws that are heavily disliked are bad laws, and not all laws that most people like are good ones.
  - eigenvector 13y ago
    True, but as someone who considers myself a safe and considerate driver, my opposition to strict enforcement of speed limits comes from this: when the police can easily enforce something numerical, they optimize for maximum revenue and devote nearly 100% of their traffic enforcement resources to speed traps. This leaves all manner of unsafe drivers free to proceed with making illegal and unsafe maneuvers on the road without a snowball's chance in hell of ever being prosecuted for it. In most North American jurisdictions, what do you think the ratio of speeding tickets to tickets for all other traffic offenses is? Do you think someone doing 55 km/h in a 50 km/h zone is more dangerous that the person who always plays chicken with left-turn traffic by blazing through the tail end of yellow lights at intersections? The person who stops traffic to make an illegal left turn in the same place every day? The person who doesn't turn on their lights on the freeway driving 100 km/h at night when it snows?
- DanBC 13y ago
  I'm not sure how you can claim that most people are opposed to speed limits being enforced. Especially in the UK.
  - eigenvector 13y ago
    I think most people would like speed limits enforced with some sensible discretion. To give an extreme example, you shouldn't receive a $150 fine for going 1 km/h over the limit. Before photo radar, there were a limited number of police officers to enforce speed limits, so most limits weren't enforced most of the time. Police focused on catching the worst offenders, so going, say, 60 km/h in 50 km/h zone or 110 km/h in a 100 km/h zone was unlikely to be prosecuted. With photo radar thresholds set in many places as low as 3 km/h over the limit, the dynamic is totally different, especially since many speed limits are set comically low, and often times photo radar is placed in locations where the limit decreases for a short distance, or at the bottom of a big hill. To my mind, the goal of speed limits is to promote road safety by encouraging drivers to proceed at a safe speed that is suitable for road conditions. This is undermined when authorities build an expressway-style road that you'd find rated for 80+ km/h in a traffic engineering handbook and then set a much lower limit and have it enforced with radar traps. This is about collecting revenue, not promoting safety. I visited Norway, which has photo radar, but also warns you that you're approaching it. The intention seems to be to get you to slow down rather than to stick you with a ticket. It works and I agree with photo radar when it is used this way.
    - cjrp 13y ago
      In the UK, most cameras allow 10% + 1mph. So in a 30mph zone, 35mph is the speed at which you'll get prosecuted.
LukeShu 13y ago
> I have never quite understood the problem with speed traffic cameras. Here are reasons that (if true) make a lot of sense. It sounds like where you live, the laws around them are very reasonable; for many people that's not the case. I don't have sources for these claims, I'm only repeating what I've heard/read, since you asked. I don't have real feelings about them either way, as we don't have them where I live. - Red-light cameras actually increase accidents and injuries. More people slam on the breaks to avoid tripping them, instead of being slightly past the stop bar or entering when the light is yellow. - When they are hidden (as many are), they do not effectively slow people down; they don't make the roads safer. - As conditioning for future behavior, they are ineffective; studies show that when the punishment is after the misbehavior, the mind doesn't link the two together as well.
poulsbohemian 13y ago
Your milage may vary depending on local laws, etc. Disclaimer: I don't live in Seattle any longer so the situation I am about to describe may have changed in recent years (but I doubt it). Story: There's a 5-way intersection near the University of Washington campus. The city put up cameras and started collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in fines. Problem: city ordinance stated something like any ticket resulting from a photo must come from a camera mounted at a 90 degree angle to the street. Notice the bit about it being a 5-way intersection? None of the roads came together at a 90 degree angle. Point was, the city continued to violate their own ordinance for years because that single intersection was a cash cow - the whole system was automated so the pictures were taken, cars identified, tickets mailed. THAT is why there is so much outrage about cameras in the US - it's the Man kicking us around.

lostlogin 13y ago

Agree with all the above except the red light camera thing. Running red lights has a non-zero risk of killing someone and while I can construct a scenario where my bad parking kills someone, its pretty unlikely.

ceejayoz 13y ago
> Running red lights has a non-zero risk of killing someone and while I can construct a scenario where my bad parking kills someone, its pretty unlikely. Most of the folks getting red light tickets are getting them from rolling forwards at 1mph while they look for oncoming traffic, though.
- khuey 13y ago
  [citation needed]
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    http://blog.esurance.com/are-red-light-cameras-actually-causing-accidents/ http://blog.esurance.com/are-red-light-cameras-actually-caus...
  - cobrausn 13y ago
    http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2011/nov/11/red-light-cam-vendor-sues-knoxville/ http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2011/nov/11/red-light-cam-vendo... TL;DR - One particular city stopped issuing violations when the camera caught someone turning right on red with a 'rolling stop' because those don't really affect accident rate, revenue drops by 90%, the maker of the cameras sues the city. In other words, abject evidence that the makers and marketers of these cameras only care about revenue.
- eli 13y ago
  I'm not sure about that, but there have been complaints in some jurisdictions that it creates an incentive to shorten yellow lights, thus catching people who barely missed getting through the intersection in time. To me, just missing a yellow light feels like a far less serious crime than blowing a light that has been red for a while, but I guess the real issue there is the yellow light is timed incorrectly.

stinkytaco 13y ago

>Tickets as a revenue mechanism is a social ill, full stop I never buy an argument that is so simple. Tickets are a revenue source and that keeps taxes lower on the backs of people who flaunt the law. If the alternative is New York where parking is such a cluster it's an impediment to business, I think I might take the corruption. It's a far more nuanced problem than you're making it. Political oversight of revenue sources is necessary, yes, but to say they are an unmitigated bad is to be ignorant of most local budget processes.

bitwalker 13y ago
Tickets being a revenue source because some people value the convenience of parking illegally over the cost of the ticket is one thing. Tickets being given deliberately as a means of increasing revenue is another. I've been given tickets for parking illegally when I was parked in my own residential parking lot, while displaying the required parking tag on my dash. It was done deliberately in the off chance that I might be too lazy to fight it. It's that kind of blatant disregard for the spirit of the law that they are arguing against, not tickets being a source of revenue in the more general sense. Granted, I'm not them, so maybe they were - but that was what my impression was from their comment.
awjr 13y ago
Aberystwyth (UK) had a weird year where they had no parking officers. Apparently caused complete parking chaos. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-mid-wales-18267009 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-mid-wales-18267009
scarmig 13y ago
Political oversight is the issue: to supply revenue, a politician is given a choice, between raising taxes and issuing more fines. Raising taxes is always a difficult battle, while jaywalkers or people who speed on the highway make a convenient target. So the latter happens more than it should. These tickets disproportionately target the poor, who have the hardest time paying them on short notice, leading to additional fines that accumulate and build on each other. So officials are incentivized to either game the system by doling out tickets more than is socially productive or by targeting people who are most likely to pay back the most in fines. The revenue has to go somewhere, but it absolutely should not go into the pockets of the agency issuing the fines. Where should it go? Best case would be to reimburse the people harmed by the social ill that's being fined: that level of targeting is hard, leaning toward impossible. Next best is to give everyone an equal share of the fines: this is also difficult, and overly costly for what would amount to a couple bucks. Third best would be to have it go into the government's general fund, to the exclusion of the agency issuing the fines. Fourth best would be going straight to the general fund. Second worst is giving it to the agency issuing the tickets, which is where we're at now. Worst of all would be allowing the officers issuing the fine to pocket it themselves, which leads to the lowest levels of ability to audit and the most perverse and misaligned incentives.

dvanduzer 13y ago

The social good of parking tickets involves the supply and demand of a constrained resource in dense urban areas. This is quite different than the deterrent aspects of a speeding ticket. Tickets as a revenue mechanism is a social ill because it's usually a regressive tax in practice. Most people don't seem to have a problem with "luxury tax"-style revenue generation. Do you have a negative view of "permanent toll roads" because it happens to be regressive since poor people often have to drive, even though it's a more usage-based tax?