AI cameras catch 297 drivers in three days in Cornwall

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-66508840

by rwmj • 3 years ago

32 131 3 years ago

bbc.co.uk

tmaly• 3 years ago

I am not looking forward to a future filled with this type of surveillance.

contravariant2• 3 years ago

I'm not too worried about this kind of surveillance.

What we're seeing here is surveillance of a public area, used for a clear goal, which is proportional (because texting while driving is insane) and is reviewed by humans, and has clear avenues for escalation when it makes a mistake.

The scary parts are the parts that such a system is capable of, but which are not made public. For one the article doesn't mention whether the data is used for anything else or if it is ever deleted. It's also not clear if there are plans to use it for less serious offences, or if the human review is going to be removed at some point.

rootusrootus4• 3 years ago

texting while driving is insane

I'm inclined to agree, but I would also love to see more detailed analysis. It is easy for everyone to jump on this particular bandwagon (I have found very few people willing to say that texting while driving is no big deal), but at the same time I see a lot of texting while driving happening every day. And while we do know it contributes to accidents, driving remains a relatively safe activity statistically given how dangerous it seems.

It's a little bit similar to the 'think of the children' argument, and it makes me uncomfortable when we use such justifications for massively increasing surveillance in a way that seems disproportionate to the problem we are trying to solve.

matthewfelgate8• 3 years ago

Why?

jameskilton• 3 years ago

Justice without mercy is cruelty. There's nothing good that can come from this kind of system.

kyralis2• 3 years ago

From the article:

The force, which is trialling the system, said if an offence has been correctly identified, the driver would either be sent a warning letter or a notice of intended prosecution, depending on the severity of the offence.

This is after human review.

voakbasda• 3 years ago

This is how it starts. Do you believe this status quo will be maintained for long? Or will it become good enough that human review will need to be requested? Then when it becomes sufficiently effective, will they lower the thresholds or broaden its scope? Experience says that's exactly what will happen.

ctoth2• 3 years ago

Welp, found the bad driver.

yawnxyz• 3 years ago

Police should also held to the same standards and be prosecuted for breaking the same laws in the same ways

js4ever• 3 years ago

And of course politics as well ...

baggy_trough• 3 years ago

Laws will have to be adjusted to make this level of surveillance and enforcement tolerable.

johngladtj• 3 years ago

No need for that, they will just prosecute when it's politically convenient

ausbah• 3 years ago

Although the cameras use AI to detect potential offences, all images are reviewed by a person, said Devon and Cornwall Police.

if this is true I really don't see a problem necessarily. AI is just being used as a tool not a decision maker, so long as humans are good about filtering out false positives. which for something as dangerous as driving I'm all for

zelos• 3 years ago

If it's just used for prosecuting things like the photo in the article and there's human review, I don't think I have a problem. This is a long way from instant Demolition Man-style tickets.

stranded22• 3 years ago

I know the whole ‘break the law and you might get caught’ type thing but this is dystopian.

Verdex2• 3 years ago

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

― C. S. Lewis

[My own thoughts, I feel are less effective and eloquent than Lewis'. I often feel that the expectations and rules of society don't make a lot of sense. Except for the extremely obvious, which frequently don't have explicitly stated expectations or rules due to being so obvious. My conclusion is that nobody else really gets it either; it's just that everyone else adjusts to this better than me. As we find ways to encode these nonsense rules into silicon and then aim it at everyone all the time, the end result will not be good for anyone.]

kyralis2• 3 years ago

I wouldn't call "requiring drivers to not be using mobile phones" a "tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims". It's for the good of everyone else on the road, and, in the case of seatbelts, for the good of the rest of society that needs to deal with the burden of caring for unnecessary injuries due to failing to take such a basic precaution.

johnnyworker• 3 years ago

I wouldn't call "requiring drivers to not be using mobile phones" a "tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims"

It's the mass surveillance that was called such.

It's for the good of everyone else on the road

Nope, they too are subject to mass surveillance.

wuliwong• 3 years ago

the good of the rest of society that needs to deal with the burden of caring for unnecessary injuries

I understand that point of view but I do think it can be tyrannical to not let people live their lives even if they are making decisions that are bad for their physical health. In the US, obesity is a far greater burden on our health care system than people not wearing seatbelts. I still can't get behind fining people for overeating or something like that.

lisper2• 3 years ago

I wouldn't call "requiring drivers to not be using mobile phones" a "tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims".

You wouldn't, and I wouldn't, but someone else might.

This is the problem: who gets to decide? Today the people deciding the parameters for focusing the AI's attention might be benevolent and acting in good faith by your standard and mine, but who is to say that this will still be true tomorrow? Not everyone shares our quality metric.

carimura2• 3 years ago

Maybe I'm reading it wrong but to me it seems like the quote is in fact talking about "for the good of everyone else".

kevinventullo2• 3 years ago

This is one of those quotes that sounds deep but is obviously untrue if you think about it for a bit. I suspect he would prefer “moral busybodies” to, I dunno, 1930’s Germany.

rglover• 3 years ago

Substitute "robber baron" with "mid-century gangster" and you'd find it's quite accurate. Mind your own business, keep the peace, and you'll find little trouble. Moral busybodies, by definition, have to constantly meddle in your affairs; it's their sole source of life.

AnimalMuppet3• 3 years ago

If I recall the essay, Lewis definitely believes that this applies to things like Nazi Germany or the USSR. The true believers in Arianism and communism thought they were doing good - they were creating this golden future for their people and/or the workers! So destroying everyone who was in the way was morally right (in their view).

It's fair to say that Lewis would prefer moral busybodies in Cornwall with speed cameras to either the KGB or the Gestapo. But he considers the Gestapo (specifically mentioned in the essay) to be the end state of what he's talking about when he made the quote.

The source is, IIRC, the essay "A Reply To Professor Haldane", which I found in the book "Of Other Worlds".

jerf2• 3 years ago

The problem is that laws are an approximation of safety and well being. When laws were all we had, the delta between the laws and the actual thing we want (safety) was not something we spent a lot of time worrying about, because we couldn't detect the difference. The law couldn't be enforced anyhow.

The problem is as we get perfect enforcement, the delta does become visible. The reality is that when a road is set to 55 mph, that is not some sort of pronouncement from God that that is the one true speed that the road is safe at. It was just an approximation. But then we set up a camera that treats it as rigid ground truth, and now you can be nailed with a ticket if you're doing 56 miles per hour.

But does that help anyone? Was anyone unsafe because you were going 56 mph rather than 55? No, of course not. 55 was never the point. Nominally, safety was the point. Safety is not about going a single speed. There are days and conditions when 65 is practically as safe as 55. There are days and conditions where 65 may be safer than 55 (e.g., everyone around you is doing it on a multi-lane road, you're safer following along than stubbornly insisting on being 10 mph divergent). There are days and conditions where the safe limit may well be 15, or even 0. That's the real thing we want. But that's not what computers and AI give us. They give us rigid enforcement.

As society develops the capability to enforce laws rigidly, it will need to figure out that rigid enforcement isn't what we ever wanted. The laws were not themselves the end goal.

Unfortunately, this is going to be harder than it should be because this rigid enforcement creates and/or reinforces a power center in the people who will benefit from this rigid enforcement, both monetarily and through the additional power to selectively pardon people for what is de facto a brand new set of crimes, in the sense that the are a whole bunch of convictions that could never have occurred in the past. Modestly clever use of the pardoning process will allow them to hold on to that power for extended periods of time by using it to cover over the worst and most socially costly offenses (see also "Support via working out how to raise enough of a Twitter fuss to get the company's attention"; you can suppress outrage and even look magnanimous by pardoning the things that get into the news while hammering everyone else).

We will, of course, have to learn this the hard way.

nvm0n25• 3 years ago

I mean sure but they give us rigid enforcement because there's no universal and fair way to define what the "real" limit should be. Limits do get changed dynamically on motorways.

You can argue that with the ever greater digitization of cars there's a way out of that: use AI to monitor road conditions and dynamically adjust the speed limit, where those superseding limits are uploaded to a central server that in-car dashes can download from. As long as the limit only ever goes above the signposted limit, it can work. People with old cars just won't learn when they can go faster (except via smartphone maps).

matthewfelgate8• 3 years ago

Oh grow up.

Wearing a seatbelt isn't oppression you muppet.

Brian_K_White3• 3 years ago

Adults almost never use 'grow up' as an argument. They actually know what their argument is and say that.

Seatbelts are a great example of exactly the stated form of oppression through giving moral busybodies the power to be more than merely annoying with their presumptions and opinions about your life.

AnimalMuppet3• 3 years ago

First, as a self-identifying muppet, I resent your using the term as a pejorative.

Second, and no longer tongue in cheek: You are definitely in violation of the HN guidelines. You can't comment like that here.

lamontcg2• 3 years ago

The objection isn't to the wearing of seatbelts. The objection is to the future of AI surveillance being injected into every aspect of our lives.

recursive4• 3 years ago

Two days ago I was running on a road that lacks sidewalks and was almost hit by a driver who was clearly texting and not paying attention. This is not tyranny for the good of its victims – it's protecting everyone else from a needless lack of care for the safety of others.

barbazoo3• 3 years ago

It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.

Oh what a slippery slope indeed. /s Instead of grandstanding, how do you suggest the law get enforced otherwise than partially automating checking if drivers are not driving blind for dozens of meters at a time?

soneil2• 3 years ago

"dozens" is probably underestimating it. That's a 70mph road, so just over 31 metres per second.

xedrac• 3 years ago

One definition of a dystopian society is a society where you cannot make mistakes. The good news is that every time one of these automated systems is implemented, too many politicians get caught and the laws get changed.

dartos• 3 years ago

Yknow… I’ve never been thankful for my congressperson’s DUIs before.

krisoft3• 3 years ago

One definition of a dystopian society is a society where you cannot make mistakes.

Except being awarded penalty points, or fined for doing something dangerous is not exactly "cannot make mistakes" is it? You do a stupid and dangerous thing, you are fined and hopefully you won't do it anymore. If you do it often enough your privilege of piloting a giant metal box around people is revoked.

ggambetta• 3 years ago

I'm surprised by the early reactions here. Looking at the picture in the article, of a driver texting while the passenger holds the wheel (!!!), my first reaction is "OH YES PLEASE GET THESE INCREDIBLY IRRESPONSIBLE PEOPLE OFF THE STREETS ASAP".

I don't want to die because some idiot is texting while driving. Whether these idiots are caught by a human looking attentively 24/7 or by a high-speed camera with an AI flagging possible violations and being reviewed by a human makes zero difference to me.

What exactly is wrong or dystopian here? AI bad? Cameras bad?

contravariant2• 3 years ago

It's basically a slippery slope argument. Which is not completely unfair, police have a terrible track record when it comes to using technological means responsibly.

elil174• 3 years ago

Police are using a bunch of technologies irresponsibly. Why not advocate for better oversight of police overall instead of trying to block them from using specific technologies?

voisin• 3 years ago

But what’s the slippery slope here? If we use AI effectively to catch texters, next we’ll… effectively enforce other traffic laws?

And police are already using technology in actually nefarious ways - technology that never had a positive use like this.

entropi• 3 years ago

What exactly is wrong or dystopian here? AI bad? Cameras bad?

Well no, not by itself. The way I look at it, this is a precedence. It works, and there is not a lot of resistance. That's huge. And there will be next steps to this.

It doesn't take too many steps from here to a distopian surveillance state.

some_random• 3 years ago

People here are concerned for the exact same reason they're concerned about on-device image scanning, they're not pro-pedophilia they're worried about the future uses of this capability.

theschmed• 3 years ago

Fair, but I think we’re ought to be much more concerned by surveillance of private messages on a communication app than we ought to be of surveillance of people’s activities on a public road. It ought to be understood that you might be observed while driving.

AndrewKemendo• 3 years ago

Not necessarily agreeing or disagreeing but I think the key complaint boils down to the level of granular invasiveness that this gives the government.

The fact that a govt couldn’t reasonably do this at this scale without computer vision being as advanced as it is just adds more AI skepticism flavor to the argument.

rootusrootus4• 3 years ago

What exactly is wrong or dystopian here?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you are probably under the impression that this won't catch you doing something illegal? You might be surprised how extensive the laws are (and we add to them all the time), and many driving behaviors that you think are harmless are in fact technically illegal.

If, for example, we start sending people tickets every time they fail to stop before the stop line on the road, or don't come to a complete stop, we're going to need to install much larger mailboxes. Or people who speed 1 mph over the limit for 1 second. Or stay in the left lane a little too long while someone is waiting to pass. The possibilities are endless.

bluecalm4• 3 years ago

Hopefully this catches up. It's scary how normalized traffic violence and risking other's life is in our society. If there is one place where AI based automatic enforcement could instantly make life better it's traffic laws enforcement. I am looking for the day I can drive at a speed limit and not be a target of aggressive maniacs tailgating and dangerously overataking me or one I can go for a bike ride and not be game for speeding reckless drivers.

All this talk about scary surveillance and what not coming from people who offer no solutions for a huge problem at hand. Let's use the technology so the laws put there to protect lives are actually respected.

bluedino2• 3 years ago

What about when you accidentally go 5mph over the speed limit?

ftth_finland• 3 years ago

5 mph is 8 km/h. That’s quite a lot.

Pay attention to your speed when you are driving. Most, if not all, modern cars have cruise control where you can set your speed if you are having trouble following the speed limits.

bluecalm4• 3 years ago

Ideally cars would be equipped with speed limiters. Then the problem disappears. Until this happens, there are many other solutions like you only start paying fines until you do over some limit (like 12 per year) of such minor infractions. Let's not take the focus from the main point: there is currently huge problem with reckless drivers causing death of tens of thousands of people per year (in US alone).

sergiotapia2• 3 years ago

It is your civic duty to destroy each and every one of these if you find them out and about. They can't fix them all and will eventually give up. The west cannot become China. There is nowhere else to go.

dymk2• 3 years ago

No, they'll catch it on camera and arrest you for destruction of public property

ctoth2• 3 years ago

Or, like, you could just not do things like texting and letting the passenger hold the wheel while you drive while blind people like me have to navigate around your one ton death machines. Crazy idea I know.

sergiotapia2• 3 years ago

I don't do either of these things, ever, and still feel this level of automated surveillance is repugnant.

nodomain• 3 years ago

The most pressing question to me is: Why don't you wear a seat belt? How can humans be that stupid, sparing 1 second of time when entering the car? I really don't understand it.

rootusrootus4• 3 years ago

In my experience it is not generally an issue of laziness, it is more often a statement of ideology.

flangola73• 3 years ago

I think it is the former dressed up as the latter. Either way it's pathetic and childish.

bayesianbot• 3 years ago

I'm living in Northern Thailand and I'm wondering this daily. Thailand has about the most dangerous traffic in the world, lots and lots of people dying annually compared to the size of the population, but still constantly I see people, even with their kids, driving a motorbike without their helmets on. It's actually almost rare to see a good helmet, it's either nothing or a mostly useless bowl to avoid fines by the police. If I tell people I won't drive in some situation as I don't have my helmet, they'll just tell me there's no police on the way..

Though in here I think big part is religion - karma / Buddha protects good people, and most people feel they're good people, so their life is already protected, you'd just think they'd get it some day as the fatal road accident numbers are so high every year and everyone knows someone who was "a good person" but is now dead from traffic..

rwmj• 3 years ago

My car beeps loudly if it is moving and it detects weight in the seat without the corresponding seatbelt. Can very occasionally be a problem if you put very heavy items on the back seat. I thought this was a normal feature of cars.

yabones• 3 years ago

This is a complex one. On one hand, cracking down on distracted driving is absolutely a good thing. Thousands of people are killed by negligent drivers every year, and every single one is an unnecessary tragedy.

But, there need to be some guardrails on this program. The UK police have a habit of keeping massive amounts of data around for years, and storing it inappropriately. I have no doubt all of the images this system takes will end up on a public S3 bucket or left open on an insecure email server within the next decade.

For the Americans/Canadians, also consider that there are already a LOT of speed cameras in the UK already -- far more than there are across the ocean. The only new thing here is that instead of connecting it to a radar system, it's using computer vision to decide to fine somebody or not. It's new technology, but not really a paradigm change for the culture.

psd12• 3 years ago

I don't think the privacy angle is strong, because it's on a public road.

In general, the idea of being tracked in public makes my skin crawl, but what sets me off is recent cars with GPS units. At least with a smartphone, I can leave it at home.

barbazoo3• 3 years ago

I am looking to set up something like this in my neighborhood. I have a pretty good angle frpmy house. We live on a narrow street with parks on either side, a crosswalk, daycares, really a place where you want to pay attention and drive slowly. Yet every day I see people on their phones. I just don't get it. All it takes is one kid making a mistake and running on the road at the wrong moment. Happened couple of weeks ago at the crosswalk, luckily all three kids survived.

I'd like to set this up using off the shelf hardware to be able to demand more enforcement but also approach the people living here directly and if nothing helps. It's a heartbreaking situation that's waiting for something terrible to happen.

Edit: I'm a noob in some fields that are involved here (image classification, cameras, etc) so if anyone has a pointer for me, I'd greatly appreciate it

hashstring4• 3 years ago

There is an important issue to be fixed here, yes.

It’s heartbreaking when this happens and I fully agree that there should be more checks in place to prevent this.

However, I am very glad that I live in a country where you are not allowed to record and process this because it’s a violation of my privacy.

I do not think that this is the solution.

barbazoo3• 3 years ago

I am very glad that I live in a country where you are not allowed to record and process this

Hehe, I don't even know if I do but honestly I'd be happy to let it come to it. Sometimes it takes a little escalation to bring about change. For sure I'll have a look though to see what the law says here.

I know how selfish I am here but I value my kids' and my community's kids safety higher than other people's privacy. And it's not that I'd publicize the footage. Not even the offenders'. Yet :)

I do not think that this is the solution.

I can't wait for someone to implement a "solution" because that usually requires people actually dying.

carapace3• 3 years ago

What privacy? It's a public road?

elil174• 3 years ago

I do understand the privacy arguments, but there are thousands of people are being killed by drivers every day (many of whom aren't even in cars, they're walking or biking). Enforcing traffic laws is one of the only tools for fixing this that can be implemented quickly (as opposed to better urban design and public transit, which are better solutions in many other ways).

I feel like their should be room to advocate for responsible use of systems like this and good oversight of police departments.

jfindley2• 3 years ago

In the UK, where this is happening, that's simply not true. There were 1695 road fatalities in 2022 total. That's very different from "thousands a day".

I do not believe it is desirable (or practically possible) to eliminate all risk of death or injury from life, and increasingly orwellian surveillance measures to clamp down on every misdeed and ill advised risk does not, I think, make for a happier or freer society.

elil174• 3 years ago

The UK makes up less than 1% of the worlds population, so it does make sense that there are many more driving deaths globally than in the UK.

I can agree that complete safety is not practical or desirable.

But in our current society, simply walking down the street can get you killed by a driver. That is not freedom in my mind.

matthewfelgate8• 3 years ago

Last year there were 48 road deaths and 738 serious injuries on roads in the two counties.

Please let me know which of these deaths you are happy with.

mdp20212• 3 years ago

That's very different from "thousands a day"

So you had us check. We hope it is now clear to you that you showed having misunderstood the poster: «thousands of people are being killed by drivers every day» does not imply "here".

But according to data,

( Road deaths over the long-term, 1900 to 2021 // Annual number of reported deaths resultant from any type of road accident. This includesvehicles, pedestrians and cyclists. - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/road-deaths-over-the-long... )

taking 2019 (just to be sure of having more data), you are partially right: apparently not even half-a-thousand per day. But hundreds per day.

Top by Country: China: 172 ; USA: 99 ; Russia: 47 ; Turkey: 15 ; Japan: 11 ; S.Korea: 9 ; France: 9 ; Italy: 9 ; Germany: 8 ; Mexico: 8 ; Poland: 8 ; Uzbekistan: 6 ; Chile: 5 ; Kazakhstan: 5 ; Romania: 5 ; UK: 5 ; Canada: 5 ; Spain: 5 ; Australia: 3 ; Azerbaijan: 2 ...

Conclusions from those numbers, that is another matter.

kvonhorn• 3 years ago

good oversight of police departments

Where I'm from, the police actively resist oversight, and have not responsibly used many of the systems they already possess.

gorlilla• 3 years ago

Every camera system in my state (OH) has proven to be nothing more than a cash grab that mostly enriched the private entities that ran the cameras/administration.

They passed laws to allow it by crying safety; but then botched the entire deployment by being the greedy nepotistic politicians they are.

AI isn't suited to fix any of the underlying problems here.

[0]https://www.techdirt.com/tag/red-light-cameras/

elil174• 3 years ago

If people are calling it a "cash grab," that means it's working in my opinion. Even a ticketing system contract was awarded in a corrupt manner (which is wrong of course - and the people involved in that should be prosecuted), every person who gets a ticket from one of those systems is someone who was going over the speed limit or running the red light and putting the lives of everyone around them in danger.

obelos2• 3 years ago

It's puzzling to me why police need to be involved at all, save for possibly some sort of statutory restriction that ought to be removed. What is it about police's training that makes them uniquely qualified to process these images to determine that there's cause for a citation to be issued? This and other automated street safety tools are very valuable for public safety. But there's no reason these programs couldn't be operated by the transportation department or some such, reducing a lot of the privacy concerns rightfully stoked by involving the police.

krisoft3• 3 years ago

It's puzzling to me why police need to be involved at all

The police: "the civil force of a state, responsible for the prevention and detection of crime and the maintenance of public order."

If you gave this task to "transportation department or some such" they become the police. They become the civil force of a state, responsible for the prevention and detection of this specific crime.

Except of course if you boot up a brand new police force just for this task they will bumble around and make all the mistakes while they lean how to you know police.

a lot of the privacy concerns rightfully stoked by involving the police

What privacy concerns does this raise which are not already raised by the 11,000 other automatic number plate recognition cameras in operation in the UK?

soneil2• 3 years ago

If you tried to hand this off to the transportation department, it'd probably end up under the British Transport Police. Six and two threes really.

The Police are already tooled up to issue traffic citations. Tooling up the BTP to do the same task would just mean more money, and end you at the same result, no?

xnx3• 3 years ago

Big fan of automated enforcement with human review: red light running, speeding, distracted driving, tailgating, etc. More please!

Verdex2• 3 years ago

red light running

This is actually one of the interesting cases.

Some studies indicate that while red light cameras reduce the number of red light running, it also increases the amount of rear end collisions. Because people are afraid of getting a ticket they slam on their brakes.

Similarly, (iirc) there was some controversy about certain areas with red light cameras adjusting the length of yellow lights not to maximize safety, but to maximize ticket revenue. At the very least the wiki link includes:

There is also concern that the international standard formula used for setting the length of the yellow phase ignores the laws of physics, which may cause drivers to inadvertently run the red phase.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_light_camera

I don't think running red lights or otherwise driving recklessly is somehow our right or a good thing. However, there are side effects to these things and they don't necessarily make things universally better.

xethos• 3 years ago

Some studies indicate that while red light cameras reduce the number of red light running, it also increases the amount of rear end collisions. Because people are afraid of getting a ticket they slam on their brakes.

Sounds like some motorists received an expensive lesson on the topic of "What is a safe following distance, and why does it matter"

diydsp• 3 years ago

[...] people are afraid of getting a ticket they slam on their brakes.

There should be some kind of warning before the red light comes on.

I've got it! A cell phone app. Whenever you're driving: the app sends your coordinates to the cloud, and every traffic light is also linked in via dirt-cheap IoT. Then, at some point between the light being green and red, the user is warned through a tweet, text, or email message that the red light will go on soon! They can navigate away from the video they were watching while driving, click through the terms of the website, adjust for their privacy preferences, take advantage of any offers that might pop up, and still find out a few seconds before the light turns red!

And then: because we know they'll be stopped at the light and for how long, we can show them a short video offering them valuable products and services right near where they are located! We can do this! Who's in?

xnx3• 3 years ago

Good notes. I see a lot of these as symptoms of adjustment pains. Once a driver's expectation is that they will get a ticket, they will treat yellow lights as designed. They a notification to slow down, not speed up.

sixstringtheory2• 3 years ago

It seems obvious to me that running red lights has more severe risks than people stopping more abruptly at yellow lights. And since it's not illegal to slow down for a yellow light, but it is to tailgate someone, well... just don't do that, then.

There are plenty of ways to make it more obvious how long the yellow light will last and whether you can make it through before it turns red. The all-red grace period that wiki article mentions also makes sense to me.

I would say it is better to trade red-light-running collisions for yellow-light-stopping collisions. Just because you can't eliminate all collisions doesn't mean you do nothing. That's letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

bluecalm4• 3 years ago

Adding timers to red lights seems like an obvious idea. You can even put them in the middle instead of yellow :)

irrational• 3 years ago

I am surprised there are more people not wearing seatbelts than using mobile devices. I would have predicted the opposite, by a large margin. Wearing a seat belt is such an easy thing to do with great benefits.

aimor• 3 years ago

I'm still surprised automated enforcement isn't more widespread. Where I live red light cameras are at almost every major intersection, speed cameras are on school roads and construction sites, school busses have ticketing cameras. But on the highway it's cops in cars (and supposedly aircraft) with radar/lidar. Thirty minutes a day on the highway is enough to know there's plenty of people undeterred from driving 40+ mph over the limit (20 mph over is enough to suspend your license after two strikes). I'd guess the 'math' (money, politics, initiative) doesn't work out, or maybe the tech is just rolling out very slowly and hasn't made it here yet.

sixstringtheory2• 3 years ago

I'm surprised as well. I visited Europe almost 25 years ago and they had automated speed cameras. In the US we've had speed limit signs that tell you how fast you're going for a long time now... adding a camera and network connection isn't rocket science. I assume it's entirely political.

matthewfelgate8• 3 years ago

Good. It's time we took car violence seriously. Too many people driving around dangerously causing traffic jams from crashes, injuries and death and getting away with it.

To those who call it dystopian or authoritarian: go drive on your own private land. The roads are created by and shared by us as a society. If you don't like it you can always walk.

carapace3• 3 years ago

You can't avoid the ubiquitous surveillance, it's here and it's only going to increase. (Your phone and your car both already know if you're driving and using them at the same time, and they both tell other people everything they know about you 24/7. This is already the case today.)

So the question isn't whether or not we have ubiquitous surveillance (we have it), it's how do we want to set and enforce policy?

This leads me to the oxymoronical-sounding idea of "humane tyranny". Since we cannot escape techno-tyranny we must make it humane.

kypro• 3 years ago

I'm from the UK. I'm very split on this.

On one hand I hate that people use their mobiles while driving, not because I particularly care if the driver wants to take that risk with their own life, but because they risk the lives of their passengers and other road users.

That said, the UK does not have a good track record when to comes to applying this technology reasonably in my opinion. We have similar cameras which catch people driving in bus lanes or in low emission areas in the UK, and while I often agree in principle with bus lanes and low emission areas, I feel like they're enforced unfairly and with a complete lack of context.

For example my city recently introduced a low emission area, the rules for which are not very clear and for some reason these low emission areas seem to primarily include high trafficked sparsely populated areas. A few weeks ago I had a family member drive down to visit me and they very briefly drove in one of these areas by accident and were hit with a £120 fine.

Point is there is not adequate warning for road users and the low emission areas haven't even been implemented in areas that are reasonable – such as those that are highly populated or have high foot traffic. I'd actually argue the low emission zone in my city is just an anti-car, revenue generating move, enforced via automatic license plate recognition cameras which have no appreciation for context.

Similarly here, I wonder how these camera might be used. Admittedly there are times I will remove my seat belt in the car such as to remove a jacket at stop lights, and although I never use my phone while driving I will sometimes pick it up and check notifications on the lock screen when it's safe to glance at it such as in slow moving traffic or at stop lights. I don't think doing this is any more dangerous than say fiddling with a car radio (which is perfectly legal), and it's very different from someone texting or holding their phone to their head while driving, but these cameras and the way they're enforced typically have no appreciation for this.

So I dunno... I guess if they're preventing cases such as the one shown in the article then great, but if they're going to be fining people £120 for glancing at their notifications at stop lights I'd rather they not exist. It's just going to effectively be another tax on working people who need to drive to / for work.

sowbug• 3 years ago

I once heard a parable during a lecture about famed process expert W.E. Deming.

A bank's management was concerned that its tellers' cash drawer balances were often slightly off the expected counts. During spot checks, one drawer might be 25 cents over; another might be a few dollars short, and so on. Management thought this was symptomatic of sloppiness. To address the problem, they instituted a rule that all cash drawers had to be reconciled at the end of each day, and if there were a discrepancy, the teller would be disciplined.

After a few weeks, management asked for a report. Congratulations were given all around. Discrepancies had vanished entirely. Problem solved.

Eventually the real story surfaced. The tellers responded to the rule by creating a secret piggy-bank fund. If a drawer was over at the end of the day, the excess went into the fund. Deficits, likewise, drew from the fund. Thus, the books balanced perfectly at the end of each day. No other process changes occurred.

The lesson is that when you're trying to manage a process, you'll almost always see improvements in what you're measuring, but that does not mean that the root problem is solved. The number of tickets issued by these cameras will certainly go down, and police will use that number to justify more installations. In reality, drivers will start holding phones above their heads, wearing seatbelt-colored shirts, driving with the sunshade down, avoiding the routes with cameras, waving their arms around the cabin, and so on. The metric is number of tickets issued. Drivers and law enforcement will collaborate, conspire, and independently innovate for the exclusive goal of bringing that number down.

AI cameras catch 297 drivers in three days in Cornwall

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