Then cities should adopt the yield signs that say that. I agree our system could be much smarter. So may timer-driven systems would be better if the computer knew the presence and number of cars, pedestrians, bikes, etc.

I could support this if you combined it with criminal and civil liability when you guess wrong and run someone over while blowing your stop-sign. Right now, that's a $500 ticket at best, and it happens every day.

The whole problem is that people don't look for pedestrians -- they look for another car that might hit them. So they are looking the wrong way. And then they tell the cops some sob-story about how the dead pedestrian "came out of nowhere".

> If you slow down, and verify that everything is clear, then that objective is achieved even if you don't come to a complete stop.

There are too many failure points there to trust mediocre meat sacks to follow that process correctly. Remember that driving rules and restrictions are not written assuming an alert, effective, and skilled driver operating a well maintained vehicle, they are written assuming an average person who has successfully completed a driver's test driving something that passes basic road worthiness checks.

The problem is that you can't always tell that there are no pedestrians or crossing traffic unless you take enough time to come to a complete stop. There are plenty of stop signs where that's not true, but also plenty where it is, and it's not always clear which one it is to the driver.

I think the right fix here isn't total enforcement nor relaxed enforcement, but relaxed signage. If sight lines are good enough that it's safe to roll through, that should be a yield, not a stop. Stop should mean, you actually need to come to a complete stop to safely navigate this intersection. Then you can enforce it without qualms.

I think that’s what lead to round-a-bouts. It forced slowing down without requiring a stop unless necessary.

With computer vision the case of checking for pedestrians in the vicinity is trivial. So these cameras are definitely worth it for that

I do disagree about the rolling stop though. After drunk driving, drivers getting too relaxed and working off of predictive execution has to be the biggest cause of road accidents. A driver rolling past a stop at high speed in a school zone cant react fast enough to kids running past or even just walking on predictive execution themselves because they think the car will stop.

Obviously there are degrees to rolling stops. one so slow that the driver can react easily (and is scanning so they can see the thing they need to react to) is fine, but some of the "rolling stops" ive seen in residential neighborhoods are crazy. Those definitely need to be made an example of.

Obviously thats when police discretion comes in. The police officer is the one issuing the ticket at the end of the day, so you need to trust that law enforcement wont be corrupt and pedantic. No amount of technology is gonna fix that

Worse than that is in my city they decided to add a forced stop to pedestrians crossing a round a bout so if you’re in the roundabout and a pedestrian wants to cross you have to stop before exiting the round about which defeats the purpose of a roundabout…

There's nothing wrong with pointing an unloaded gun at someone. There's no bullets in it, so what's the harm. You can even put your finger on the trigger without any real danger

Laws, rules, morays, norms etc. are in place for the "lowest common denominator", wether that be malicious people, people with impairments, older drivers, newer drivers etc. etc.

you as a human of course know not to hit a person walking thru an intersection. But a drunk person might think "eh I never fully stop and I don't see anyone".

We must all follow the rules to a TEE, ie; stopping even if completely clear, to signal to the lowest common denominators "this is the rule, you must stop regardless."

If this where not the case, by your logic, you can blow thru red lights, make left turns on red, drive against traffic etc. "as long as it's clear."

I personally am okay with enshittification of AI traffic cams if it promotes more aggressive traffic compliance. The police sure aren't.

Spoken like a C programmer!

> Nothing wrong with a "rolling stop" if the sight lines are good and there are no pedestrians or crossing traffic.

Why bother rolling the stop, it should be ok to blow through it at full speed if you're sure it's clear.

This works for emergency vehicles

It's just optimizing the reward function. The traffic ticket maximizer is the paperclip maximizer's sibling.

I'm just speculating. But people in US in general drive a lot further for everything.

Most of shops i visit , other family members, my job , parks etc are all within about 5km of me.

The longest drive i do to visit a family member is 90km, every few months.

Anytime i've visited the US even going to the nearest shop seemed like a very long drive.

So if all other things are equal, theres just more opportunity for accidents.

EU has much higher training and licensing requirements in general.

In the US a 15 year old can get a learner's permit and start driving (with an adult) the same day. They can be licensed to drive on their own at 16 by passing a fairly cursory written exam and a short road test. No formal/classroom instruction is required.

Possible causes for this include the prevalence of really large SUVs, which make it physically much more difficult to even see pedestrians - especially children.

Another part is truck design. Same reason: American trucks have elongated noses for the engine, whereas European trucks have the driver sitting directly above the engine.

On top of that, European countries have much more strict testing requirements on vehicles. Basically, every 2-4 years you have to have your vehicle inspected for roadworthiness - foundational stuff such as structural rust, worn-down tires or brakes gets caught much, much earlier than in the US.

I can't speak to every European country, but Portugal also has a lot fewer stop signs and traffic lights than the US (roundabouts are one reason, but there are multiple four-way intersections on my street that would have stop signs in the US).

Given the way American streets are set up, rigorously enforcing stop signs is probably beneficial, but I think other factors about how streets are arranged and how people drive are more important.

Police no longer feel the need to do their jobs, and Americans in general have just lost any sense of empathy or even awareness of other people.

But also we have a serious problem where taking away someone's license to drive is to sentence them to poverty if not homelessness and starvation. We don't have decent public transit and there are very few jobs within walking distance of most residential areas. Those jobs that do exist don't pay a living wage because pegging minimum wage to inflation or even the poverty line is "communism" and an "attack on businesses".

Our problems with car fatalities is really only one small symptom of the ongoing collapse of American society.

I wonder if the size of the cars matter. Two Honda Fits crashing into each other is going to be different than a Honda Fit and a Ford 150.

This is speculation on my part: I assume US citizens tend to drive more short distances within cities to get to places, like shopping, while many EU cities are walk-able.

Cities and city entrances have the largest concentration of people and accidents.

Fatalities are horrible to the people involved, and in many cases the people responsible for such are punished. This is about saving a fractional percent of people while backdooring the technologies as a surrogate for control of everyone else.

The error in agreeing to automatic enforcement lay in the indirect failures that naturally follow within centrally structured systems, when those automatic systems stop working correctly, or worse selectively work; the world will be worse off than not having the solution in place at all.

There are dramatically more risks of this becoming a component of a panopticon prison in a fascist state, something the US is degrading into right now with the slow erosion; and stress fractures to our rule of law, it might very well suddenly fail overnight.

What impact will these solutions have in breeding discontent if everyone has the boot of the government on their neck every time they roll through an empty stop-sign where no one is there..., or worse when they did stop and the AI mis-categorized it as a rolling stop. What feedback systems correct a faulty running system? Government and government apparatus have trouble getting sufficient benefits to legitimate welfare recipients, what makes you think they'll do this any better? Competency is not a common trait for government workers.

Who do you think will be most impacted, the people with less awareness, or the people with more awareness. Lower IQ/cognitive speed vs. Higher IQ/cognitive speed. Would this result in an evolutionary filter against intelligence?

Would these dramatic changes drive the intelligent people which society rests upon (dependently so), so crazy that they end themselves, don't have children, or end their children and themselves? Is there any hope for a future under such repressive and stagnant systems. No there isn't. Intelligent thought is largely based in cognitive speed, and multiplied by education. There are some very educated people who are not necessarily sufficiently intelligent to stand in for these people. Their words and ideas often cause more harm, the more complex the system becomes.

The moment you rest an argument on do it for the dead people, or do it for the children, which is what %, you dismiss all the failures of the proposed system. Those failures still occur, those harms still happen, and the type of people you have left are less capable of adapting, or rather become enraged with each additional reminder that they are not people, they are slaves or animals.

A nation becomes strong only as a result of its strong people in unity.

When you make people necessarily dependent on the imagined detriment of what could happen, prevent them from acting, and do this at the expense of what is actually happening, you get a weak fragile complacent brittle people who break and are parasitically dependent on a pool of people that shrinks to nothing.

These detrimental characteristics spread over time both laterally among people but also generationally, and eventually circumstances occur where your people simply cannot adapt to what the environment requires as needed, and in that existential threat you face oblivion as a species, extinction.

Complacency, and a blindness or reactance to the risks, breed delusion which takes root spreading to those that remain, as a contagion.

The moment you think you can make people better by treating them like animals or slaves, or prisoners, is the inflection point towards your people's ultimate destruction; although it may be many years between. Every person is dependent on every other person indirectly, and some carry more than others.

How do you suppose such camera's of an all seeing eye will change the populace for the worse, might it make them more animalistic, ugly, violent... just as Sauron did as described by Tolkien, and much of the basis for Tolkien's works is based on the bible.

The only way to win a game of thermonuclear war is to not play the game. The same can be said about a lot of decisions which pigeonhole your future into a box without a future.

I feel like private companies enforcing when you can and cant move at a stop sign is a libertarian hellscape.

This isnt alot better, but at least its a provate vendor that gets data to the government who then decide to cite whats supposed to be dangerous behavior. Theres obviously corruption there, but these people are at least somewhat beholden tp the public through local elections and stuff. The toyota executives are not

While I don’t doubt that OPD is ignoring plateless cars, that thread has outdated info. CA now does require temp plates, most places seem to be pretty good about enforcing the rule, and seeing a plateless car now seems (to me) to be a pretty good indicator that the person driving it is up to no good. My city further East in the East Bay is not exactly great about enforcing most traffic laws, but you’ll rarely see a car without a plate or temp these days.

That's being tightened up in some states. Texas no longer allows temporary paper license plates. The seller has to provide a plate.

> There's also the general problem with stop signs that if you do stop before the line as you're technically supposed to, then most times you can't actually see oncoming vehicle traffic.

In these cases there's usually some other violation that is occurring, e.g., cars parked too close to the intersection, or shrubbery not properly cut back. As you note, the result is often they have to go beyond the stop sign. Even worse, I often end up so far in the street that if there was a car that was within its lane, but on the right-most side of it, they'd hit me (fortunately most drivers are aware enough to stop).

The issue you’re highlighting is called the sight triangle. There are supposed to be restrictions on maximum landscaping height, etc, so you can see from the stop bar. Unfortunately many smaller crossings violate this.

For example see fig. 71 at https://highways.dot.gov/safety/other/older-road-user/handbo...

> hen Goodhart's lawwing themselves into thinking they're succeeding. At least for myself, when I've got to deal with some kind of traffic control device and optimize my driving around that (say a speed bump), it takes my view/attention/focus away from looking for pedestrians elsewhere.

I find that most with unexpected speed limits. Speed bumps are actually on the road and the road surface something you should be looking at anyway. I was recently on a stretch of road where the speed limit kept changing from 20 to 30 and back very frequently, and there were speed camera signs. That was distracting.

Another common issue in the UK is what feel like random speed limit changes when moving from one local authority to another. Its not uncommon for the speed limit to rise just before a junction or roundabout.

> But fixing intersections is expensive meticulous work, while fining drivers for dealing with what they've been given is profitable.

Yes, it is, but the problem is often that it was not well thought out in the first place. Doing it right first time would not cost more.

Vision Zero is based on a simple principle: if cars are driving less than 20mph a pedestrian collision is highly unlikely to be fatal.

So they set a speed limit of 20mph on any mixed use street, and create separated pedestrian/cyclist infrastructure for any street with higher speed limits.

The latter is super expensive, but it's what you need if you want usually zero fatalities and to go faster than 20mph.

Actually zero all the time is impossible, of course. It's possible that a 5mph collision with a frail pedestrian will kill them. So Norway and Sweden sometimes have a fatality. But a goal of "zero pedestrian fatalities most years" is actually feasible for polities with fewer than 10 million citizens.

It may be unrealistic, but it has been achieved: https://urban-mobility-observatory.transport.ec.europa.eu/ne...

It's a question of priorities, really. America does not like using public policy to prevent deaths.

There's a verse I like a lot in Tao Te Jing:

"One must know when it is enough. Those who know when it is enough will not perish."

I think it's good to aim for zero traffic deaths, as in many countries the situation is so bad that a lot of improvement is feasible.

The long tail would definitely be much harder to tackle, but I don't expect this to be a serious problem in practice.

This post is about ticketing people who run stop signs. Is that the kind of price you consider too high?

It is generally illegal in the USA to be accused of a crime without being "confronted by the witnesses against him".

Red light cameras foundered on that obligation since they were generally run out of State and fly the camera operators in was not cost effective.

Also, just because your car broke the law doesn't mean you did, which was another defense that worked.

I'm surprised that the citations aren't thrown out...

Public services arent supposed to generate a profit, they are supposed to serve the public. If the system prevents people from being run over then its well worth the money

Oddly enough, policing as a business leads to some undesirable outcomes.

If you have drivers that are taking stoplights as "suggestions" aka running stop lights. Those drivers themself are going to be a bigger contributor to the gridlock problem than this perceived cause, as they clearly have no regard for any traffic laws.

They don't even pretend it's about safety anymore. Flock cameras are all over the place and were never installed on the pretense of issuing citations or enforcing safety. It's all about tracking who is coming and going.

Itd be great if this sort of system could be trustworthy. How could that be done. Public data? But then that opens the data stream up to criminals who could stalk people and stuff. Third party audits? Who do you trust to do that? NGOs?

The whole idea that the way to reduce crime is by surveillance and enforcement is a con. Like in this case, all the places that managed to significantly reduce traffic accidents do so by carefully redesigning their street network to make safety easier and more intuitive.

Incentive structures need to be alligned better. Its so disheartening to see tech that works fine in europe fail in the US because of corruption and negative motivations.

What incentive structure could make these things be more benficial than just money grabbing? Laws that revenue from citations must be spend for direct public benefit only? With public audit?