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After reading the 21 page order, I do tend to agree with the judge

The judge frames the red light camera scheme as a revenue generating scheme, not a public safety measure.

Additionally, "A distinctive feature of the statutory scheme is its assignment of guilt to the registered owner rather than the driver of the vehicle". and "If there are multiple registered owners, the citation is issued to the 'first' registered 'owner'". and the person whom the citation was issued to must sign an affidavit that includes the name, address, dob, of the person who was actually driving. The judge says this "...abandon(s) centuries time honored protections of hearsay as substantive evidence.".

"It is a foundational rule of constitutional due process that the government must prove every fact necessary to constitute an offense beyond a reasonable doubt before a person may be adjudicated guilty of a crime".

"Although nominally civil, traffic infraction proceedings retain every substantive hallmark of criminal prosecution..." "under Feiock, such proceedings are sufficiently criminal in form and function to invoke the full protections of due process..." - that's probably the core of the reasoning here.

"Section 316.074(1) provides in relevant part that "The driver of any vehicle shall obey..."" - the driver, not the registered owner.

I highly recommend reading the order. It's easy to follow and aligns with my understanding of the law within the USA.

California's new speed camera pilot (AB 645) explicitly solves for this.

Tickets issued by these cameras are civil penalties issued to the owner of the vehicle, like parking tickets, rather than a criminal moving violation. This means the tickets are just as constitutional as parking tickets. It also means penalties are limited to fines and can't impact your driving privilege or insurance.

Hopefully other states can follow this pattern. Consistent, low-impact enforcement is better at preventing unwanted behavior than the rare and severe but also capricious enforcement performed by human police.

Consistent, low-impact enforcement is better at preventing unwanted behavior than the rare and severe but also capricious enforcement performed by human police.

It can also give permission for unwanted behavior. Cf. the Haifa study, where the rate of late pickups increased when daycares added a fine. One explanation is the fine turned a complex moral obligation into an ordinary financial transaction.

The Haifa daycare study can’t be used to extrapolate much.

They fined parents (IIRC) ~$3 per late pickup. Rerun the study with a $300 fine and let’s see how it pans out. It’s an interesting finding, but that then people take it to mean that fines don’t work (no matter their size) is insane.

I worked in childcare about 20 years ago, and we charged $1 per minute late.

We had to keep two staff there, and they would split the fine.

Many times we got stiffed.

Edit: for reference, our fee was about $14/day to keep the kid, so it was a pretty stiff penalty.

Well, If the staff got stiffed on the fee "many times", and the parents were allowed to bring their kid back.. the place didn't charge $1 per minute late. They just bluffed and got called on it.

(apologies for the immediate edit, changed my wording)

> Many times we got stiffed.

I understand that you could not keep the child till you were paid (kidnapping and ransom shouldn't be a business plan!), but you could refuse them future service until they paid.

My daycare fines parents $5 _per minute_ of lateness.

Three hundred dollars per hour? How is that acceptable? Certainly there's some sort of maximum or grace period?

How much does it cost to keep the facility open for 1 minute? Power, staff, etc.

And then there's the challenge of keeping people on staff at all when parents consistently make the staff work late.

Beyond that, it seems like a good way to achieve the objective of convincing parents to not offload externalities onto others by being late.

How is being late acceptable?

Let's say you have a job interview. You're 5min late, so they either don't hire you, or the receptionist says the interviewer is now not available. Are you now due the salary, because you being this late 5min cost you a lot of money?

If you in a private contract reject the terms of paying $5 per minute late, well then the other party now knows you plan to be late a lot, so they'll be glad if you take your business elsewhere.

Keeping people from being able to go home after their workday, effectively forced overtime, is incredibly disrespectful. And even if "it's not your fault", you are the only one that could have prevented it. So incentives should be in place that you don't. $5 per minute sounds fair.

If you force me to stay late for a full hour you'd BETTER pay me triple digits. But in this case the $300 for an hour may have to be shared among several people.

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The problem with any and all fees is that they go up as soon as the business notices simple patterns.

How is that a problem with “all fees” if the explicit intention is to limit a behavior that most people say we should somehow reduce?

A $3 fine is a good portion of someone's disposable income and a $300 fine is not much of someone else's.. A civil penalty of that nature almost guarantees some part of the population will view it like the $3 fee.

This is exactly why license points (leading to suspension) are better than fines.

If the ticketing decision made by an automated camera system is deemed acceptable when issuing mere fines akin to parking tickets, but deemed unacceptable when issuing other penalties (which don't have this wealth inequity issue we are discussing now, at least not exclusively), that's effectively a poor tax.

The government operating automatic camera citation systems, almost never is interested in improving safety or even minimizing undesirable behavior- often the placement of such cameras is done to maximize revenue (as when red light cameras are placed at long-cycle-time intersections vs intersections with a history of accidents). And it’s been documented that some cities have reduced yellow light times (which almost always leads to more citations) rather than increasing yellow light times (which usually leads to fewer people running the yellow, because people are less likely to take a chance after the light has been yellow a long time).

There’s a lot of compelling evidence that these systems are just revenue machines.

More broadly, I think it's important to distinguish (more than we do) what aspect of justice a fine is supposed to be for, particularly between restorative versus punitive. The first is what it costs to fix measurable damage-done, the second is what we need to ensure the person cares to change their behavior.

I don't like paltry sums like this. $300 is a significant financial impact to someone who's barely making ends meet, and absolutely nothing at all to a billionaire. "If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the poor."

Make it a tiny % of net worth, with a modest minimum and watch EVERYONE obey. Or at least something meaningful to everyone, or don't make it a fine. Use some other carrot or stick.

But that makes wildly different incentives to enforce, depending on the target. We all know this stuff is all about revenue enhancement, and in that capacity, the targets will become the whales.

Automated enforcement where fines are anchored to the KBB value of the car is The Way

Enlightenment and utopia across that simple bridge

Or how about the curb weight of the car? Higher mass means you're doing a lot more damage in an accident. People might think twice about buying an F250 for their grocery getter.

Devil's advocate: billionaire driving a beater (I'm not a billionaire, but I drive a beater)

Good for them. I’m willing to let them off easy to incentivize lower cost cars in general.

X% of net worth is still a bigger deal to someone with a net worth of $20 than to someone with a net worth of $20M, even though the latter may get some sticker shock. And it's possible (if rare) to have a reasonably middle-class lifestyle and an actually negative net worth. Presumably you would not make it possible to pay off student loans by repeatedly violating a red light, although it would be very funny.

You’d be surprised at the numbers of people living middle-class lifestyles with negative net worth. Credit card debt, car loans (with a too-small down payment, a car purchase can easily cause one’s net worth to decline the second you take delivery on the car), underwater mortgages, not to mention student loans.

> Presumably you would not make it possible to pay off student loans by repeatedly violating a red light

I lack the context and knowledge to understand how this would work, but I am curious (enough to ask but not enough to google it, admittedly).

The joke being that if your net worth is negative the fine will be negative.

Man, I missed that by a mile. Thanks. :D

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> I don't like paltry sums like this. $300 is a significant financial impact to someone who's barely making ends meet, and absolutely nothing at all to a billionaire.

One thing about daycares is that you will essentially never find "someone who's barely making ends meet" and "a billionaire" with kids at the same daycare, so a surcharge for out-of-normal-expectations service does not need to be designed to address both cases.

(In fact, you'll probably not find a billionaire with kids at any daycare, their hired childcare workers won't be shared with other people, and will probably be adequately compensated up front in a way which anticipates a fair degree of schedule variability.)

OTOH, with red light cameras, you also don't need to scale the fine to work with both, because the entire purpose is to bind the lower classes while exempting the upper from any substantial burden. (The least cynical explanation is that it is to discourage behavior which might incur liability grossly exceeding the mandatory level of insurance company by those least able to cover the cost of that liability, thereby avoiding uncompensated harms, but the realistic explanation is...not so generous.)

I mean as a much greater "study", look at the UK - government introduced fines for parents of kids missing school, and the rate of absenced increased - because parents see it more as a cost that you just have to pay to go on holiday during school year.

I get your point, but I doubt the fine could have been ethically higher. Domino's drivers killed dozens of people in speed-related accidents before they ended their 30-minute guarantee.

I don't think our society is ready for the combination of automatic enforcement and truly punitive penalties. We readily demonize the accused; just having your mugshot taken can end your employability. Yet many of us break laws daily -- speeding, jaywalking, watering the lawn during the day, even plugging in a microwave oven without a building permit in some jurisdictions -- and society still works because we don't expect much enforcement. We are heading toward a future where everyone will have marks on their permanent record, but today our society tut-tuts, or much worse, at anyone who does.

I don't think you did get my point (my fault perhaps), as my only point is that if you take away from the Haifa study that fines will automatically increase the prevalence the targeted behavior in all situations, that's an insane conclusion to draw. There are lots of variables at play: the size of the fine, how consistently and strictly it is enforced, the ability of the finer to collect the fine, the social context, and so on. The Haifa study examines none of these. It does does highlight an interesting phenomenon, but without further studies that control for these variables, I don't think we can just blindly assume that the outcome in the Haifa day cares will apply to all situations where a fine is levied.

I see all the time on the Internet (and even IRL once) people make claims like, "oh, carbon taxes will just increase CO2 output, you know like in that Israeli daycare study." Drives me nuts.

Are fines the best possible solution to this particularly traffic problem? I have no idea. I'm not an expert in this area. But I am highly confident that whatever relation it has to the Haifa daycare study is so incredibly tenuous that it is not worth mentioning.

We might be talking past each other. Call Haifa a parable, if you will. I understand why you find fault with the study, but I invoked it to call out (quoting myself) that a fine can also give permission for unwanted behavior. That point adds to yours and doesn't contradict it.

The reason I said anything in the first place is that I object to automatically administered punishment. Either separately can be OK. Automatically administered? No problem, that's called a tax (including use taxes like tolls). Punishment? Then we'd better have due process, and yeah, it's going to be expensive and labor-intensive to administer, but that's critical in a free country. That's why I called out the "is better than" quote. I think it's strictly worse.

It is understandable that someone who only lived in the United States or a low-enforcement place would have this world view. I'm more sanguine about the trajectory of our society.

Australia, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, etc, have well-enforced traffic laws. Speeding is the exception rather than the rule, unlike the United States, where one can expect the flow of traffic to be 10-20 miles per hour over the posted limit. Yet these societies don't suffer from an excess of enforcement or consequences in other areas. For example, it is legal to walk around in public with a bottle of beer in virtually all of Europe.

What we have seen in the United States is a reduction of many hardly-enforced laws. Jaywalking and minor drug possession have been decriminalized in several US states. This is due to voter interest. It will continue to be up to the public to decide what do to when enforcement can catch up to excessive laws.

In the Netherlands fines are insane. If you pick up your garbage bin two hours too late from the street corner, you pay 210 euros. On the other side, if you sell drugs to kids and have a weapon, nobody touches you.

Yes, you can sometimes walk around legally with a beer bottle here.

That must depend on the town. I saw people hanging their trash bags on the trash poles several days early, no consequences.

https://thehustle.co/originals/the-failure-of-the-dominos-30...

"Domino’s confirmed it knew of 20 people who died in crashes involving its drivers in 1988 (the National Safe Workplace Institute would later claim Domino’s delivery drivers had about the same death rate as miners, who had a fatality rate of ~35 per 100k)."

For that same period, the death rate per 100k of young drivers was 46 per 100k https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00044682.htm

And to compare truck drivers 27 per 100k: https://www.malmanlaw.com/malman-law-injury-blog/is-being-a-...

Is this a dominos problem, or a young drivers problem or...

Sure. Then the bill requires that all those fines you pay go towards street calming infrastructure, eventually making it physically impossible (or at least very uncomfortable) for you to continue speeding.

Kind of like if enough parents paid the late pickup fee, eventually the daycare could afford a van for dropoffs.

Don't make me say "roundabout."

I've seen quite a few roundabout projects over the years that seemed to work out well... Although I really detest any that have multiple concentric lanes.

There are multiple well-researched and practical interventions that can be done to make driving safer for drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists. Implementation in the US is regularly scuttled by insane self-styled experts who "audacity" their way to public trust and influence, inexplicably.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forester_(cyclist)

It seems like this rarely happens. The fines become another stream of income, and reliance on that income kills any incentive to fully eliminate the behavior the fines are ostensibly meant to discourage.

Given the many restrictions on how the income can be used in this bill, I find it unlikely that will apply here. Feel free to check back in at the end of the pilot.

Random thought: this also accurately describes the financialization of home ownership. It was supposed to provide stability in shelter, and instead created a market that's completely unaffordable to the prime home-buying generations, in favor of protecting those who've come to depend on unconscionable valuations.

No one, gun to their head and hand on a Bible, should defend a status quo where the only way to afford a median house is to have twice the median income.

As the great patio11 said:

> Raise the prices. Then raise the prices. Then when you're done with that, raise the prices.

Sure. Do it as an increasing-upon-recurrence, two part fee though.

1st offence = base fee

2nd offence = base fee + minimal % of wealth fee

3rd offence = base fee + higher % of wealth fee

offences thereafter = goto 3rd offence until some breaking point condition like gaol/jail.

Otherwise the rich will happily pay to do whatever the hell they want.

How about you prove your claim by providing some evidence that the richer you are the more speeding tickets you get. Otherwise you're solving for a problem that doesn’t exist.

I read the grandparent comment's point as being about suggesting %-based fines.

> prove your claim by providing some evidence that the richer you are the more speeding tickets you get.

How/where did the grandparent comment claim that the rich get more speeding tickets? Even if the rich speed at a lower rate, would that make %-based fines a negative improvement?

> a problem that doesn’t exist

My assumption was the speeding is a problem no matter whether rich or poor, and that both exist. Is there disagreement there?

Instead, I think their point was that even a $100 fine for a poor person may impact their ability to pay for groceries, childcare, etc, whereas for someone who has $10 million, etc., even a $1,000 fine will not impact their ability to pay for groceries, childcare, etc as they still have $9,999,000.

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Expensive cars tend to accelerate faster, and it can be vastly harder to feel the speed. It would be unsurprising if up until some limit there was a correlation between wealth and the frequency of getting speeding tickets.

And then when you do that, get thrown out of office.

> It can also give permission for unwanted behavior. Cf. the Haifa study, where the rate of late pickups increased when daycares added a fine. One explanation is the fine turned a complex moral obligation into an ordinary financial transaction.

You know what they say: a fine makes something legal for an amount of money.

And for daycares, I think a lot of parents saw it just like that: a cheap way to keep the kid away from them for longer.

Increase the punishment for repeat offenders, ultimately suspending their license.

This is very common outside of the US, btw.

Haifa study result was only possible with small enough fines. Larger fines would solve that easily.

I don't see how that is viable when the fine for late pickup is $6/minute.

In the UK, speeding fines are also backed by "points" added to your license - get enough of them and you lose your license altogether for a while. It's similar in at least some other European countries.

That is a definite punishment for anyone that cares enough about driving that they were doing it in the first place, while also clearly not being revenue generating (in fact it prevents future fine revenue). I'm not sure that would wash in the car-centric States though (but it would make it an even juicier punishment). But since you don't get banned immediately, it's potentially low-impact on a per-ticket basis.

Hopefully other states don't follow this pattern; I don't think the government should be installing surveillance arrays, even if it's "for the children" or public safety.

Trading a little liberty for a little safety and all that.

The problem is ever since COVID the cops don't do their job and everyone drives terribly.

Maybe it exists but I wish there was more heavy hitting articles/research on this. I feel like an absolute grumpy old man but it feels drastically different compared to my younger years driving and I am only 40. These days I rarely see police on the side of the road ticketing and when I do it’s usually on a highway. Never do I see people getting pulled over in city streets.

My thesis has been an uptick on BS calls. Said differently the bad neighborhoods have gotten worse and funding for police is mismanaged.

Absolutely. They shut down for COVID and never came back.

A big part of traffic stops was to find weed and trade up for an arrest. With legalization, they’ve shifted to camera work, which has gotten even bigger with Flock.

I am constantly amazed at how many people blatantly run red lights now. It used to be that people would sometimes press their luck on a yellow a little bit, but now it'll be red for several seconds and people will still just drive right on through.

I'd love if the police enforced this insanely dangerous behavior instead of trying to catch people going 10 over on the highway.

I see this a lot too here in Australia now, and yes it used to be pretty unusual but now I see it every day. I've sometimes wondered if it's just a frequency illusion but I'm sure it has got much worse, maybe since the COVID times?

It depends. Traffic lights are just mutexes. They are there to stop traffic so that other traffic may pass safely. There's no point if there aren't any other cars. Obviously anyone running a light on a busy intersection deserves to get fined but if you know the terrain, have good visibility into the road where the other traffic comes from and can clearly see there are no vehicles present, running the red light is utterly harmless.

In my city, certain traffic lights literally turn off at night. There's not enough traffic flowing to justify them.

I can’t tell if you’re joking or seriously trying to justify running red lights.

Use your eyes, your situational awareness and your best judgement. The traffic light is not god's word.

In my neighborhood there used to be a traffic light that would be red for a long time despite not usefully regulating any traffic whatsoever. It stopped traffic despite the fact no other traffic could possibly conflict with it. People realized this and routinely ran that light with zero consequences. At some point the city realized it too and redesigned the traffic controls so that the light would be green in this situation.

Stop training yourself to run red lights before you kill some body.

The correct action is to constantly bug your local representative to fix the problem, not break a law written in blood.

The correct action is to understand why certain barriers were erected in your way before attempting to demolish them. If you don't understand, just respect the barrier. If you understand, you know if, when and under which conditions it can be safely bypassed. Use your judgement.

Jaywalking laws were also written in blood. People break them every single day regardless because they have eyes and can look both ways to determine if it is safe to cross the street before actually doing it.

And yet, jaywalking pedestrians get killed daily, despite their best attempts at determining whether it's safe to cross. The problem with allowing drivers to use their best judgment as to whether it's safe to continue through a red light (after stopping) is that a non-zero percent of those drivers will fail to judge the situation correctly, especially during an edge case they rarely encounter.

It's impossible to get hit by cars if there are no cars around you. Vehicles are not going to materialize out of nowhere and crash into you. They are going to be funneled into your path by the roads. If you look at the road and see zero traffic, then you cannot be hit by traffic. Even if you run a red light.

Obviously, if you can't see the road where the cars will come from, then you cannot know if there are any cars coming towards you in a potentially intersecting trajectory.

> Vehicles are not going to materialize out of nowhere and crash into you.

At 60kmh a vehicle travels 16 meters per second. In freedom units: at 37mph a vehicle travels 54 feet per second.

A vehicle will materialize out of nowhere and crash into you.

I have noticed a severe uptick in bad semi-truck drivers on the interstate since COVID, I'll agree at least with that part.

The local cops here have always just run plates for stolen vehicles. Getting a ticket is almost unheard of. I don't know what their deal is, but you can speed right past them in the other lane, or if they're just parked on the corner.

I'm guessing you still can't pass them on a two-lane road without poking their ego.

That has more to do with CDL mills out there cranking out minimally qualified drivers.

Pre, post and during COVID, you rarely see someone pulled over for running a red because you rarely see it happen. When you do, a cop it is even more rare to be present. These rare events stick out, yes.

Depending on the situation, it might be dangerous for a cop to also run a red to give chase, so consider it might be their job to let it go.

I’m not sure if it was COVID or the social movements around the same time like defund the police. Here in Seattle when defunding the police was suggested the police department threatened to close the precinct in a large residential area. Basically they attempted to extort the voters. I think the police have realized that crime is good for them because the more of it voters see the more they think police are needed.

Which leads to the extreme—maximal crime leads to maximum police budgets!

There’s no upper bound for either of those things.

I don't disagree. When the state runs out of enemies it manufactures more.

Vilify them, defund them, restrict them, reduce the number of officers to the lowest level in 30 years, and then when crime increases in the next few years .. was it maybe because of everything that was just done? No, that's not it, it's a grand conspiracy across every police officer in Seattle who coordinated/decided to be evil together and intentionally let crime spread. Yup, that all checks out.

Ok so now that crime is lower can we blame them?

I wasn't inviting another tired relitigation of the defund movement, only observing the apparent origin of police caring even less about crime.

Cameras aren't going to solve that.

The "problem" being solved with cameras is "cops aren't generating enough traffic ticket revenue"

Would it not? I actually don’t think I would mind speeding cameras and the like. Put a camera on every street and auto ticket every car.

My city does it. It sucks ass. It’s a 70% vendor / 30% city revenue share and people avoid the city and use side streets to avoid the main avenues.

Are the speed limits set unreasonably low? Otherwise one could always try abiding to the speed limit.

Most US cities have lower posted speeds than average drivers’ perception of safe speeds.

Oftentimes comically lower. I remember in Chicago the interstates having posted speed limits of 45mph... the average flow of traffic outside of rush hour was easily north of 70mph.

Looking even at normal arterial streets, many streets in Seattle are marked 25, but you'd be hard-pressed to find even a cop going under 30 most of the time.

I truly don't understand US road design. The construction of the road and the posted speed limit almost never are even gently correlated other than on a few select residential side streets in a few select cities who have rebuilt streets based on safety studies.

These cameras are by definition still cameras triggered by radar or laser systems, they're inactive unless a speeding vehicle is present. Hardly the surveillance array you're imagining.

Noooo. Most cameras retain 30 days of video. That allows officers to review the violation.

These camera systems have always been about surveillance. Flock adds the Silicon Valley software process, while the older tech is “law enforcement tech”.

This. You say "but we're gonna catch people who speed" or "terrorists" or something like that and all the people who would be against your surveillance suddenly can't get enough of it.

Well, they're putting up the flock cameras, too. We have four in a local small town.

But I'm guessing you are only correct sometimes. I bet some of them can be live-viewed, or track license plates.

Is only said by those days intending to provide neither?

Is said in place of using actual arguments or evidence?

That's ridiculous, a radar that snaps a photo when a car goes over the speed limit is not, by any conceivable definition, a surveillance array.

There are real surveillance arrays, please worry about those instead.

It absolutely is a surveillance array. It is trivial to record the time and license plates of every vehicle captured by the camera and fully map out their movements.

But AB 645 is designed to punish and deter rather than compensate, which creates a genuine constitutional vulnerability under California's Article I, Section 16 jury trial guarantee.

The structural problem is that revenue goes to program costs and traffic calming, not to anyone harmed by speeding, which makes the fines punitive in character under any substance-over-label analysis.

The lack of DMV points and criminal record weakens the argument somewhat, but under California's substance-over-label approach those omissions aren't dispositive. They merely show the legislature knew how to stay on the civil side of the line, not necessarily that it succeeded.

If a court finds the penalties punitive in character, the owner-liability structure becomes a compounding problem: California's state due process protections are arguably more robust than federal, and imposing a punitive fine on a registered owner without proof they were driving, while burden-shifting exculpation to them looks increasingly difficult to sustain.

Everything you've said applies to parking tickets too. You can't prove that the owner parked the vehicle.

Tha owner is ultimately civily liable if the vehicle is parked in a way that it shouldn't be. Extending that same civil liability to the active operation, as opposed to only the consequences of active operation, seems perfectly reasonable.

The key difference is a parking ticket isn't $500.

PA did this with construction zone cameras. I'm not sure where that landed because its been a while since I've seen one. I successfully appealed my ticket to the magistrate. It initially started as a pilot program and the law requires signage which during the pilot was quite inconspicuous. After the launch the sign was changed to a tiny little thing, about 1/5 the size of the pilot program.

I was going 5 over the reduced speed limit, in the slow lane with rush hour traffic. That thing must've issued thousands of tickets.

The problem is that you need to have decent legislators and hold them accountable, and unfortunately we seem to be backsliding on making that happen.

Why can't they impact insurance? Are CA insurance companies prohibited from using non-criminal information when deciding who to cover or set rates?

Given that they insure cars more than drivers, it seems kinda reasonable that they be allowed to look at tickets for cars.

>It also means penalties are limited to fines and can't impact your driving privilege or insurance.

If this is the case, what are the consequences of not paying the fine? I interpret your statement to mean that they can't prevent registration of your car. Can they tow you in SF for unpaid fines?

I assume they meant you can't lose your license (or get "points" that your insurance company can use to charge you more). I would fully expect that any unpaid fines would be added to next year's registration, and if you don't register and pay, you're driving an unregistered vehicle.

There's the timing aspect of it as well. As it stands, you only find out about your 'offense' weeks after the fact. If it were a human interaction (eg speeding/police stop) you'd know right away and still have the relevant information in mind to understand the charge and maybe defend. The ability to know and defend should be critical to any charge. K

Yea, that would be great then I can completely ignore them as I am not poor.

It just turns speeding into something you can buy.

While I agree with your sarcasm, this proposal is a least bad scenario: no enforcement is worse as there’s less incentive to respect the lights.

Sadly money and power buying freedom of law isn’t restricted to road rules.

I would argue such enforcement does not need automation and such automation is often for revenue generation vs saftey focused.

Also, I am a bit biased here after working at flock.

Is there a non-automatic light enforcement other than placing a policemen at every light - which makes the light useless?

Revenu generation is a bonus point: in my country taxes that incentive smokers to quit are directed to healthcare and most of the speeding tickets revenue goes to road maintenance and safety.

I’d prefer a public handling but the trend is privatization with everything : from health to education to water treatment. Even military assets! IMHO red light tickets enforcement is as much important.

> California's new speed camera pilot (AB 645) explicitly solves for this.

Your mixing up states. California's law from above comment is NOT about running red lights.

I would argue living in the US has rotted your brain.

Don’t want the state to generate revenue? Literally just stop speeding and stop running red lights.

> While I agree with your sarcasm, this proposal is a least bad scenario: no enforcement is worse as there’s less incentive to respect the lights.

I disagree. This is acknowledging that these are revenue products rather than safety enhancement.

If you want safety enforcement, put a damn cop there. It WILL work. This isn't hard. People are creatures of habit and you don't need to adjust the behavior of very many of them to make the whole group change.

If you don't want to put a cop there, you don't want safety enforcement.

Well, it's red-light running. But I don't think even rich people will just breeze through every red and pay the fines; it'll add up quickly.

Yea, I think the chance of death will encourage them not to run every red light making mass surveillance unnecessary. The money is a noop for the rich in thus case.

If that is the argument, then we should just drop enforcement of traffic rules alltogether. Because people don't want to have an accident?

But driving reckless and having a big well protected car helps of course, so everyone speeding would want even bigger and better armored cars.

Those daring to drive light vecicles or even bicycles, screw them?

Here in germany we managed to have automated red light tickets, without saving video at all btw. Just a picture (or multiple) of the incident. The picture is tied to the traffuc lights logic so knows when red light was on.

Now I am not really a fan of them, but they do work without mass surveillance.

AIUI, calling a law civil vs criminal and/or limiting penalties to fines only are not always enough to remove the protection of due process.

That sounds fine except the part where private companies have cameras everywhere surveilling us, directly tied into dmv records to identify us, and then do whatever they want with that data. And not on a random store front or a persons front door but the major roads we all must use.

Even forgetting that, all this means is people that don't care about getting a ticket, either because they won't pay or it's a such a small amount to them that they don't care. just do what they want. Nothing is being "enforced", just taxed.

I don't this is is as cut and dry as you're making it seem. See SEC v. Jarkesy. The Supreme Court decided that, when the SEC seeks civil penalties for securities fraud, the defendant has the right to a trial by jury pursuant to the Seventh Amendment.

So to work around civil protections in law, California now does not consider speeding to be an offense that should impact one's driving privilege or insurance? Just so they could collect that sweet fine money?

These systems are still often too expensive to operate safely. Over and over again these systems have been seen as needing to break even rather than being treated as a public service. But if they actually work then incidence of red light violations should go down, and hopefully substantially. So whatever fines you expect to receive in the first months before drivers adapt are more revenue than you should see at one year or more.

So when you start worrying about it as a cost center, then there is a perverse incentive to do things like shorten yellow lights. Short yellows have been proven to create more vehicular fatalities than people running red lights intentionally. And so the person who makes that decision to shorten yellows to boost tickets is effectively committing murder to keep the system “working”. Which is disgusting. Ghoulish, even.

It is literally better in such situations to simply dismantle the system than keep it running.

They are speed cameras, not red light cameras.

That said, the bill addresses this category of abuse directly: if a speed camera fails to reduce 85th percentile speeds or violation volumes within 18 months it must be removed.

There are also substantial limits on how the revenues can be spent. If you are interested in this topic it's worth a read: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

Good call. I consider the precedent set here to apply equally to both cases, and the stop light cases tend to be much more egregious, as I've telegraphed in my top-level comment.

Yup. Cameras "improve" safety in intersections--but not overall. It's just displaced. I would have thought the displacement reduced the severity but the injury data says otherwise. It's a case of removing the top and bottom stair.

As you say, it encourages short yellows. I am aware of having "run" one red light in my life--got ticketed for it. The yellow timing was set as short as legally permitted--a driver had a narrow window to decide go or stop. Unfortunately, what happens when neither is an option? I was in the left turn lane and past the decision point. I was already slowing when the light went yellow, I saw it and knew there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.

There's also the problem that a huge number of red light tickets are issued to people who "run" red lights in a completely normal and safe manner: making a right turn on red. Car #1 stands as far forward as they can without being in the cross traffic path, the other cars line up behind. First car goes, the rest move forward. Nobody pays attention to the stop line--but the camera does.

In the real world, neither speed nor red light cameras pay for themselves except when something about the situation causes a problem--and it would be better addressed by fixing the true problem. Likewise, I have never seen a cop watching a situation for offenders unless there was something out of sync between the law and the road. Half of the traps I've seen over the years have disappeared when the root cause was fixed.

Interesting that your use of "solves for this" is with regards to the end result of being able to write more red light tickets. In my view, the courts solved this by deeming at least certain uses of red light cameras illegal.

Automated traffic control is objectively one of the most pro-social things we could possibly ever create. Yes it is good if more red light cameras exist and face fewer legal challenges.

> the courts solved this by deeming at least certain uses of red light cameras illegal.

This is incorrect. The court in Florida said certain arrangement of the statutory basis (a different one than in CA) for red light cameras is illegal.

You're coming with the assumption that pro-social is a universal goal, and that it is objectively good.

I'm not even disagreeing with you here, but that's a huge assumption yo make and you are granting pretty broad authority to the state in the name of that goal. Where do you draw the line of power the state shouldn't have despite it using the authority today towards pro-social goals?

No, their use of “solves for this” is with regards to disincentivizing an incredibly dangerous habit that randomly kills the most vulnerable bystanders in the vicinity at the rate of many thousands per year

You're misrepresenting. The article is about red light camera tickets and the GP is specifically describing how California got around this legal issue in the way they write tickets in their new camera pilot. They mention nothing of bystanders or their vulnerability.

"It also means penalties are limited to fines and can't impact your driving privilege or insurance."

Wow! So if you have enough money, it's cool to run as many red lights as you want?

I understand your criticism and it is fair, but this represents and improvement over the current state which is effectively no enforcement.

They're speed cameras, not red light cameras, and the revenues go towards street improvements to reduce speeding. So you could speed as much as you can afford, but eventually you'll have bought enough traffic calming infrastructure it'll be prohibitively difficult to keep getting tickets.

Constitutional protections aren't trumped by mere issues of governmental convenience.

What's the alternative? No rules at all? Immediate death penalty for anyone who runs a red in front of a cop? Seizing and auctioning off the car? Deporting the offender to Texas? Something else? Revoke their license?

What do you mean other states follow this? Of course not. It’s a nuisance, not a safety measure.

>Tickets issued by these cameras are civil penalties issued to the owner of the vehicle, like parking tickets, rather than a criminal moving violation. This means the tickets are just as constitutional as parking tickets. It also means penalties are limited to fines and can't impact your driving privilege or insurance.

So what does this say about the legitimacy of having those fines affect your license and insurance when issues by a real flesh and blood cop?

Sounds to me like that by default they shouldn't be affecting squat because there's an implicit "the cops will mostly only pull people over if it's unconscionably bad" filter going on.

...and just like parking tickets they shouldn't exist on govt property

[dead]

Or maybe not have automated surveillance robonannies playing gotcha games and pocketing money, often impacting those who can least afford it, over technicalities and arbitrary rules made up to benefit the people doing the collecting.

The idea that AI enforcement won't be just as corrupt and capricious as any other form of government run extortion is bonkers. You're talking systems with less oversight than openclaw being run by people whose entire goal is to make as much money as possible, no matter the source. Private, unaccountable companies with effectively no oversight with the legal right to send you invoices for things you might or might not have done, and the cost for disputing it might well exceed the cost of just paying it and getting it over with.

Why are Californians so hellbent on giving their money to the government, given the absolute shitshow that is their budget and track record? The only good things that have happened in California for decades comes out of private enterprise, but all the crazy nonsense is fostered and maintained, apparently quite vigorously, by elected governments.

I'm furious that 10% of my federal income taxes end up going to California's bullshit, I can't imagine what it would be like having to live there.

Seriously, it's bordering on levels of insanity right up there with thinking that Jefferey Epstein would make a great babysitter. Do people just not pay attention? Does the weather just make everyone complacent and docile?

Speed cams and automated gotchas allowing the government to raid your pocketbook are a bad thing. There's no framing or circumstances where that's good.

> The idea that AI enforcement won't be just as corrupt and capricious as any other form of government run extortion is bonkers. [...] Private, unaccountable companies with effectively no oversight

In the specific case this thread is about - that of red light cameras - presumably the camera produces a photograph showing a red light, a vehicle going through it, and the vehicle's license plate. Plus a video, showing the light was orange for the legally required amount of time, and showing the absence of any exceptional circumstances (e.g. ambulances).

As law enforcement goes, that really seems like the least capricious, highest oversight law enforcement I can imagine.

Unfortunately, all too often it doesn't.

Some cameras only produce a photograph. Some produce a video with the light status showing on it--but there have been cases that's wrong, the camera recording what it was programmed to do which didn't match the real lights.

You need actual video of the scene that can be examined and which is of sufficiently good quality that the identity of the car can be confirmed. Very often it does not exist.

Likewise, speed cameras should record enough that one can do a time/distance calculation to confirm the speed--because the system can be miscalibrated or can be fooled by large, flat surfaces.

Or look what has happened with breathalyzers. Last I heard if a judge grants the discovery request for the source code the case gets dropped. And the whole thing is based on a flawed principle in the first place: the ratio of breath alcohol to blood alcohol varies substantially between people--setting it for average isn't accurate. As a screening test for doing a blood draw, fine, but it should not be allowed anywhere near the courtroom. (Some states get this right, some do not.)

And, yes, ambulances. I forgot about another time I know I ran a red light. Something with lights/sirens was coming up behind, no lane was empty, I was in the only lane with one car. Lots of space at the intersection, I pulled forward and turned hard right, clearing my lane without actually entering the cross path.

I'm furious that 10% of my federal income taxes end up going to California's bullshit, I can't imagine what it would be like having to live there.

Your taxes getting evenly distributed is one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that removing California from the US would either increase your taxes or require reductions in federal spending.

Yes, California has long been a "donor state", ie one that pays substantially more federal tax revenue than gets spent there. This shouldn't be too surprising as it's much richer than average and the tax system is approximately progressive.

Removing California's corruption, ineptitude, and fraud would eliminate any problems I have with my tax dollars being sent that way.

Well that's my point. "sent that way" is not entirely fair. Your state is spending California tax dollars, or so, not the other way around.

What’s crazy is every dissenter of the parent comment is being downvoted, despite HN being strongly against this type of enforcement in the past.

>"The judge frames the red light camera scheme as a revenue generating scheme, not a public safety measure."

In my own experience, when they took down the red light cameras in my area now people are not afraid to run red lights ~2 to ~3 seconds after it's red. See this kind of thing on a regular basis. Every now and then there's a serious accident.

I feel like when these tickets are struck down it's still smart to send notices to the homes of the cars doing this in more of a shaming way - even if the fine itself isn't legal. I suspect it would increase safety a small amount just by doing that.

Fines (and points) are better of course.

The objective evidence indicates that accidents tend to go up after red light cameras go up, generally because the operators lower the yellow light time to increase fees.

The objective evidence shows an increase in rear-end crashes but a reduction in injury and fatal crashes, offering a net overall benefit.

Council et al., 2005 -- https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/05048/...

This states that there are many variables they were not able to control for, such as the yellow light timing, as I previously mentioned. Warning signs were another major factor. There doesn't appear to be enough investigation into the protected left issue.

This is pretty damning, in my opinion. AKA we did some cheap analysis on a small dataset, without confidence or effect size, and just agree with the people running the programs.

"The intent of the multivariate regression analysis was to confirm the direction of the effect, not to establish effects with statistical significance or to assess the size of the effect. To undertake analyses for these purer purposes would have required a substantially larger database, much more precision in the estimate of economic effect at each site, and more accurate specification and measurement of the independent variables. For the purposes of this current investigation, it suffices that both the univariate and multivariate analyses are reasonably in accord with the perceptions that are commonly held by those involved in red-light-camera programs."

There's a regression to the mean issue at work.

Sometimes an intersection simply has bad luck, draws more accidents than anything about it would cause. Put a camera there, you'll see an "improvement".

One might argue the intersection itself is the problem and should be redesigned, as well as adjoining roadways feeding into the offending intersection.

> generally because the operators lower the yellow light time to increase fees

I'm skeptical of this claim because the red light camera operators are usually contracted by municipalities. They don't have any direct control over the light cycles.

(Yes, obviously they can be in cahoots with the municipality, but I would be surprised if that was common and not the exception)

Do you have any evidence of this?

Chicago is one publicized example. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/10/chicago-shortens...

I am chosing, perhaps naively, that the Chicago red light cameras are an exception and not common because that whole process was criminal: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndil/pr/former-redflex-ceo-sent...

Neither of you share any references for the objective facts you claim to be stating. At least link an article or a study.

can this not be regulated? yellow light timing must not have changed for the last 12 months before adding cameras

Better to set it using a standard such as 1 second per 10mph of speed limit.

So the objective evidence indicates that yellow light timing is the most important factor in reducing accidents.

Why are we discussing cameras?

Maybe people should brake on yellow lights.

I've followed a few cases surrounding traffic cameras that have been ruled unconstitutional on the grounds that individuals have the right to face their accuser.

The question in those cases came down to if the operators of the cam can be considered "accusers."

They widely considered that of course the cam itself didn't count as an accuser, but the question was how "automated" the system was. If there was a human who flagged it, the system was fine, if it was fully automated, they were unconstitutional.

Many states don't share this opinion, but an interesting argument nonetheless.

Couldn't you say the same of drug testing spectrometers etc? The end operator of the equipment has to appear in court to testify to the proper operation of the machine. [0]

[0] Unless the defendant waives that right and stipulates to the prosecutor's statement about the machine.

This literally occurs; one of the reasons that the drug testing lab is usually somewhat local. The prosecution called the individual who ran the test as a witness, and he had clearly been called for similar things many times before.

They started putting them up in the midwest where I live. The interesting thing is if you get a ticket and just pay it? Nothing. If you get a ticket and you challenge it, the judge will immediately throw it out for the reason you pointed out or just dismiss it before it even gets to court by sending out a form letter saying they nullified the ticket, no reason to pay it.

So in essence, if you know this is what they're doing, you're good. But they're not telling people so the money grift continues unabated and in place.

So if it's established as unconstitutional, couldn't you file a criminal complaint of official oppression against the members of whatever government approved the cameras since they are levying unconstitutional fines?

As an individual and not the government, you can't file a criminal action.

You could file a civil action for violation of constitutional rights, but under Roberts, SCOTUS has basically been ripping out all of the mechanisms that would let you file such suits.

"As an individual and not the government, you can't file a criminal action."

You can file with the police, if they take it. You can also file as a private criminal complaint in many jurisdictions. However, it's up to the DA to approve it most of the time. There can be an appeal process where a judge would make a determination.

But yes, if the whole system is corrupt, then there's not much to do.

If they invalidate every contested fine nobody has any standing to make a legal complaint.

They're only invalidating it if you fight it. The people who paid it and later realized it was unconstitutional may have standing.

I don't have much meaningful info to contribute to this, but it is interesting to observe how the rollout of the red light cams happens in different places, and how it eventually turns out.

IIRC there was a point in time roughly around ~2017 when it happened in Redmond WA (i.e., in the town that the Microsoft HQ is in). I might be off by a year or two, but it doesn't really change the overall point.

TLDR: in under 2 years, that whole red light cam initiative got canceled and reverted, because the local stats showed that it just made things more dangerous on the roads (by significantly increasing the rate of rear-ending accidents at traffic lights).

The judge is right, of course the solution is not to ban the cameras, but to place them in a position that will capture the driver.

Doesn't the same logic apply to parking tickets?

possibly, although I suspect the quote from above:

> Although nominally civil, traffic infraction proceedings retain every substantive hallmark of criminal prosecution...

Is going to matter here. A moving violation (ex: red light) is quite different from a non-moving violation (ex: parking) in how they're handled, and often how they're classified.

Ex - my in state, a moving violation is a criminal misdemeanor, while a non-moving violation is entirely civil.

Idk how Florida handles it but several states citations issued by red light cameras and those issued by officers are handled entirely differently for the exact reason you mention. Camera citations are entirely civil, you don't get points against your license. If a cop issues the ticket it does become a misdemeanor moving violation.

there is no state where a moving violation is criminal misdemeanor. some moving violations may be CM but there are myriad of moving violations whose class/degree is not CM. CM is serious class/degree that if you are charged with it you better get yourself an attorney.

That quote is from the judge's decision: he considers that moving violations are quasi-criminal proceedings, and as such, that the protections for criminal prosecution apply, unlike in purely civil cases.

Where is the line drawn for criminal vs civil in nature?

It feels like any civil case brought against an individual by a government is quasi-criminal.

Per the US Supreme Court in Hicks v. Feiock 485 U. S. 624 (1988):

>The substance of particular contempt proceedings determines whether they are civil or criminal, regardless of the label attached by the court conducting the proceedings.

>See Shillitani v. United States, 384 U. S. 364, 384 U. S. 368 -370 (1966); Penfield Co. v. SEC, 330 U. S. 585, 330 U. S. 590 (1947); Nye v. United States, 313 U. S. 33, 313 U. S. 42 -43 (1941); Lamb v. Cramer, 285 U. S. 217, 285 U. S. 220 -221 (1932); Gompers v. Bucks Stove & Range Co., 221 U. S. 418, 221 U. S. 441 -443 (1911).

>Civil contempt proceedings are primarily coercive; criminal contempt proceedings are punitive. As the Court explained in Gompers:

>The distinction between refusing to do an act commanded -remedied by imprisonment until the party performs the required act; and doing an act forbidden -punished by imprisonment for a definite term, is sound in principle and generally, if not universally, affords a test by which to determine the character of the punishment.

>221 U.S. at 221 U. S. 443. Failure to pay alimony is an example of the type of act cognizable in an action for civil contempt. Id. at 221 U. S. 442.

>Whether a particular contempt proceeding is civil or criminal can be inferred from objective features of the proceeding and the sanction imposed. The most important indication is whether the judgment inures to the benefit of another party to the proceeding. A fine payable to the complaining party and proportioned to the complainant's loss is compensatory and civil. United States v. Mine Workers, 330 U. S. 258, 330 U. S. 304 (1947). Because the compensatory purpose limits the amount of the fine, the contemnor is not exposed to a risk of punitive sanctions that would make criminal safeguards necessary. By contrast, a fixed fine payable to the court is punitive and criminal in character.

this is why going to court pretty much takes care of these tickets. of course, for a lot of people, going to court costs more money than paying the ticket so people pay.

disclaimer: I write software for court houses and am intimately familiar with the proceedings etc. in some jurisdictions these tickets will be outright dismissed and in others you may have to put up a bit of fight :)

"this is why going to court pretty much takes care of these tickets."

But what about things like red flag laws, child support (like the cited case law), etc?

Do parking tickets result in “a formal finding of guilt, and consequences tied to a driver’s record”?

No.

Almost, except parking tickets are still typically civil “owner-liability” citations tied to where the car is parked, while red-light violations are intended to target the driver’s conduct

And speed light cameras

What is a speed light camera?

No. Parking is leaving your possession somewhere and should apply to the registered owner. It is not illegal to own a car that someone else used to run a red light.

Who is leaving your possession is just as relevant as who is driving your possession?

I didn't leave my possession. I just owned a car that someone else left.

But is it illegal to own a car that someone else parked in the wrong pkace?

No. Running a red light is when your possession crosses an intersection while the light is red, and should apply to the registered owner.

If I lend a neighbor my kitchen knife and they murder someone with it, should I be liable?

You absolutely can be, especially if you knew, or should have known, that the knife was likely to be used illegally.

While a bit more extreme than your example, there have been multiple cases where the parents of a school shooter have been held responsible because they provided access to a weapon when there were warning signs.

On the less extreme end of the spectrum, this is the same reason why you have to pretend that you are buying a "water pipe for tobacco" and not a bong if you don't want to get kicked out of the headshop (in places where that is still illegal).

3 year before the murder: You are probably fine, IANAL

10 minutes before the murder: Expect to get an accusation of accessory to murder, conspiracy to murder and a few additional tomes of the penal code. We all know you are innocent, but you should better find a good lawyer just in case instead of wasting your last free minutes arguing on the internet.

When subpoenaed, you'd be obligated to tell the court who you gave the knife to.

But if you'd like to tell the fall, I'm sure some prosecutors wouldn't dig too hard to find the guilty party.

It seems in this case they’re not asking, they’re accusing and saying I need to prove otherwise. I think that is substantively different

Edit: subpoena is not a criminal charge afaik is what I’m saying

Or is it?

Surely the framing is "we the people allow you to operate this (otherwise illegal) dangerous vehicle on public roads, on the condition that by default you are responsible for whatever transgressions".

If someone used the car without permission, they are guilty of theft.

If they used the car with your permission, you should either be responsible for what they do with it, or be able to point to the person who was using it.

> If someone used the car without permission, they are guilty of theft.

Sure, but I still don't know who they are, so I can't give their name over for either investigating the theft or reassigning the speeding/red light/parking fine.

Except that requiring you to testify in order to absolve yourself of guilt violates your Fifth Amendment right not to testify in a trial against you. It is up to the government to prove you did something, not up to you to prove you didn’t.

You can not testify all you want, but you should still be on the hook for your vehicle getting tickets, just like you are on the hook for your vehicle accruing toll fees.

If your car was magically stolen and returned, and you have no idea that it happened, or who could have done this... Well, that's certainly an interesting legal argument that you could make to a judge. I doubt he'll believe you.

In the old days it certainly happened. Joyriding. Take someone's vehicle for a spin, put it back. Illegal but nowhere near as serious a penalty. Car security systems have gotten a lot better since then.

"under Feiock, such proceedings are sufficiently criminal in form and function to invoke the full protections of due process..."

This makes me question many existing civil things. Obviously child support, as in the case law. But also, things like red flag laws. It seems like any civil law that would apply criminal-type contemt penalties is unconstitutional.

So is there an alternative or we'll just accept we can't punish bad driving?

Two paths:

Higher quality cameras equipped with facial recognition connected to a database to issue a ticket to the correct person (driver), or

Hire more traffic officers to sit at traffic intersections to catch red light offenders, which will scale in cost by the size of the city, so

Pick your poison

So this has been a thing in Germany since forever. The driver must pay the penalty, not the owner. So what they do is take a picture of the driver and send this to the owner. They have to either pay up, or state the name of the person who drove. If the driver claims that they did not drive and do not know the person on the picture (and if a cursory investigation fails, not sure how much time the authorities will invest in finding the driver), they will be told to record all rides with that vehicle from now on. If they fail to do that, I guess they get a greater penalty the next time, I'm not sure.

So yeah, in some cases you might get out of it by feigning ignorance, but it seems to be a sensible compromise between facial recognition and giving up.

A speeding ticket is not a criminal charge. Criminal procedure and the rights for criminal defendants don't apply.

The court says that criminal rules should apply because points are at stake, while civil penalties are usually restricted to fines, but I don't buy that argument. We have plenty of non-money civil remedies. Code enforcement departments can require changes to property. Family courts can make all kinds of requirements. It's not outside of constitutional bounds for a traffic rule to result in forfeiting a license without criminal proceedings.

>but I don't buy that argument. We have plenty of non-money civil remedies. Code enforcement departments can require changes to property. Family courts can make all kinds of requirements. It's not outside of constitutional bounds for a traffic rule to result in forfeiting a license without criminal proceedings.

All of which are an affront to people's rights.

The fact that we use a "special word" (civil) for the category of laws where we won't throw you straight in prison if you don't comply, we'll add the extra step of waiting for noncompliance and then charging someone with contempt doesn't fundamentally alter the relationship between the enforcers and the people, so why should the people have to put up with their rights being ignored in those cases?

> All of which are an affront to people's rights.

Rights are not unlimited.

You don't have some inherent human right to ignore building codes, or to retain full custody of your child in the event of a divorce.

A reasonably median person doing reasonably median things (so like within a couple standard deviations) has a right to be free from low effort harassment by the state at the unilateral whim of its agents. In the US this is codified across several of the amendments in the bill of rights.

That means the building inspector can't just waltz into your home uninvited, ICE can't kick in your door because your maid is brown and the government can't just put up cameras and start dragnet fining people for rules that only really exist on paper and are used to make it procedurally easier to go after behavior that's bad for subjective reasons.

Second, the fact that legislative bodies may pass and enforcers may enforce stuff that violates people's rights (rental inspections and civil asset forfeiture) come to mind because the size of the harm and the manner in which it is targeted keeps it below the "get everyone pissed off" level doesn't make it not a violation of people's rights. Funny you mention building code. The manner in which building (zoning really, since building code is basically the public adoption of 3rd party standards via the zoning code) code is written and enforces is complete dogshit and would not hold up to rigorous scrutiny (and generally does not, in the incredibly rare occasion is sees it), but between the fact that it's cheaper to comply and that the worse abuses are generally targeted at exactly the kind of people who no judge will have sympathy for (much like civil asset forfeiture was initially) mean the general population is not too up in arms about it since it's

Now, before you put words in my mouth as the kind of people who say things like "rights are not unlimited" are in my observation very apt to do, I'm not saying don't have building code. I'm saying don't violate people's rights to have it, or anything else. It's nowhere near enforced to the letter anyway so walking the actual letters back to match what can be enforced without violating people's rights should be no big deal. And the same is goes for like red light cameras.

Lol most of radars become mainly revenue stream, regardless of country or continent. Even mighty orderly Switzerland has some of that shit and its growing.

Where I live, there is one nasty radar placed so that people have to break rather hard, when leaving town as in few meters before end sign, on a steeply downhill slope, when there is just straight empty road ahead. Those who don't know get flashed frequently. There is no pedestrian crossing, no buildings, just empty fields. Locals complained and municipality said - sorry, we know, but its generating too much revenue and municipality needs that cash and became dependent on that. Basically FU. I know about few others in either Switzerland or France which have very nasty locations, in order to trap as many as possible, in places with 0 actual risk to anybody.

They also love putting temporary radars in some train underpasses which also go steeply down, so its trivial go few kms over the limit if you don't constantly brake and ie actually watch traffic around. Since they are well hidden and people see them at last moment and slam brakes hard, it properly increases risks of accidents, especially with mixture of cyclists or scooters/motorbikes. But that doesn't seem the priority anymore.

I am not saying they don't make sense in some places especially around pedestrian crossings, but its trivial to get 'addicted' to steady cash flow and then friction to change situation is maximal. Thats the point where it stops its primary purpose and becomes self-serving bureaucracy self-feeding loop.

As someone who lives next to an intersection where cars routinely run red lights, this truly sucks and I hope it gets overturned. I understand the judge's reasoning, but running red lights is dangerous and we need much stricter enforcement.

If people routinely run the red light, it seems like an easy case to post an officer to do traffic stops and issue tickets. AFAIK, tickets issued by a sworn officer are broadly constitutional.

There's a literal police station at the intersection and they don't pay any attention at all.

Are you bringing attention to this matter at your city council meetings? The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

I people are routinely running a red for a particular intersection, it seems likely that there is a design problem with the intersection or the signaling. Improving safety would be fixing the underlying problem.

It's actually pretty common for some people to just run red lights when the road is really clear, especially at night. Best that could maybe be done would be to reduce visibility of cross traffic, so that the drivers can't tell from afar that the road they'll cross is clear - but this is likely to cause other kinds of risks.

They do it when the road is busiest actually. Just following the bumper in front of them instead of looking up.

Seems the fact that it was a "red light camera" is completely irrelevant? The relevant part:

> The defendant argued the statute unconstitutionally requires the registered owner to prove they were not driving — instead of requiring the government to prove who was behind the wheel.

Bit like having to prove you weren't the one breaking in, rather than the police having to prove you were guilty.

In light of this, seems like a no-brainer no one could disagree with.

Not the same. They know the car was yours so, by extension, you should be aware of its whereabouts at any given moment. If it wasn't you driving, you know who. An illegal activity was committed using your tool and you know who did it. They have every right to question you. If you do not know, you testify as such, but then again you need to plausibly explain why was someone operating your car while you were not aware of it.

> In light of this, seems like a no-brainer no one could disagree with.

If someone shoots a person with your gun, you gonna say it wasn't you and expect them not to question any you further? Not very no-brainer, is it?

This is how it works in Poland and, I assume, most/all of EU and the rest of the world.

In America, we have the fifth amendment, and the right not to divulge any information whatsoever unless we're granted immunity.

It is enough to say absolutely nothing, and request the government to prove its case.

If someone shot a person with my gun, I would invoke the fifth amendment, and ask the government to prove who did it beyond a reasonable doubt.

Actually, the fifth amendment only protects your right not to incriminate yourself. So you may be called upon to testify against your will against some one else (With some limited protections for spouses and such). However, if you were in fact the one driving, you can plead the fifth, and they cannot use that fact against you to prove it was in fact you driving- they have to prove that independently.

(EDIT: I should note that you also have a right to remain silent when questioned by the police- and since they won't know who to charge, there will likely not be a court case to call you to testify at)

> they cannot use that fact against you to prove it was in fact you driving- they have to prove that independently.

5th amendment protections are much weaker for civil cases though.

Part of this judgement was that even though the law labels is as "civil" it looks and acts in fact like a criminal case, and so it doesn't matter what label they put on it, criminal standards apply.

In reality the way it would work is the prosecutor and police would use every bit of circumstantial evidence to construct a claim of motive, means, and opportunity. Then threaten you with a lengthy prison sentence if you are convicted.

You're not going to roll on whoever really did it (assuming you know), and trust your fate to a jury understanding presumption of innocence, and being convinced of "reasonable" doubt, without you saying a word in your own defense? Most people would not unless they had an iron-clad alibi, but if they did, they wouldn't be getting charged in the first place.

There's a big difference in when you break silence though. Strategically, much better to keep it until all the facts are known to your side. At the start, the police/government have the informational advantage. In other countries, even delaying (but eventually speaking) can allow a negative inference to be drawn. The right to silence is important even if you eventually speak.

The correct way to interact with the American legal system is never to talk at all unless you have a written immunity deal. Kids should learn to say "no questions/searches" and "slide the warrant under the door" from their parents.

Pre-lawyer it's never a good idea to talk. Post-lawyer often not either. But there are some rare cases you might negotiate a disclosure through your lawyer. For example, if they're about to ransack your home or get you fired from your job and you've got a rock-solid alibi.

AFAIK Fith Amendment only protects against self-incrimination, you absolutely can be subpoenaed to testify against someone else and failing to produce truthful testimony is a crime.

You are correct, which is why that compulsion will be accompanied by immunity.

OK, but then you're testifying under oath and lying, because it was you who did it, after all?

If you have an immunity deal and are asked to testify about a crime you committed under it, you admit to doing it and they can't prosecute you.

Gotcha.

That's what I'd be afraid of

> If someone shot a person with my gun, I would invoke the fifth amendment, and ask the government to prove who did it beyond a reasonable doubt.

Sounds nice on paper, but unless you have an absolutely airtight alibi that's a great way to end up in jail. Oh, you were alone at home all night? Well, your neighbor is pretty sure they heard you come home unusually late, and a witness saw someone who kinda-sorta looked like you run away from the crime site, and the victim was sorta-kinda involved in your social circles, and there's video of victim bumping into you a few weeks ago in a bar and you reacting in what could be interpreted as an aggressive way - and it is your gun...

Or you could tell them who you loaned the gun to. Your choice.

Sure, but that's a problem for my lawyer, not me.

And sounds like a great way to plead guilty to a lesser crime, but IANAL.

You missed the point. Your neighbor and the witness don't mean much in the absence of your testimony, but they point to the likelihood you're lying about everything you said on the stand because the detail of your location is suspect. If everything you say is uncorroborated otherwise, that statement might incriminate you on its own given those two witnesses.

Note that in civil cases, such as a traffic ticket, the fifth ammendment doesn't apply to the same extent, and the standard of evidence is typically not "beyond reasonable doubt", it is "a preponderance of the evidence".

Now, per the judge's ruling in this case, red light tickets are actually quasi-criminal, not purely civil, so the standards of criminal law might need to be applied.

How does the Fifth Amendment work in a civil context?

Is it appropriate to compare murder and running a red light given what you know about the civil implications of 5A?

It doesn't apply. The argument was that the red light violation was "quasi-criminal" and the judge agreed with that argument.

> It is enough to say absolutely nothing, and request the government to prove its case.

Only in criminal contexts. In civil contexts your silence can absolutely be an adverse inference. Usually these red-light cameras are civil penalties, not criminal (fines with no points). The judge here seems to be saying that these are "quasi-criminal" because, uhh, I guess there are penalties.

In some ways the government bringing civil charges against you is rather bullshitty and in many ways can be used against you in violation of your constitutional rights. Hence is the most likely reason the judge is calling it quasi-criminal.

Right, in effect the Judge ruled that while the state _calls_ it a civil matter, they treat it basically the same as any other criminal matter and therefore it is in fact a criminal matter. As we all know, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

> In some ways the government bringing civil charges against you is rather bullshitty

I think there are circumstances where this is true, but I don't think it's true in the general sense. And I really don't think red light cameras, which are incredible for public safety and a really fair enforcement tool, are a good example of a civil rights violation.

You don't need to explain anything to the government, that's why we have the 5th amendment. It is the government's job to bring charges against you and prove them beyond reasonable doubt. The government is right to investigate and ask questions to accomplish that and I am right to refuse to answer anything.

It's basically "innocent until proven guilty". Red light cameras turn that assumption around since if your car gets ticketed it is assumed you are "guilty until proven innocent".

I think the argument is generally: nobody has a right to drive a car, it's something we permit by issuing a license and other regulations. One of the conditions is that the owner of a vehicle is ultimately responsible for it.

The judge in this case disagreed, because the red light infraction was not a simple civil fine but quasi-criminal, e.g. points on drivers license, possibly resulting in suspension, etc.

You can own a car and not drive it. It can be stolen from you, anything.

The structure of this whole thing is to avoid having to do an actual investigation. They could subpoena the car owner's phone records for instance. Instead they choose to hide behind bureaucracy and offer you an off ramp in the form of a lower payment to make it all go away.

If the owner is who is responsible for it, then make the ticket to the car and not an individual. State was attempting to play it both ways to tip the outcome in the states favor.

> I think the argument is generally: nobody has a right to drive a car, it's something we permit by issuing a license and other regulations. One of the conditions is that the owner of a vehicle is ultimately responsible for it.

Do you know you can be licensed to drive a vehicle without owning one, and similarly, own one without being licensed to drive it?

Why would the owner of the property be responsible for someone else's actions with that property?

Because they bought the most dangerous tool we have in common use, and society decided to make the law.

The owner isn't responsible for the drivers actions, but they are required to name the driver. (Or declare the car stolen etc.)

(At least in much of Europe.)

I would say they could be, but its needs to under strict circumstances. Easiest is with guns, I loan you my gun knowing your going to go and use it to commit a crime, but that is covered under being an accessory. With cars, the only situation I can think of is if you loaned your car to someone you knew was drunk and was going to drive. Or you loaned me the car knowing I was going to use it as a get away vehicle in a bank robbery. But I assume the second case would also be covered under being an accessory to the crime.

But for the purposes of traffic tickets, yea, its ridiculous. It also has a lot of faults. I got a traffic ticket from a red light camera for a car I owned when I was stationed in California. The ticket came to me in Oregon 5 years AFTER I traded that vehicle in (I traded it in right before moving to Oregon) and the traffic cam ticket was from Texas, a state I've never driven a vehicle in. My only presence in Texas has been being in the airport in Dallas. The ticket was also for a year prior to when I received it. So I hadn't owned it in 4 years when it ran a red light in Texas.

> You don't need to explain anything to the government, that's why we have the 5th amendment.

As someone else said, this only works against self-incrimination? If you say it wasn't you then you need to testify or get prosecuted?

First, you have the right to say nothing at all; there is no requirement to incriminate someone else to protect yourself.

Second, you can still generally invoke the 5th amendment during testimony even if you already claimed someone else did it. You aren't under oath until said testimony, so it still protects against you having to choose between committing perjury or self-incrimination, and doing so cannot be used as evidence of either.

No, you don't always have the right to say nothing at all. Courts can compel testimony and punish you if you don't.

And you plead the 5th after going under oath. And you can't just plead the 5th to any question. If the prosection puts you under oath and asks you your name, you can't plead the 5th to that

That's why I said generally - once testimony is compelled, it can no longer be used against you. And the definite exception for compelling your name is if the government already believes that you committed a crime and is trying to figure out who you are, and you cannot articulate specifically why your name could be incriminating.

5th amendment protections can include questions of identity, if the question of identity is relevant for incrimination. Like, if the government has a warrant for "Joe Smith", you're not required to testify whether that's you. It's usually a waste of time since could just prove it with the non-testimonial evidence that lead to your arrest, but the protection does exist.

The 5th amendment with regard to self-incrimination only applies to criminal cases. When I represented myself in court for a speeding ticket the judge threatened me under pain of contempt that I had to testify against myself.

Most camera tickets are either civil moving, or civil non-moving. Civil moving are against a person and civil non-moving are against the vehicle. Neither of which case does 5th amendment protect you from incriminating yourself, and neither of which does it require prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

Read the ruling. The judge says red light camera cases are quasi-criminal in the way they are handled even if nominally civil and thus can be subject to constitutional requirements including the protection of the 5th amendment.

Please don't project the laws and norms of Poland onto the US.

The US is a very big place. And in this place, we have fifty (!) different states. That's fifty different sets of rules relating to owning and driving cars -- nearly twice as many as the EU has member nations.

A Florida judge might decide that red light camera tickets are unconstitutional, while an Arizona judge might decide that they're completely OK. These two very different rulings can co-exist, without conflict, potentially forever.

Each state doing their own thing independently of the others is just how we roll here.

A sane and rational person might reasonably conclude that this situation is literally insane -- and they may be right! -- but it is this way anyway.

(And it is this way by design.)

It's a bit like the EU, in that way.

I don't believe the founders intended as much federal oversight as we currently have. It was supposed to be self-governing states with a few exceptions. So much of the constitution is to limit the feds.

Sure, that would be sufficient probable cause for police to ask questions. But it’s not sufficient evidence on which to write a ticket because we specifically wrote into our Constitution that the police must know and be able to prove who the guilty party is _before_ they write the ticket (or make an arrest, in the case of more serious crimes). Poland doesn’t protect its citizens to the same degree, so what is acceptable there is not acceptable here.

> They know the car was yours so, by extension, you should be aware of its whereabouts at any given moment.

This is an absurd assumption. I own many cars. Often, I'll borrow a car to a friend, I'm generally totally OK if they borrow it to other people. I don't care, and should not have to care, who those people are.

Also, for what it's worth, the government has no idea who owns any of my cars. EU registration certificates are typically not proof of ownership (are they in any EU country? I suspect quite possibly not). At best a government might be able to figure out the registered keeper of my vehicle, but they're not going to know anything about who drives the car.

>If someone shoots a person with your gun, you gonna say it wasn't you and expect them not to question any you further? Not very no-brainer, is it?

If I say "it wasn't me" and refuse to answer further questions, I would expect them to stop asking me pretty quickly. Being excessively bothersome about asking further questions would be a clear violation of the ECHR.

Most of the world also doesn't have the same degree of protections against self-incrimination that the 5th amendment provides. If someone shot a person with my gun, while the police can obviously ask questions, in the US I have the right to not answer and force them to prove beyond a reasonable doubt who fired it.

Four people in my family drive my car. I'm supposed to track that? sure.

The standard for this in the UK is that you should make a reasonable effort to work out who was driving.

e.g. checking your calendar/diary, looking through receipts or bank statements to work out where you likely were.

There's also a requirement that a request for information is sent within 14 days for minor incidents like speeding or red light violations, so it's not like you have to work out who was driving on a Tuesday morning three years ago.

That’s not how it works in the United States. I was driving my (female) partner’s car and received a citation. I gave the cop my license but he pulled the owner’s (my female partner) driving record using her vehicle’s license plate (is what I’m guessing happened) and issued her the citation instead of me. I was very excited since this meant I was going to get away without a citation.

I gave her the citation and she called the cop who issued the citation and asked him who was driving at the time. He answered that a man was driving, and she told him he issued the citation to her, a woman. Her first name is one letter away from a male first name, so I’m guessing the cop saw it and assumed it was me and not her.

He got frustrated and told her to go ahead and rip the citation up since he wrote it to the wrong driver, she told him she’d show up to court and the judge would instantly dismiss the ticket due to the officer pulling over a man and issuing the citation to a woman, so he canceled it. He didn’t want to look like a complete fool in front of a judge.

Not once did he ask who was actually driving because he knows she is never going to tell him and he can’t force her to reveal that it was me.

Why not just drive under the speed limit and sober instead of giggling about avoiding penalties while endangering us all?

Note that not once did you mention that you were innocent.

> and sober

Why would you presume GP was drunk?

Also, it's completely common and safe to drive slightly over the speed limit in some circumstances, and in many parts of the US it's exceedingly rare for people to drive below the speed limit as you suggest. In many places the tickets are essentially written more for not seeing the cop and slowing down than for actually doing 78 in a 65.

Your car, your problem. Either get someone to fess up, or take responsibility yourself and stop loaning it out.

There really is no difference between "who drove through a red light" and "who scratched the bumper while parking" here - how do you currently solve the latter one?

I know you'd like it to work that way, but it doesn't in most jurisdictions in the US.

> how do you currently solve the latter one?

Same as parking enforcement. Goes against the car, not an individual. So the financial responsibility will be assigned, but no punishment.

Does the car get points on its record?

Except no, that is not how it works. People get moving violation tickets, not cars.

This is exactly how it works in plenty of countries, actually! The US is the outlier here. In practice people have zero trouble figuring out which family member was driving - just like they have no trouble getting a kid to fess up to scratching the bumper while backing up into their own garage.

The burden is on you to explain why the US should do things the way other countries do. What's better for everyone about that? Why should we change our notion of justice to make you feel better about it?

> The burden is on you to explain why the US should do things the way other countries do. What's better for everyone about that?

In short: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ef/19...

>They know the car was yours so, by extension, you should be aware of its whereabouts at any given moment.

Lol your "Tool" analogy breaks down here.

Its not the responsibility of the defendant to prove their innocence, no matter how you want to twist it.

> expect them not to question any you further

Wow. No one expects you to not be questioned, but for questioning to take place before punishment because duh.

Build a case, test it. Not issue fines based on an assumption.

Speed camera tickets show up in the mail weeks after the fact. Say your entire family uses your car. You know who was driving the family car at 2pm on a random sunday five weeks ago? I'm guessing not...

I'm guessing many would recognise a family member or friend from the photograph of the person in the drivers seat though . . .

> you should be aware of its whereabouts at any given moment

Says who? If the car is mine, I am free to do with it whatever I like (of course, excepting criminal acts). I do not owe anybody an account of what I - or the care - did at any particular moment. If the car was used in the commission of a crime, it's up to the prosecution to prove I had something to do with it. If they think I know who did it - prove it and prosecute me under the law. You can't just prosecute because you think I should know, that's not how proper law works - otherwise every cop in the country would be 100% sure who they caught is the criminal - because why not, if it's enough for conviction, why work harder!

> If someone shoots a person with your gun, you gonna say it wasn't you and expect them not to question any you further?

They can question all they like, but to secure a criminal conviction, they must prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that I was the person who did it. Otherwise you get no conviction. If they strongly suspect I did it, they would find a proof - but the fact that I owned a gun is not that proof (for one, guns can be easily stolen, and frequently are).

But couldn't you then have the same argument for speeding tickets (or parking tickets)? Like, "I don't know who drove my car too fast or parked my car on the curb, so it's not my problem. The state should prove who did it.".

For the speeding ticket, if the police officer stops you, you'd get a ticket and would sign it, thus ensuring you were there. Or, if you refuse, the police officer would testify in court (if you would ask for a court hearing) that they saw you behind the wheel (and, likely now, you'd also be on bodycam). That would likely be enough evidence - which is why you probably don't want to go to court, because the judge would be annoyed at you for wasting everybody's time, and you'd probably get more severe punishment.

That said, I did at times get smaller fine and less severe consequences from a speeding ticket by just pretending I am going to go to court (I didn't really want to, I wanted smaller fine :) - because policemen do not like to waste time in court either - so they would agree, that if I do not try to deny I did it, and do not force thus them to go to court and testify, they would agree to less severe violation (while still costing me $$, just not as much as it could). That's totally a thing, at least in the US. The risk, of course, if you are an ass about it and piss off the police officer, they'd say to heck with it, I'll go to court, and you'd have to go to court too, and as per above, you'd get punished more severely. So, always be polite, and it will be to your benefit.

As for automated speeding tickets, I'm not a huge fan of it. Too many cases of this system being wrong or abusive.

I meant speeding cameras, where a system OCRs your license plate and you receive a fine after a month or even two months. Fine being monetary + points, depending on how fast you drove. Police officers measuring speed have become quite rare, at least here at my location (EU country). While speeding cameras are becoming quite common, especially in towns/cities and on the highways.

Yes, and that is likely what will happen based on this ruling too, for parking tickets as well.

In Europe the law argues that cars are dangerous, and if you loan your car to a habitual bad driver, that's on you. You can either get the person who drove it to fess up, or the judge can fine you (because you lent out your car against better judgment) and impose a drivers log, so the circus doesn't happen again.

The arguing about having a constitutional right to drive bad boggles the mind, road deaths in the US are high, compared to civilized nations. Wikipedia states it's 14.2 deaths per 100000 inhbitants, that's between Sierra Leone (13.8) and Angola (15.0). For comparison, India has 12.6 traffic deaths per 100000 citizens and the worst country in Europe is Greece at 6.1.

The right metric is death per citizen, not per mile, because it's about the number of people who have lost a family member or friend.

When you get around exclusively on two wheels (motorcycle and bicycle) bad drivers are a direct safety threat. Even cagers ought to be careful about being permissive with red light running, side-on crashes are remarkably deadly for the one who got hit in the door because there is not much structural protection or space on the side of the vehicle.

> but then again you need to plausibly explain why was someone operating your car while you were not aware of it.

There is no such requirement.

> They have every right to question you.

Sure, but they have no right to issue you a ticket without proving you broke the law. Same as in the gun case: they have every right to question you, but they can't convict you for murder based solely on evidence that it was your gun that killed the victim.

A ticket (citation) is a promise to appear before a court, not a conviction of anything. Law enforcement can cite anyone with only reasonable suspicion than a crime or infraction has been committed.

I may have used "ticket" in a far too imprecise way, that may get a bit too much into the weeds of terminology and specific laws in specific states for me.

By my understanding, though, this case wasn't about a citation to appear in court, it was about automatic issuance of a fine + points on the driver's license of the owner of a car filmed blowing past a red light. Of course, you can sue the government to contest the penalties, but unless you do, you are liable for even worse penalties if you don't pay.

Of course they are going to question you further. But they still do have to prove it to convict you. If the prosecution provides no evidence that you were the shooter other than the fact that you were the owner of the gun, then you are going to get off.

The relevant law here is US constitutional law, not Polish nor EU law.

Did I say otherwise?

I think it's like this in the UK, you are required to either admit to it or inform the police who was driving at the time.

For speeding there's a website where you can view photos and a certificate showing the equipment was calibrated recently, and you can admit or nominate another driver (or you can do it via paper forms)

In Poland, ticket enforcement from speed cameras is about 50% (because if you don't accept it voluntarily, they need to file court case and burden of proof is on the government here, as with any other criminal case).

> but then again you need to plausibly explain why was someone operating your car while you were not aware of it.

Why? IMHO, I shouldn't have to. It's the police's job to make sure they have the right person.

Car is a deadly machine (especially big trucks and SUVs) and the owner of the death machine should know who they give their death machine.

In Japan the driver's face needs to be clearly visible in the photo. At least that's what I've been told. I don't drive.

> If it wasn't you driving, you know who

That's not necessarily true. What if it's a shared car in your family and you weren't home to see who took it?

This comment is the tech equivalent to "falsehoods programmers believe about <thing>"... real life does not fit into such neat boxes.

Then you pay the ticket yourself or ask the family who did it so they can do it. This is normal across the world and really isn't a stretch to expect vehicle owners to figure out who's been driving dangerously with their car.

> This is normal across the world

I'm not arguing it isn't, but the thought exercise is: does it make sense for the government to take people's money if the accused can't prove it wasn't them driving the car based on a police accusation (also with the threat of jail time if you don't pay)?

I don't think that's "normal", personally.

No, because in a functioning legislature the offence would be something like 'failing to disclose details', in the same way that refusing to participate in a DUI breath/blood draw would be a discrete offence.

The photo will show the driver. Presumably, you recognize your partner and/or your children.

Twins.

> They know the car was yours so, by extension, you should be aware of its whereabouts at any given moment.

People's spouses and kids drive their cars. I've lent cars to friends before. Unless you've got some kind of log book, you might not know (or even remember) who was driving at any given moment or location.

> you need to plausibly explain why was someone operating your car while you were not aware of it.

This is the point of the judgement, under US law it seems that you don't need to plausibly explain anything, the authorities need to be able to show who was driving as the penalty is pseudo-criminal.

> I assume, most/all of EU and the rest of the world.

Under UK law which is much less definite about the state proving who was driving, one must make a good faith effort to identify the driver. But my Father got into a situation that took months to resolve when a speeding ticket arrived. The photograph of the driver didn't capture the head and was otherwise too blurry to identify from the body. It's a month after the fact on a road they both drive down frequently, and they only have one car. Was it him or his wife driving? Nobody knows.

The primary vehicle owner is not allowed to just assume responsibility for the ticket, because the liability for the offence is with the specific driver. Giving the wrong information is an offence itself, because people have tried those sorts of tricks to (for example) give penalty points to their spouse and avoid a ban.

So ... what do you do?

It's possible to take such cases to court in the UK and receive a not-guilty verdict if the vehicle owner can show a good faith effort has been made to identify the driver but there is no reasonable way of doing so.

You are missing a nuance. It is simply a separate offence (a misdemeanor) to not identify who was driving when the car was used to commit a violation.

But also traffic cameras here generally take frontal pictures, so typically the only way you can get away with claiming it wasn't you is if they are very lazy / not interested in investigating further.

> you should be aware of its whereabouts at any given moment.

Why? Americans liberated themselves from this kind of relationship with the government hundreds of years ago.

> If it wasn't you driving, you know who.

I don't have to prove who was driving. I don't have to prove I wasn't the one driving. The state has to prove that I was the one driving.

>If someone shoots a person with your gun, you gonna say it wasn't you and expect them not to question any you further?

I don't expect them not to question me further and that's not what this is about. This is about whether your car running a red light is proof, in and of itself absent any other facts, that you ran a red light in your car.

>This is how it works in Poland

This is not how it works in the US

>I assume, most/all of EU and the rest of the world.

You assume incorrectly

Even if I know who, why would I ever give that information to the court?

Let's say your friend borrow your car and drives through a red light. You don't have to tell the court that it was them, but as the car owner you'll be held responsible for what the car was used for if you don't.

It seems like that is not the case in Florida according to this judge.

it's not true anywhere in america, at the very least.

I agree that's likely true but I'm not sure if there are any jurisdictions finding things differently? I'm not aware of any rulings from appeals courts with broader jurisdiction but I imagine if they don't exist they will soon.

here's the thing about that: it's absolutely not true at all. once again, in the place where this ruling took place (and, therefore, the place we're talking about) the people who accuse you of a crime have to prove that it was definitely you that did it. an accusation doesn't put the burden of proof on you to prove that you didn't, or to find who actually did. this isn't a phoenix wright game, or an argument with your mom. if the state can't prove that it was you, then it wasn't.

Because you'll be paying the fine if you don't.

> If someone shot a person with your gun, you gonna say it wasn't you and expect them not to question you further

Running a red light is not remotely equivalent to shooting someone with a gun, get a grip

In oral arguments the supreme court uses hypothetical questions with extreme examples to explore the limits and constitutionality of law.

Why shouldn't we?

OK, so now write a law that makes a distinction here. What do you end up with? EU law.

The EU does not write traffic legislation, it leaves that up to the individual states.

Unlike the US, the EU is a collection of fully sovereign countries.

This was a mental shortcut, to exemplify EU vs US attitude in this case. I am from and live in one of EU countries, I am very well aware of that.

“fully” is optimistic - being a member of the EU means giving up some sovereignty.

They have the right to question, but I don't have to testify to anything, that's what the fifth ammendment is for.

As usual, Europe doesn't care about internal consistency when it comes to rights. They just legislate (or rule) whatever 'works' for the current definition of 'works'.

> If someone shot a person with your gun, you gonna say it wasn't you and expect them not to question you further? Not very no-brainer, is it?

Nobody has said you can't be questioned.

> As usual, Europe doesn't care about internal consistency when it comes to rights.

Sure. And you advocate that in exchange in US you get havoc on the roads because anyone can say "it wasn't me speeding 50 miles over the limit, bite me"? Is that the freedom you want?

Hard yes; I do absolutely do not want to live in a society that is held together with cameras instead of people. By all means please enforce the law, but it should be done by people in a court, not by some auto-citation by mail.

The US has a comparable per-mile road fatality rate. There's no 'havoc'.

No, it doesn't! It's 2 to 10 times more! But that's irrelevant; what we're talking about here is a hypothetical scenario where this gets challenged in Supreme Court and, as a result, police in US cannot assume fault in such cases.

> No, it doesn't! It's 2 to 10 times more!

It's literally not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

> Belgium 7.3

> Slovenia 7.0

> US 6.9

> France 5.8

Never mind all the other countries that do have presumption of guilt, which are also comparable in per-mile road deaths.

And the ones with presumption but which _are_ 10x worse.

Allowing the presumption is very clearly not well-correlated with safety.

You are conveniently leaving out some European countries, such as Norway being at 3.0 per 1B km.

You are also conveniently leaving it the per-capita figures, with US being at 14.2 per 100k while countries like Norway, Sweden, and Finland being at 2.x, and Europe as a while being at 6.7.

So sure, "10x more" might be an exaggeration, but "2x more" is fairly accurate and even a claim of "7x more" is arguable.

I haven't conveniently left out anything. I wrote my previous comments intentionally, and specified which statistic I was talking about. If you misread it, that's on you.

I used this statistic because yours is like saying the US is richer than Switzerland, if you don't divide by the number of people. Pretty irrelevant.

There is no point comparing a country that drives everywhere with a country that doesn't using a metric that doesn't account for this difference.

You named the two European countries higher than the USA, and ignored the 12 that are lower.

I presented the US' position in the list with the surrounding European countries, both higher and lower, to show that it sits in the cluster. It can be at the edge of the cluster, that's fine. The other person was claiming a 2-10x difference and, more importantly, blaming it on the 'havoc' that occurs without the presumption of guilt. The countries I listed have that presumption, and yet have comparable rates.

> There is no point comparing a country that drives everywhere with a country that doesn't

Unless the argument is that driving everywhere is a stupid and irresponsible way to operate a society.

Perhaps but seems irrelevant to a discussion that's around the question of policy as it relates to people who are already driving.

The problem with both of these numbers is that they are highly sensitive to how (city/suburban/rural, freeway/highway/byway) people drive.

It’s a very typically American opinion to argue that you don’t have to be personally responsible for your actions if the law legally allows you not to.

When you say personally responsible, do you mean legal repercussions? Because, yes, that is definitionally what the law is. Or do you mean some extra-judicial responsibility? Because GP (and this whole chain, for the most part) is only talking about law.

The state is so powerful that inviduals should be given such affordances, and should be allowed the put the state to strict proof.

Europe is a nonsense in this regard: you have rights, except all the special cases when you don't. You have a right to free speech, except for all the ways in which you don't. You have the right to silence, except when you don't.

Which is also true in the US, after all they restrict obscenity as a form of speech. It's just that they have much fewer exceptions.

How very typical of non-Americans to misrepresent Americans!

Florida must be using cheap cameras. My daughter got a red light ticket in Beverly Hills a couple of years ago. They mailed the ticket to her as the registered owner of the car, including the photographs from the cameras which showed that a) she entered the intersection on a red light, b) her car front and back showing the license plates and c) the face of the driver, establishing it was her. From her expression on the photograph you could tell she was saying "oh, shit!" She just paid it.

Same here; tickets always include the photo of the driver. If the photo is unclear or differs from the registered owner, tickets are easily dismissed.

However, I agree with Florida on this; the onus should be not be on the accused to prove innocence after a citation is issued. Feels like a 'call us to unsubscribe' time-wasting dark pattern.

If the law is such that the owner is guilty regardless of who was driving, but the owner can opt to reassign the fine to the driver if they have the willingness and the evidence to do so, then proving innocence isn't really what's happening if the driver opts to do it.

That said, if merely being the owner of a tool is sufficient to be guilty of whatever infraction someone else performs with said tool, that has 2 problems beyond the whole "proving your innocence" debate:

1. Why stop climbing up the chain at the current owner when you could keep climbing and say it's all the fault of the manufacturer? I jest, but this illustrates why, despite my first paragraph, it's indeed only sensible that the driver be at fault, so the government must prove who was driving.

2. Why treat cars differently from, say, weapons?

I see your point, but these are civil tickets rather than criminal charges. And since there’s already many laws and regulations around owning a car, such as registration… isn’t it trivial to say “you are responsible for a car that you register by default”

In the same way, if your car fails emissions tests, you can’t register it and it’s the responsibility of the owner to ensure that their car meets emissions standards.

If you read the article, you would see that issue addressed. The claim was that it wasn't civil, it was quasi-criminal which is why they had to follow due process.

But the risks that running a red light pose aren’t civil in nature, so it feels like a perversion to use civil infractions as an excuse to get sloppy with enforcement.

The alternative would be an actual criminal record because you misjudged a yellow light.

If the yellows are set correctly there should be very little of misjudging. You see yellow, if you can reasonably stop you do so. Judging only is an issue when you're going below the speed limit.

Sort of. Basically you can fine the owner of the car and revoke the privileges of driving that car in a given state. Where it gets to be a problem is if the charge is against the 'driver' of the car and the state's not able to prove that. Normally, in courts we can face our adversary and cross-examine, etc. We hit this problem in NJ during the red light camera pilot program, I can remember a guy I worked with getting a ticket because his roommate borrowed a car and the front was hanging out a bit into the intersection.

Some other thoughts: An illegally parked car can be fined, impounded, booted. Car with outstanding parking tickets can also have all of the above. But typically the driver wouldn't see points or a moving violation for any of these offenses. For example: NYC you can get blocking the box tickets written by parking enforcement but they don't carry the weight of a moving violation like a police officer's ticket would. (and if you don't pay it, it's not the driving privilege that's suspended in the state, it's the car itself that would be targeted for booting/impounding, etc)

>I see your point, but these are civil tickets rather than criminal charges.

Yeah that's what they said when ICE was unilaterally kicking in doors.

The way I see it anything that would prompt the government to use violence upon you without you taking action to escalate deserves the same level of protection for the accused as a "real" criminal matter.

Yes I'm aware this includes just about everything beyond library late fines and would break the system at least for awhile. Worth it. The government shouldn't be able to assess the same penalties (fines) and threaten the same enforcement actions (forfeiture of property, arrest for nonpayment, etc, etc) as they do in criminal matters and side step people's rights simply because they say it's civil. The rights and procedural protections are what they are not to prevent the application of a label, but to prevent abuse at the hands of the government.

Criminal offenses are punishable by incarceration.

Civil offenses are not.

---

Mild speeding, no seatbelt, broken taillight are civil.

DUIs, reckless driving, hit-and-run are criminal.

All vehicular offenses, but different punishments.

---

Unauthorized immigration to the US is NOT punishable by incarceration. (It can result in deportation to the nation of origin.)

>Criminal offenses are punishable by incarceration.

And what happens if you don't pay civil (or criminal) fines? A bench warrant gets issued and you get arrested. And if you get a contempt charge in all this guess where you can go?

The only "real difference" between a criminal offense where they "can" jail you but usually just fine you is procedural.

I would rather catch a bullshit DUI than have a local building commissioner coming after me for some violation. They're both $10k problems, but with one of them you have "real rights"

>Unauthorized immigration to the US is NOT punishable by incarceration.

The problem wasn't what the statutory punishment is or isn't.

The problem was the unilateral nature of it. Hence all the hoopla over warrant types, sloppy behavior, etc.

No more lending your car to a friend in need, no more letting your children learn to drive on your car or borrow it ever. Families must now own and insure a car for every individual driver because we can't be bothered to find robust solutions for traffic enforcement

Shift the problem onto individuals, make it a burden for the public. Typical HN attitude

Driving cars is a dangerous activity that deserves higher levels of accountability and responsibility.

It is commonplace to drive, but has high potential for danger and death. It seems ok to me to have a level of care required for owning a vehicle, and that includes being mindful of who you share your vehicle with.

Same thing with guns - if you blindly lend a gun to an acquaintance and they shoot a school, you will absolutely be charged with some crimes, either accessory to murder or manslaughter, where you have to prove that you weren’t being negligent by giving it to them. Guns are dangerous and owning them bears a higher level of responsibility to the owner.

Vehicles kill more people, they also deserve responsibility to own. If somebody breaks laws with your vehicle, it’s your responsibility by default unless you prove otherwise.

I mean, if your kid or friend gets a parking ticket in your car you probably already pay it and collect from them.

It doesn’t seem that different to extend this to camera tickets.

Or you could ask your friends who borrow your car not to be dipshits who run red lights. If you get a ticket for your teen running a red light, you can have your teen pay for it. Might be a good learning lesson.

But the reason for the ruling is that if your teen runs a red, YOU get points on your license.

Not if the teen takes responsibility. So don't loan out your car to people who aren't willing to take responsibility for their actions. Surely that's not a massive burden?

Is that just?

Yes, vehicle ownership is a level of responsibility, I believe it is just to be accountable for what happens with it.

This is unjust BS and discriminates against poor families.

Using this line of thinking, it will be a short time until you’re responsible for what a criminal does with your stolen vehicle; after all, you failed to secure it.

I hope you get exactly what you’re asking for, and all the implications thereof (but in a state far from me). I feel certain you won’t enjoy it.

Obviously someone stealing a vehicle is different, as long as you’re reasonable about it. Leaving an unlocked car with keys in the ignition outside of a bank being robbed is different from someone breaking the window and spoofing your fob, and both of those are different from willingly giving the vehicle to someone.

Also I mentioned criminal vs civil penalties being treated differently - I don’t believe the same scenarios apply to both. AND if you can prove that you lent a car to someone who got you a speeding ticket, then it’s on them - just that the owner of the car is responsible by default.

I hate these arguments that doing anything to restrict the deadliest machines in history is impossible because it discriminates against the poor. It doesn’t. But having a society where driving is the only option does, so I am all in favor of alternatives. But I also think that we should improve safety for cars when possible as well

> Obviously someone stealing a vehicle is different

But someone borrowing it with permission isn't?

Yeah, keeping this would be a dangerous precedent. If the state can presume you're guilty in a traffic case, why not extend it to other cases? Stuff like that is routinely used in legal arguments, "we are doing X so why can't we do Y which is essentially the same?" So say they'd go for "we have your phone located within the vicinity of where murder is committed, now prove you're not a murderer!" or "your license place was tagged next to the store that was robbed, now prove you didn't rob the store!"

And yes, very likely some people would abuse it to get out of traffic tickets. I'd rather have that than constitutional due process protections eroded. We're not doing super-great on that anyway, we don't need to do worse, and if some scoundrel occasionally not paying traffic ticket is a price we have to pay to avoid that, I am fine with it.

Yup. Camel's noses should always be shot. Otherwise they creep in more and more.

Some examples that come to mind:

Look how the exception for searches at border crossings has expanded.

The use of actions against licenses for behavior that has nothing to do with the license.

The use of permits to get companies to do things only marginally related to the purpose of the permit.

The encouragement of universities to expel those accused of criminal acts--just because the punishment isn't jail should not mean the state can hand it off to a kangaroo court.

Pressuring financial companies to cut ties with disliked things. (For example, getting Steam to remove games with any whiff of incest. Either declare them illegal or don't take action against them!)

If it's their vehicle and the vehicle wasn't stolen, the owner should know who was driving it. Courts do compel people to testify sometimes (when it is not self-incriminating).

They are not required to know who is driving their registered vehicle at all times, just that anyone that is allowed to drive it has a license.

What are some scenarios where a vehicle owner knows that the vehicle is being driven by someone with a license, but not who that person is?

Happens all the time. You and your spouse do the same or similar route (e.g. bring child to school) and a month later you get a ticket. Who was driving that day?

You have one spouse and several children, and all of them have a license and are allowed to use the car?

Your court date will be weeks after receiving the citation in the mail. Most families talk once in a while.

The state is constitutionally unable to force you to testify against yourself because the judge ruled these tickets are quasi criminal

The relevant part is that the judge declared traffic ticket proceedings “quasi criminal”:

> In the order, the court found that red-light camera cases, although labeled as civil infractions, function as “quasi-criminal” proceedings because they can result in monetary penalties, a formal finding of guilt, and consequences tied to a driver’s record.

Which seems to just relabel any fine from the government as a criminal matter?

IMO when you register the vehicle for the right to drive on public roads, you are entering into an agreement that you will be responsible for following the rules of the road, and for lending the car to people who also do so.

Similarly, if I register a firearm legally, and then lend it out to anyone who asks, regardless of whether they follow the law, I don’t think it would be crazy to hold me financially responsible if a shooting happens with my gun.

Seems untenable because I can just lie to you about my intended use. I borrow your hammer to build a cabin. Oops, I actually used it to murder people. Enjoy the millions in damages.

The justice system can generally deal with gray areas like this. For example the parents of school shooters are usually not held liable for the crimes their kids commit. It depends on a lot of variables.

More states are enacting laws that directly charge the parents in these cases.

example of a very recent case: https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/04/us/colin-gray-verdict-mass-sh...

Seems more like jury nullification than new legislation, in this particular case

>I don’t think it would be crazy to hold me financially responsible if a shooting happens with my gun.

States have had to write laws for this to be a criminal matter. Before then it was a civil matter, but it was individuals against individuals and not state against individuals.

>Which seems to just relabel any fine from the government as a criminal matter?

It wasn't exactly about the fine, but points on a license I believe.

In California at least (I'm not sure about Florida law), you can go to court and state "the state hasn't proved that I was the driver," and if the photos are too blurry to show who the driver was, the state loses. You don't have to tell them who the driver was, just show that they don't have enough evidence that it was you. I believe this approach is more consistent with the constitution.[1]

[1]:https://caticketking.com/help-center/photo-red-light-help/ph...

The logic is fine, but hit and runs just became a lot easier to get away with then no? Especially with tinted windows being so prevalent you very well might not even be able to give a description at all of the driver, and they can just later say they found their car like that.

Probably a lot of other issues arise from that. If your car gets towed for being illegally parked, what if you just say you didn't park it there? Seems like a similar violation to a red light ticket.

Hit and run is different; the car is insured, regardless of the driver. If criminal, they will interview to see if the owner was driving, who else had access to the car, and so on.

I don't see why the government should have to prove who was driving to issue a ticket, it's not like they have to prove who parked the car to issue a traffic ticket.

In Finland there is fun thing on that. There is both tickets by municipality where the ticket goes to keeper. But as private parking fines are contractual violations they need to track down or at least reasonably prove the person who parked...

Still, seems to me that it is reasonable to prove who did such violation. Maybe photo could identify person. Or maybe other data could be requested like phone location data. Doesn't seem unreasonable or high hurdle. Probably not cost effective in every case.

Parking tickets don't go on your driving record. They are just a tax on parking improperly.

I thought the same was true of automated red light and speeding tickets too.

No, they are considered moving infractions in many states.

I think that administrative charges do not need to clear the "beyond a reasonable doubt" bar -- that is reserved for criminal cases only. (So indeed, breaking in or killing.)

"Preponderance of the Evidence" which is probably used for traffic cases means only "more likely than not" (or about 51% certainty).

There are plenty of laws where you do nothing and are still considered responsible.

For one, that was Florida. In California there's the "Permissive Use" rule which means you are at least partially responsible for who you lend your car to. If they get in an accident, you can be held partially liable.

There's also "Negligent Entrustment" if it can be proved you knowingly loaned your car or gun to someone intoxicated, unlicensed, etc...

Businesses are generally supposed to take responsibility for their employees. That might sound obvious if the business is FAANG but it's far less obvious to a single person coffee-shop or flower stand who hires their first employee who then spills hot coffee on a customer.

Parents are liable for their kids on many (most?) cases

I think another is where a someone goes to bar, drinks too much, the bartender gets charged.

Rather than just fight the cameras, what solution would you suggest? Just saying "more officer enforcement" doesn't seem valid as budgets are shrinking, applicants are shrinking, and people are dying from reckless drivers.

This is such a strange argument, as any reasonable person should know or be able to find out who was driving their car at a specific point in time. But also easy to solve such absurd positions - Change the law to say the owner is responsible for any and all infractions and loses the right to ride and own a car for such infractions unless they identify another driver. But I don't see who wins in this scenario, it is much more logical and fair to go in with the aim to penalise the driver, and for this purpose ask the owner to confirm the driver.

The article title is: "Judge dismisses red-light camera ticket, rules law is unconstitutional"

Which is better than the HN title.

> seems like a no-brainer no one could disagree with.

I disagree completely. This is how speed and red light cameras operate in my country. If you weren't the one driving, it's straight forward to show that. The other party can admit to the offence or you can present evidence including the camera itself. The burden is low. Camera infractions do not carry license demerit points because of this ongerent uncertainty.

What's the alternative? Use even more valuable police resources to issue these tickets? Or just not penalize dangerous infractions?

>Or just not penalize dangerous infractions?

Perhaps needing to show these are dangerous infractions should come first?

I mean this entire case was the state attempting to have its case and eat it too.

These US states considered them moving infractions with points. Now the state must adjust by removing points or doing its due diligence.

Steve Lehto has an analysis of the opinion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VinCGmdj-jQ

One interesting point is that the Judge also spent some ink criticizing the law because paying the ticket removes the ticket from your driving record. This means that habitual bad drivers can get away with the same infractions over and over again as long as they pay the fines quickly. This bypasses the State’s points system that was designed to punish repeat offenders by taking away their license.

I wonder how other state’s red–light camera laws hold up? Do they have the same flaws or are they written better?

Same flaws. It was all designed to make up for budget cuts and stayed when it made a dent. Once they got used to the money from it, they got complacent with how effective it actually was. This is Law Enforcement in America in a nut shell. They only care when they can’t make their pension plan payments. Rather than go out there and police, they have staffing shortages and rely on the private sector to provide services that allow them to “police” from afar or by an algorithm.

Loosely related:

There is a driver in NYC who gets almost 300 speeding tickets per year. They've paid their fines, so they're allowed to keep driving. Apparently, since the fines come from speed camera, they can't revoke their license.

https://www.jalopnik.com/1836395/worst-driver-in-ny-563-tick...

In Australia you will get a fine and demerit points for speeding or for running through a red light. The points don't go away even if you pay the fine. If you go through a year without infractions, one point will be taken off. I think that's a fair system. More details here [https://www.nsw.gov.au/driving-boating-and-transport/demerit...] and here [https://www.primelawyers.com.au/traffic-law/speeding-offence...]

Coming to the part about issuing fines to the registered owner, you can nominate a different driver online here, when replying to the fine. The person nominated need to accept this as well before it is taken off the person to whom the vehicle is registered to.

Right, many other countries let you point the finger at someone else. The problem is that in the US the government is not legally allowed to even issue a ticket unless they can prove that the person they are prosecuting is the guilty party. Merely being the owner of the car is not enough.

New Jersey abandoned their red-light camera laws after ticket challenges involving yellow-light lengths. The length should be proportional to the posted speed limit (e.g. 5.5 seconds for 50 mph), but many lights were found to have incorrect timing (e.g. 2.5 seconds for 50 mph).

Also, I think at that time some questionable arrangements surfaced between the operators of the automated ticketing system(s) and the towns and/or counties involved.

My city seems to be fixing this by having yellow lights extend when it sees a car reasonably close to the intersection. And also helps by switching lights quickly based on car presence.

> the Judge also spent some ink criticizing the law because paying the ticket removes the ticket from your driving record

Weird thing to point out, as in Florida, if you get any traffic citation, you just hire The Ticket Clinic for ~$80. If they don't get your ticket expunged or points eliminated, you get your money back. They don't lose often. You can keep racking up tickets, but not get any points, as long as you've got $80.

That's by design, and that's a good thing. Anything where the person actually driving the car can't be identified (i.e., tickets given by camera as opposed to in-person) shouldn't have any long term affect on anyone's personal records.

If you can't tell who was driving, you shouldn't be sending anyone a ticket.

You get a parking ticket regardless of who parked

Is there no distinction between standing and moving violations?

Yes, there is a distinction. But it’s irrelevant in this case because you can be ticketed for either. The speeding ticket goes to the registered owner and there are no demerit points as there is no proof of driver identity.

Either way, it's bizarre that blame-assignation is anything other than defaults-to-owner.

Wow, that's a huge problem with that red light camera program then. The drives that run red lights around me clearly don't care much for minor consequences. The point needs to be to identify the sociopathic drivers and get them off the road.

In my jurisdiction, the GP point is irrelevant because the biggest problem drivers just ignore the fines [1].

It's very common to just have fake plates / registration, with the plan in the case of an accident to just bail out and run.

[1] https://www.wmar2news.com/homepage-showcase/how-md-drivers-w...

You mistakenly believe that these camera systems are not functioning exactly as intended: they're a revenue stream. If they ended up shutting down the offenders that revenue stream would dry up. The sociopath you've identified is called a whale instead.

Not in my jurisdiction - the biggest offenders know that there's no collection mechanism with any teeth, so they just ignore the fines [1].

FWIW, despite all this the speed cameras have been effective at reducing average speeds at problem points.

[1] https://www.wmar2news.com/homepage-showcase/how-md-drivers-w...

NYC government has thought about the legality of red light cameras. What they made it legal is to have human law enforcement officers review ever single computer flagged speeding footages with zoom out license plates, putting enforcement officer's signature into the tickets mailed out. In the same ticket they also provided a signed affidavit from the red light camera technology vendor's technician who performs weekly technical maintenance to certify that the red light camera is functional proper at the designed technical specifications (violation speed was far exceeds the margin of errors of reported speed etc.) Thus, both signatures satisfied the legal due process in NY state law. And the red light camera tickets mailing out are legal and enforceable.

Sources:

1. yes I got them before when I was driving a lot in Queens, New York City had legal counsel regarding fighting these red light camera tickets.

2. NYC government is quadrupling those cameras as it's a really cheap way to increase municipal revenue and reduce traffic speed. It's working if you drive in Queens NYC you will notice most traffic obey to the speed limits. https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/1q8fm89/nyc_to_quadrup...

> What they made it legal is to have human law enforcement officers review ever single computer flagged speeding footages with zoom out license plates, putting enforcement officer's signature into the tickets mailed out.

Sound like, in typical NYC fashion, its also a great way to pad time for the NYPD and get some quid pro quo from their Union.

Surely the obvious next step is to charge the car itself with the crime of moving through a red light? Isn't that what civil forfeiture was supposed to be for? You're not getting a ticket, we're just impounding your car until someone bails it out...

Besides, it neatly solves the whole responsibility problem for self-driving car!

The car is then required to do X number of self driving rides for free until the total amount is paid off

Its baffling to me how the US cannot handle their traffic laws. How is there any doubt in running a red light? Why can they not let common sense handle it? Just fine the car owner without question. Car owners will think twice borrowing their cars. Easy detection, less bureaucracy. And hopefully safer streets.

>"I've been ticketed here twice, and it's ridiculous because they it's just not fair," one driver said who didn't want to be identified. The person that does the determination when you ran the light, it's just a random. Whoever they want to pick, pick you to say, okay, you're gonna pay the ticket."

This is the opposite of my understanding of red light cameras. I always considered the supposed impartial application of the traffic law as the main benefit.

This is funny quote. Is the driver even disputing that they were the driver? They seem like they're just mad they got caught.

Maybe they just stop running red lights?

I suspect this is some light with chronically-bad timing that gets run by tons of people every day. The camera is taking a photo with a bunch of vehicles in the frame and it's ticketing the one that had the license plate unobstructed, even if a few of the vehicles in the frame technically entered the intersection when the light was yellow.

Sometimes lights are just so poorly implemented, and drivers pass through them so often, it feels like whoever designed the intersection was actively goading drivers into running the light.

My hometown got busted making yellow lights shorter than the legally required duration, then hitting drivers with tickets for running a red light they couldn't have safely and reasonably avoided.

There are standards for this kind of thing, like if a light is on a road with a speed limit of X, then a yellow light has to last Y seconds. Imagine a yellow light that lasted .5s: you'd have to stand on your brakes and risk causing a rear end collision from the car behind you to even have a chance of not getting fined. That's the opposite of safety. My place wasn't that bad, but a defendant successfully demonstrated that the yellow light he was tricked by was illegally short, and a judge basically threw out all the tickets from it and others.

I mention this as just one example of specific light setups that suck. I bet you're right, and this is just a money grab from the local gov't.

Read this if you want to be angry today: https://ww2.motorists.org/blog/6-cities-that-were-caught-sho...

In same states they also mark the intersection start where the curb ends and not at the crosswalk starts, so you think since you passed the crosswalk under yellow you are safe to proceed but you have not yet entered the intersection.

Is this the case where instead of admitting to it, the municipality attempted to have the complainant prosecuted for practicing engineering without a licence?

No, that was Oregon's turn to be Embarrassment of the Week: https://ij.org/press-release/oregon-engineer-wins-traffic-li...

In my city they synchronized the light so that each one turns red just as the pack of cars is reaching it. To be clear the obvious implication I'm making is that they did this to increase the chance someone would run the light and increase revenue.

This does mean that if you're in the front of the pack and go about 15 over the speed limit, you won't "catch" the red light.

When you're not in the front of the pack it can be frustrating trying to travel just 3 or 4 miles with the red lights not even a full half mile from each other. Even late at night if you follow the speed limit, you are penalized. You will sit at every red light and look at the vast stretch of nothingness that has the right of way.

If they didn't do this to generate red light revenue, they could have done this to generate more revenue from the gas tax they collect by making people start & stop more often, and from sitting in traffic longer. But I suppose both things could be true. And no, I won't accept any other plausible explanations (/s, but holy heck is government awful here).

I haven't run into those (I mostly drive in rural areas--in fact, there's no stoplight in my county) -- but I do run into some lights that just change in the middle of the night, for no reason, and then take a really long time to change back to green, despite not even a single car being present / going through.

Lights with sensors have a backup pattern of timed changes so that you won’t get stuck at a light where the sensor isn’t seeing your car.

> Maybe they just stop running red lights?

Some lights change timing depending on the time of day so e.g. rush hour might have different timing than midday or late night.

I also believe there are and likely still are cases of malicious short yellow lights at camera intersections to increase revenue.

If someone is using your car they cant legally give you a ticket. If the picture taken doesnt clearly show you theoretically it needs to be dropped but of course thats not how it works in reality

Seems silly. Just attach the ticket to the car itself and then the registered owner can handle obtaining payment from whoever was driving the car.

If the registered owner wants to claim that someone stole their car or was operating it without permission then there can be some very hefty punishment for making false statements if it can be proved that it was actually the owner in the car.

I believe the issue is that moving violations often give you points on your license. If it was just a fine I think they could put it on the car, but because the of the potential loss of a license they need to actually have evidence of a person committing the violation.

I suppose they could also put the points on the car and impound it after it accrues enough points to have a drivers license suspended. Hard to drive if you don’t have a car.

In North America, from what I understand, the issue is that the authorities need to verify your identity in order to ticket you and traffic cameras don’t do that whereas a police officer does.

I agree the automated systems are impartial, but they cannot ID you without it becoming super invasive.

In Europe and places with more omnipresent cameras, the laws are such that they can ticket you without needing to ID. The car gets the ticket so to speak.

It depends on whether the ticket is considered a criminal or civil matter in the US.

For a criminal case, yes, they need to prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" - which would require that you are positively identified as the driver.

For a civil case, they only need to prove by a "preponderance of the evidence" - which is a much lower standard.

This is why tickets from red-light cameras in many states are zero-point citations. You're still charged a fine, but there's no finding of guilt attached to the offense, which keeps it away from being considered a criminal matter. (This is the same way parking tickets work.)

I guess the car could require inserting a driver's license in order to start, and then store records of who was driving at what time.

What does "North America" have to do with Florida?

I'm in Canada and they issue you a fine without any ID. It goes straight to the registered car owner. Simple as.

The issue is that currently in FL there are points / demerits issued for violations, and these can cause the loss of a license, increases to insurance, etc. This is not a problem if an officer can ID you directly.

In Brazil, you can identify who was driving the car and they will get charged with the fine and get the points on their licence. You can do it all using an app on your phone. It's really simple.

I don't know what happens if the other person denies it though.

Many US states have switched to that approach. The ticket goes to the registered owner of the vehicle and no penalty points are attached. It's treated more like a parking citation than a traditional moving violation.

Systems don’t necessarily react based on the legal situation. A red light camera that’s improperly installed, poorly maintained, etc could essentially act randomly from a drivers perspective.

... which is why they are supposed to be regularly calibrated by an independent third party - with tickets automatically being void if law enforcement can't prove that it was functioning properly.

Sure in theory, in practice the incentives don’t align for local governments to particularly care if these things actually work well.

Here there was no attempt to photograph the driver rather than just assume the owner was responsible or would point to the responsible party.

Which is why they are supposed to have a sworn officer review the camera footage. I have certainly had a camera flash me while waiting to turn right on red, still outside the intersection. They never sent me a ticket however since I had clearly not done anything illegal.

There are too many examples of them rubber-stamping.

This person is not articulating it well but I think they are complaining that the person identified as the driver is random. Presumably the camera can impartially identify a car running a light, but not necessarily who is driving.

"I've been ticketed here twice, and it's ridiculous because they - it's just not fair. The person that - [let me start over] - the determination when you ran the light [of who is responsible], it's just a random whoever they want to pick ... [they] pick you to say, okay, you're gonna pay the ticket."

Obviously it's not actually random, it just defaults to the vehicle's owner, but with a generous reading I think you can interpret the quote this way based on the context of the article.

I think it's kind of irresponsible and lazy for the publication to use a verbatim verbal quote like this, when it isn't from someone notable who really needs to be quoted. If you don't understand what they're saying then don't put it in the article, and if you do understand then put in a sentence explaining what they're saying.

Everywhere I've been, the owner of the car gets the ticket, and it's up to them to figure out if they were driving, or if not them, collect from whomever they loaned the car to.

No camera I've ever seen tries to figure out who the driver is.

The logic is, it's your car, you're responsible for loaning it/owning it, so you get the fine. Don't like that? Don't loan your car out.

The trade off is no points are deducted from a driver's license. It's a pure fine, because they can't prove you were driving.

So the person just seems to be speaking gibberish to me.

edit:

More context...

The same logic applies for parking tickets. No one cares who parked the car, the car's owner gets the ticket... not the person who parked it. While I dislike red light cameras, the logic holds.

> … the owner of the car gets the ticket, and it's up to them to figure out if they were driving, …

That's exactly what makes it unconstitutional here in the US. The Constitution specifically requires that they have evidence of who committed the crime _before_ charging someone with it. If you do it the other way around then you are making an assumption about who is guilty in advance of the evidence.

It's not a crime, it's a fine, and are you suggesting parking tickets don't exist in the US?

I've never gotten an automated ticket so I don't know what is normal. It doesn't seem insane to give it to the vehicle owner, but I can certainly understand feeling indignant about getting a ticket for something you didn't do, especially if it's a new process.

That somebody got nailed twice suggests to me that they are at least making borderline yellow-light decisions, if not running the red outright. I doubt they actually know anything about how tickets are handed out, claiming it's just some guy handing them out at random is flagrant cope.

Lmao why. Stop driving through red light, stop speeding. Ya fuckers.

In the UK it's ridiculous, barely any speed cameras and those that are there are clearly marked (legally have to be). Everyone just slows down for the speed cameras and then start speeding again after.

I've actually heard people say that the above is effective because it makes people slow down where it's important. Or, you know how about people just don't fucken speed in general?

If it were up to me they'd be everywhere, totally unmarked and all revenue from fines would go to charitable causes to rule out the "but they just do it for da money!11" bs - no, they're doing it to stop people speeding and killing someone for fuck's sake.

Stop speeding.

Except cameras don't increase safety. You say it yourself that everyone just speeds up after the camera.

Getting a ticket also does nothing to prevent you from speeding in the first place (the ticket does not arrive to you instantly, you're still speeding on the road).

Road safety is an infrastructure problem, but it is always easier and cheaper to just put a camera and collect money. While designing roads that you cannot go too fast, and actually building them cost money.

They just want the cheapest option to say "we did something". Not the safest.

I was pulled over for having a non-obstructive frame on my license plate. The officer said they interfere with the red light cameras. He then presented me with a screwdriver and gave me the option of getting a ticket or taking it off. I took the screwdriver and he watched me take it off. I lost a freedom due to a shitty ml model.

Time to paint your rear-end chrome.

Just put it back on? In my state, that would not be a stoppable offense anyway if we had red light cameras (too easy to abuse).

Well if this abuse is common the fines should rise. How would you enforce it otherwise?

One thing that seems reasonable is to have car points and driver points. In the event of violations, both the vehicle and the driver are assigned points depending on detection. Then after a certain number of points, the vehicle is impounded with the owner able to have it stored at an appropriately licensed facility of their choice that ensures that the vehicle cannot be driven on public roads.

Reporting vehicle theft etc. can provide immunity from points on the car.

That seems extremely unreasonable, cops can prove who was driving at the time of the violation or they can not bring a case. If I lend my car to someone and they break the law, it’s not the car’s fault.

I’m glad my state found these unconstitutional as well.

Well, objects used in the commission of a crime are frequently confiscated. That's not outrageous. If I lend someone my gun and they rob a bank, I will likely not get my gun back though "it's not the gun's fault". Automated machinery has the advantage that it is impartial and effective, and given that law enforcement costs a lot in these circumstances, and that chasing cars for small enforcement violations creates worse outcomes, it seems thoroughly reasonable to apply the crime to the detectable object.

Yep. Cars are horrifically dangerous and we treat them like toys. It's part of driver culture in the US and why we'll never design for public transportation.

Having driven in the UK and coming back to the US I miss all of the roundabouts. Any reason (aside from contractor profits) towns use 4-way traffic light systems vs a roundabout and some yield signs?

A perpendicular intersection uses way less area than a roundabout. That's the basic reason.

Roundabouts have better throughput than a busy 4-way stop, but less throughput than a signaled intersection if the timing and sensing is reasonable (many signaled intersections don't have reasonable sensing). Roundabouts also have some pretty nasty worst case wait times; I'm really not looking forward to the state installing one near me on the approach to a car ferry; it won't be fun to wait for 200 cars to go by before you get a turn to go, and I expect long ferry lines to result in impatient people in the ferry line blocking the roundabout. Sometimes there's two hours between ferry loadings. Going to be some fun times.

Personally, I find it challenging to both look ahead to the right to confirm I have room to enter the roundabout, look to the left to confirm there is no traffic that I need to wait for, as well as looking far left and right to ensure there are no pedestrians crossing soon. Signaled 4-way perpendicular intersections have worse outcomes when a participant doesn't follow the signalling, but indication of right of way makes it easier to confirm at a glance if it's safe to proceed.

> A perpendicular intersection uses way less area than a roundabout.

That’s not actually true. It’s entirely possible for them to have the same footprint.

Nitpicking: roundabouts that small may be entirely impassible to truck hauling a standard trailer.

Personally, I think we could replace a LOT of stoplights with roundabouts. Way better throughput and faster travel for everyone.

Traffic lights can be tuned to create "green waves" that allows for efficient flow of traffic along arteries through a city. You can adjust the timing throughout the day to help alleviate congestion. In rural areas, heavy machinery/commercial vehicles may need to make a very wide turn through the intersection. Traffic circles are fine for a lot of applications but they aren't strictly better than lights in all circumstances.

I don't see how that could possibly be true. The same flow has to be achieved either way, and lights will always have some margin of inefficiency in switching. Seems lights will always be strictly worse than roundabouts in this sense.

There are also solutions for large vehicles where the center is raised but not impassible.

You over estimate the intelligence of the average American. I've lived in a few cities with a number of roundabouts and while I love them, the number of stupid people that panic and..

-stop in the roundabout

-stop before the roundabout and let their brain buffer for 30 seconds.

-somehow go the wrong way in the roundabout

-fail to yield to traffic in the roundabout

Is way too damn high. It makes traversing one a high stress situation since you have no idea if grandpa grunt and run in to you is about to perform a confusion based terror attack on the traffic control device.

LOL.. stop before the roundabout and let their brain buffer for 30 seconds

As with most things, it’s just history. Roundabouts were invented here in the US, but the inventor made a tiny but critical mistake. Originally drivers inside the roundabout had to yield to drivers entering it. Obviously we know now that this leads inevitably to gridlock during heavy traffic, but back then it wasn’t so obvious. The result is that roundabouts were written off as a bad idea, and signalized intersections (also invented around the same time) took off instead.

Having driven in both, Americans don't take naturally to roundabouts and it would be difficult to teach all the existing drivers about them. Same in the UK when they add new rules: most drivers remain completely unaware of them.

The only difference is Americans aren't yet used to them because they're uncommon. You fix that by making them common. It's not like there's a genetic difference in Europe that makes them capable of roundabouts and Americans not.

Roundabouts were introduced in the UK back when car penetration was low and every learner for decades has been indoctrinated into how to use them. It's the education piece that's the problem. People don't intuitively understand roundabouts and you can't magically send that knowledge to millions of existing drivers.

In some sense you have to start sometime, but there's going to be pushback from the accidents and injuries that will certainly happen in the interim.

There’s nothing complicated about roundabouts: entering it is like joining the traffic from a parking lot/your own driveway, exiting it is like exiting a highway.

It's not exactly the same though

You yield to traffic from the left, which mean someone from a leftward entrance has priority, but they can actually be blocked by other traffic. So you have to not only consider yielding to them, but also whether they are yielding to someone else, thus giving you space to go. I see this computation mess people up all the time.

Also, judging intentions is much harder. On a multi-lane highway, it's very clear when someone is cutting across lanes to exit. And there's only one place they can be exiting. On a multi-lane roundabout, they might be taking the exit before your entrance, or the one after. Often people won't be signalling, or even giving incorrect signals.

When joining as well, if I'm emerging onto a busy road with two lanes in the direction I'm going, I will probably accept joining when the nearest lane is clear, even if the next lane is not, as long as the cars there don't look to be moving into the nearest lane. On a roundabout people can peel off at any time, and you should really wait until there's a gap in all lanes.

Come to Massachusetts, we have a lot of roundabouts and even a few old style two lane rotaries.

I've driven them.. fantastic and no technology to go wrong.

Space/land; you have to displace and buy the four corner properties (at least) to put one in.

The issue with police departments trying to maximize fine revenue has a simple solution.. pass a law that says all fines go directly to the treasury.

A similar law could eliminate most of the problems with civil forfeiture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VinCGmdj-jQ He's a lawyer and describes it in excellent detail.

One side issues the judge brought up is that no points go on the driver's record with a red light camera offense. The entire point of the points system is to get bad drivers off the road. But people can have numerous red light infractions and still keep their license.

The US could be be such an amazing place...

Meanwhile the solution to this problem in the UK is to reaffirm that you are in fact guilty by default unless by happenstance you are determined not to be by an unfairly chosen panel of blind and deaf mice.

It seems like the law was poorly written. If it is civil, automated speeding tickets and red light tickets should be just added to the registration cost. If it is criminal, you definitely need to identify the person in order to prove they are guilty.

It should be noted that red light cameras were NOT found unconstitutional as a thing, BUT Florida (and many other states) implementation of them was. And I think the judge used very good, solid reasoning.

Minnesota is in a strange place where they were ruled unconstitutional, and they disappeared for many years. Now they are back, and to get around that they are not a misdemeanor, aren't a ding against your license or insurance, and you're under no obligation to pay them.

Fun fact! This is the second time red light camera tickets have been successfully challenged.

I believe the first time it was because the photos were processed out of state. Apparently it didn't stick!

Florida did something good for once?

Here's a novel idea: Let the citizens vote on whether they want red-light cameras or not.

I suspect the result would be dependant on the specifics. How much is the fine, and how much of a delay after the red triggers a ticket. Sounds like they are set at $158?

Red light camera fines, like all sin taxes, should be made revenue neutral.

By that you mean the fines should be made much higher, right? Because traffic crashes have a huge economic cost.

Set the fines to any level, it doesn't matter.

I only mean that all revenues collected from the fines must be distributed to the public at large. They must never be treated as a revenue source for the government.

Sin taxes are meant to reduce bad behavior - or incentivize good behavior. Ideally you'd collect $0 in red-light fines because everyone's following the law. If some politician's budget or private company's revenue stream depends on traffic fines they have adverse incentives. I don't want my city council member voting against traffic safety initiatives because it makes people better drivers and that means less money for some other city program.

Where does the fine money go? Building more red-light cameras?

Back to taxpayers. Subtract only the cost of installing and maintaining the cameras and aggressively audit that annually. Cut everyone a check at the end of the year. Buy each household a pony. Have a really good 4th of July fireworks display. It doesn't matter, as long as the government can't spend it for any government program. (And actually the pony and fireworks programs might be susceptible to corruption - just send a check)

Or in the case of a private company contracted to run the cameras, don't give a private company a contract to run the cameras. At least not a contract where they get paid in proportion to the fines collected.

No one should profit off bad behavior. No government program's funding should have to depend on people driving badly.

bike lanes, pedestrianized streets, and public transit

That sounds like an easy obvious win. But see then you've made bike lanes and public transit depend on funding from car drivers, specifically ones who run red lights. When what you want as a bicyclist are safer drivers. And what you want as a bus rider is fewer cars.

You're putting those public services and their sources of funding in conflict with each other.

Real world, sin taxes lead to sin.

Explain. Is this like "guys walking with rifles in the woods cause deer"?

I mean, thats also a thing in abstract.

We have this issue with imported deer, that the local hunters will gladly reduce their population, but not to zero. And baits and other methods are prohibited. Deer were likely imported for hunting, and hunters effectively protect the species from eradication by killing off their competition (roos mostly), and permitting them to breed within limits. Not to mention trying to protect them politically.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-05/hunters-call-for-end-...

So yeah, guys walking with rifles in the woods cause deer.

https://www.law.gmu.edu/pubs/papers/ls15_36

Palantir found their next contract for facial recognition. Palatir x Flock collab soon?

I know this is not related to the legal merits of the case being discussed, but who runs a red light? In my experience, this is an infarction that occurs very infrequently. Speeding or illegal parking happen all the time, but running a red light? Most people are not suicidal.

Edit: Nevermind, I think crossing on yellow and catching a tenth of a second of red counts as running a red light. If it does, it’s something I did myself a few times (of course, all in the distant past, the statute of limitations has pased now …)

Where I live, it's common to see at least one person run a red at every major intersection and not just for left turns that couldn't be made due to cross-traffic. Quite often these drivers have expired temp tags which means they don't have insurance because you have to show you registered your vehicle to get insurance. Enforcement is awful so people have been trained to realize there's virtually no consequences to their bad habits. And if they do cause an accident, well it's not like the police will show up in time to stop them from driving off.

In fact, it's so bad that parts of the metro are reinstating red light cameras this year despite having decommissioned them years ago for similar legal reasons as what Florida has run into.

>drivers have expired temp tags

Then the state needs to start doing immediate impoundment of these vehicles. Add on massive fines before release of the car for repeat offenders and you'll see this dry up pretty quick.

The city supposedly did an enforcement weekend on it last year. It was so ineffective that the state actually changed registration laws so that you pay the sales tax when you purchase a car at the dealership and then you get your plate in the mail. That doesn't go into effect until late this year and I won't be surprised if it gets pushed back before then.

Fairly common for me to see my light turn green and 2-3 more cars continue turning left in front of me through a red light. And not just yellow-light clippers, but cars that would have fully entered the intersection under a red light.

I'm actually all for impartial enforcement of traffic rules via camera systems, but there are problems that need to be solved.

- There need to be standards for evidence required to assign an infraction to a driver.

- There need to be standards for setting yellow light durations to avoid municipalities reducing them to increase revenue

- There needs to be protection against municipalities outsourcing the whole project to a private entity where there is a combined financial incentive from the private entity and the municipality to issue more tickets without adequate oversight.

My town implemented red light cameras around 15 years ago and then took them back out. Locals noticed shortened yellow lights, and there were multiple issues found with how the private operator issued the tickets and with their contract with the municipality.

I live in Baltimore and straight-up running of reds is pretty common here.

You can often do it pretty safely - stopped at a light with good visibility to see that there is no cross traffic. But also some people are just insane and blast through lights at 45 without stopping.

Cops haven't cared to enforce it for going on a decade.

The worst drivers do it a lot more than good drivers.

Running reds is a favorite pastime of Boston area drivers. Enter just after the yellow and buzz the pedestrians waiting, lurk in the middle of the road and make a left turn once oncoming traffic is stopped for the red, or just blow it for the hell of it.

> lurk in the middle of the road and make a left turn once oncoming traffic is stopped for the red

In the jurisdictions I'm familiar with, this is the proper way to make a left-hand turn. Many intersections are designed such that this is the only realistic way to ever turn left (high traffic, no left arrow).

Most red light rules are written against entering the intersection on red. If you're already in the intersection, you're allowed to safely proceed through and out of the intersection on red. That can be challenging, of course, if oncoming traffic is running the red light.

The vast majority of red light tickets are people not coming to a complete stop behind the line on right turns on red.

Where I live people run them routinely to make left turns. The light timing and spacing are bad, so at some intersections people will keep turning left long past the turn red. There are also several intersections where people cross but get stuck in the middle because another light has to change for traffic to move.

This is a silly example but in Los Angeles, there are hardly any protected left hand turns so the standard behavior is to wait for the light to turn red and two cars proceed before the next traffic group continues. Police even do this.

San Francisco also has a good number of unprotected left turns. Cities are just asking for trouble.

I mean I’ve run red lights but only because I live in a city and there are times where it would be impossible to turn left due to oncoming traffic. So you poke your nose out a bit so the other directions see you and turn when incoming stops but before new directions start.

Depending on where you live it is very common. In chicago when they installed the cameras they lowered the yellow duration to like half a second so people were constantly running them for a while. Then running yellows became normalized, and just ignoring lights from bikers which drivers noticed, and now when traffic is low its not uncommon to see people just treat lights as stop signs if they think no one is coming.

Yep, the states acted like aunts to get more money and have made the whole system more unsafe for everyone.

Anyone involved in those yellow light lowering schemes should have been criminally charged.

> "I've been ticketed here twice, and it's ridiculous because they it's just not fair," one driver said who didn't want to be identified.

Of course they don't want to be identified after blankly admitting they were ticketed; i.e. they were the one driving, in fact.

Entitled prick: running red lights, and crying "unfair".

> The person that does the determination when you ran the light, it's just a random. Whoever they want to pick, pick you to say, okay, you're gonna pay the ticket."

Complete nonsense; why is the article even quoting this mouth breather?

These cameras work in terms of determining that the given vehicle was involved in the alleged violation. There is nothing random about it. It's not randomly pinning a drummed up allegation on vehicles not involved in a violation. The choice of pinning the ticket on the registered owner is also not random.

Typically these systems take at least two shots, moments apart, one showing the vehicle not yet in the intersection (whose traffic light is clearly red) and then the same vehicle in the intersection a split second later, providing evidence that the vehicle entered the intersection on a red.

>Of course they don't want to be identified after blankly admitting they were ticketed; i.e. they were the one driving, in fact.

In context of this article, being ticketed does not require to be the person driving.

You don't say things like "I was ticketed here twice" if it was someone else using your car.

This is going to be the year of refunds from the government.

The ripple effects for automotive liability will be interesting to watch here. For a long time, insurance companies have viewed these citations as an easy signal for high-risk behavior. If that signal is now legally 'poisoned fruit' in Florida, it likely makes the move toward private telematics tracking your actual braking and speed via apps even more inevitable for the carriers. They are going to want that risk data one way or another, and private tracking bypasses the due process issues of municipal cameras.

The HN title is factually incorrect. As the article's title and text state, it was Florida's specific law that was declared unconstitutional, and not because of red light cameras.

Stephen Ruth sends his regards.

whether you want a network of cameras tracking every vehicle through every intersection is a different question that nobody voted on

Before getting too excited - note that it's just a County Court Judge. So the ruling only applies in one of Florida's 67 counties.

just means they will install more cameras to capture driver faces or buy cellphone data

Cellphone data is not sufficient to prove who is operating a vehicle

the judge probably also got a ticket

Interesting - the constitution protects people for so many years now.

[dead]

Great. Ban speed cameras next. They’re just performative safetyism used as revenue sources or by activists on an anti car quest. But I actually suspect all of this will somehow be twisted into something neither side expects, which is mass surveillance and tech grift.

[flagged]

They’re only proven to unnecessarily slow the flow of traffic and create inconvenience for the majority of people, and revenue for mismanaged local governments. That’s not a right wing thing, it’s just reality. Not to mention I’m not sure how you’re drawing this weird political association here in the first place.

The problem with red-light cameras is that enforcement becomes robotic. Robots are perfect—they don’t make mistakes (at least in theory), and they don’t show leniency. If policing is done by robots, then humans are expected to be infallible.

This is a complete non-issue. It's a traffic light, you are supposed to stop when it turns yellow! The yellow is the leniency. If you can't manage to stop before it turns red, you are either: 1) speeding, 2) driving a vehicle with defective brakes, or 3) mentally impaired. In all three cases you are a danger to fellow road users.

Besides, it's not a "the machine says so and not even the Supreme Court can overturn it" scenario. If there's genuinely a reason to cross into the intersection while the lights are red (such as there having been an accident, and a cop is temporarily managing traffic) the ticket will be waived. Heck, there will probably even be photographic evidence of it!

Most countries even have cops judge the tickets, just to already filter out those weird cases. The registration is done by a robot, but the policing is still done by a human.

Or you have a heavy, inbalanced object in your car you don't want sliding, something fragile in tow you don't want to have fast decelaration, or just don't have super-human reaction time since some light have extremely fast yellows.

Or, a deer jumped out on the side and you briefly looked away at it.

Or you could tell the driver behind you wasn't slowing down, so the safer option is to go.

Or. Or. Or. Real life is messy, and there's a million reasons to go though a yellow instead of slowing down.

Most of those excuses just make you a bad driver.

> Most countries even have cops judge the tickets, just to already filter out those weird cases. The registration is done by a robot, but the policing is still done by a human.

This is common in the US as well. The machine takes the picture, filters out the illegible ones, and sends the rest to an actual officer who will issue the ticket.

Huh? No, you don't stop if it turns yellow, you yield.

> and they don’t show leniency. If policing is done by robots, then humans are expected to be infallible.

This is bad when applied to laws that were written with an exception of leniency and selectivity in enforcement, which is quite a lot of them. For running red lights though? I don't mind if the robots take you off the road automatically.

Running red lights? That's not all the cameras are used for. If are making a right turn on red and didn't come to a complete stop first you can get a ticket.

But why would you do that? Especially if you know there are robots enforcing that you come to a complete stop?

There are many places that don't even allow rights (or lefts) on red.

I got a right on red ticket once, and then I made it a point to obey the law -- especially at the intersections with the robots.

For things like traffic laws especially (where there are very simple cut and dry rules), why is it okay to break the law, and why is it not okay for robots to enforce the law?

Why did you break the law, and why do you still break the law when you know you won’t get caught?

Okay? Rolling through a red light is dangerous whether you do it straight or to the right. Hell, the latter probably kills more pedestrians. I don't really mind holding drivers to high standards.

> If are making a right turn on red and didn't come to a complete stop first you can get a ticket.

As you should.

> If policing is done by robots, then humans are expected to be infallible

The reality is that the people doing the policing are counting on humans not being infallible

Fines have become an important revenue stream, that's why they are being automated.

Now that this is becoming more widespread, there's a perverse incentive for governments to maximize the difficulty in avoiding fines. Lower the speed limit on roads designed for higher speeds for "safety", etc

> that's why they are being automated

There are many citizens, like me, begging for red light cameras so something can be done about the rash of crashes and killings from willfully reckless drivers.

Is there proof that red light cameras increase safety? I would expect an increase in rear-end crashes after red light cameras are installed, with a slight decrease in fatal t-bone accidents.

I wouldn’t expect them to make driving safer for anyone, as enforcement doesn’t do anything to moderate the behavior of people that just don’t give a shit.

Why would a willfully reckless driver care about a camera?

In my experience preventative measures only work on people who are conscientious, they do not work on people who do not give a shit

Then the camera lets us identify and take reckless drivers off the road.

> Fines have become an important revenue stream, that's why they are being automated

Maybe we should legislate traffic fines out of existence, and just use points. Or at the very least the fines should never go back in any recognizable way to the budget of the police doing the enforcement.

Subjectivity in applying the law is a huge problem, especially given how corrupt and violent police are. Red light cameras remove police from the equation for that infraction and apply the law evenly. They also scale in a way that police just can't, and that's extremely important for safety.

I live in a city where red light running is an epidemic. Drivers flagrantly just don't stop, and it kills people all the time. Red light cameras - plus actually revoking drivers licenses, and then actually throwing people in jail for driving on suspended licenses - are the only way to fix this.

It's far past time that drivers are no longer immune to consequences for violent, sociopathic behavior.

“all the time”

When was the last person killed by someone running a red light? When was the time before that?

We have red light cameras here in Tampa. I don't know all the details of what it takes to make a right on red and not get a ticket, so I do exaggerated stops to be sure. I know what the law claims but that doesn't matter. The real law is the actual (proprietary) code rumning in the machine. Not what the law says. Not what the contract says. Not what the requirements say. Not what the programmer thinks the code does.

No, the real law is what's written by the Tampa/Florida legislature (or I guess you could say the "real real" law is judges' interpretations of what is written). While it may be inconvenient, if you are falsely issued a ticket while following the real law you can have the ticket thrown out.

What kind of time and money and opportunity cost would it take to right this wrong?

I don't know for sure because I don't live in Tampa, but it is generally free (minus the opportunity cost of your time) for these types of tickets, no lawyer or other expense required.

This is the correct take. And it's frustrating! To fix the problem an individual has to fight a huge, multi-party system (law, jurisdiction, police, tech-provider) - it's a (near) impossible feat for a person.

Sorry, but what is the concern, that you don't know when you've crossed a red light? Or that the software is too stupid to know when a light was red?

This is a great argument for fines indexed to the price of the car, and non-linearly with speed and value and repeated occurrences.

Fine = 2 ^v^2 ^n^2 ^p^2

Where v is velocity % higher than the speed limit, n is the number of speeding occurrences in the past 12 months, p is the normalised price of the vehicle. Obviously these parameters could be tweaked.

The result should be that frequent violations cost much more, cost is proportional to the increased danger, and rich people feel the cost of violations.

Or they can just hire more police and deter crime with actual hard work instead of building a nanny state running social experiments based on how nice your car appears.

I can see that you have sand in your underpants about getting infringements for breaking the law. It is obviously uneconomic to have very expensive police officers enforce traffic crime when automated cameras are so effective. What you are really arguing for is individual exceptionalism for rich people to violate speed limits.

It isn't a "social experiment" to deter crime, and calibrating punishment to have an actual deterrent effect has a long precedent. If it is "nanny state" policy to set speed limits that penalise repeat offenders and hoons in high powered cars, you will find it has broad community support.

These are already unconstitutional in Tennessee — yet the private company still sends out violation notices (with a payment address).

Nothing happens if you don't pay them; state congressmen have burned their own citations publicly.

Red light running is bad...but I think the solution to this problem at this point is just "self driving cars". With some exceptions, I would just focus all jurisdictions on this future and avoid policy inline with a world full of self driving cars. Currently in the US, most places feel like you need a car, and many US laws are designed with this in mind. In 5 years, this will no longer be true, so laws should reflect:

1. No parking minimums 2. Less free parking (e.g. street parking) 3. Policy supportive of self driving cars 4. More aggressive removal of driver licenses for human drivers with repeat violations 5. More aggressive penalties for driving without a license.

Most people like to drive and don't share your views, and it will be that way in five years too.

I’m skeptical.

The average cost of car ownership is $0.69 per mile without insurance, $0.25 per mile to store it, and $0.49 per mile in societal costs (death, injuries, delays due to accidents). So about $1.43 per mile. I do not enjoy driving, so would add more cost per mile, maybe some would want to pay more but I do t see that much joyriding outside of teenagers and classic car enthusiasts, so I don’t think those that do it for pleasure is a large population.

Tesla cybercab is targeting $0.20 per mile. Waymo projections are $0.40 per mile by 2030. Assuming both hit $0.50 and are twice as safe, this is basically $0.75 per mile.

I don’t see may paying more to drive themselves. And I think as society there will be non economic reasons human driven cars get banned. Like MADD but for human cars.

So I expect 5 years and human cars will not make sense in many cases, 10 years new human car sales to be <50% current levels, 15 years you start seeing bans. 20 years bans common.

I like to drive. I support taking asshole drivers' licenses. They ruin my driving experience.