Red light violation ticket costs are way out of proportion with the potential damage done. For example: I go through about 40 traffic lights as part of my daily commute. If I sneak through only one of them every day, then I could potentially owe about $40,000 in fines each year.

And if I go out at 2am drive to the nearest deserted red light and just drive backwards and forward through it, I can rack that up in a single evening. I'm not sure what your point is? That you can deliberately hang yourself on the law if you are an idiot? Ok... I'll give you that.

In 10+ years of red light cameras here, I've never gotten a ticket from one, ever, and I drive through at least 3 to 4 protected intersections a day. And I don't count myself as a qualified driver ed instructor or anything else. I go days even weeks at a time without seeing the camera flash at any one; so its not like the general public has a difficulty with the concept.

I'm certain the safety aspect of a few extra cars going through the end of a red doesn't constitute enough of a safety issue to warrant fines at that level.

It does if you want them to stop doing it. Because a normal person isn't going to get 40,000 in fines, they are going to get 1 or 2 and then "figure it out" and stop getting them. But if the fine is $5 they won't care unless they ARE getting them daily.

Anyone with $40,000 in annual red light camera fines shouldn't be on the road, because if nothing else, it means they are incapable of "figuring it out".

If a rule is being ignored, then it's probably a bad rule.

Like stopping for red lights? Is that a bad rule?

Also, I assure you that a few extra cars getting through a red light doesn't promote gridlock at the next one

Traffic jams can arise nearly spontaneously via something like 'butterfly' effects. A few cars sneaking through the red (and in turn delaying the traffic moving crosswise as a result) can disrupt traffic in both directions leading to congestion "waves" that lead to jams where it would otherwise not occur. It doesn't take much at all to disrupt traffic and create waves.

There's a demo on youtube where they asked drivers to simply drive on an even circular track at 30km/h maintaining the same distance from the car in front, and within a short time there was a conjestion wave causing cars to have to stop completely when it hit them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Its amazing how little it takes to disrupt stable traffic flow.

The state of traffic engineering is pretty dismal.

No argument. But saying that, traffic is much more complicated than regular fluid dynamics, and good mathematical models are hard to come by. And then to top it off you've got various political meddling overriding otherwise good design.

Men and women both contribute to creating people.

A mans contribution can be completed in a single night.

A womans contribution requires 9 months, during which time any distraction, disruption or stress can cause the "person creation" process to fail catastrophically.

This is the reason we systematically transform men into specialists instead of men. It is a waste of precious resources to turn a woman into a computer programmer when she's a lot more valuable as a mother.

It's not that women are incapable of being computer programmers. It's that they have more important duties, and when they neglect those duties, the entire human race suffers for it.

At the end of the day, the problem is people like you, who don't care about the fate of the human race as long as you get what you want out of life before you die, and, frankly, the solution is NOT diplomatic in nature.

Your opinion that red light cameras would help with traffic flow is just a gut feeling, not data

Within a couple months of red light cameras being added the situation where 1 to 10 cars would stream through the red light during each cycle during rush hour had ceased.

That much is a fact not an opinion. Sure, whether or not it improved traffic flow is question for debate. Presuming the traffic light timing is engineered properly its a reasonable speculation, but I'd be happy to see a study funded.

I strongly suspect that adding a red light camera to an intersection would not allow more people to go through per hour.

I don't think you realize how much congestion can be alleviated by regulating flow properly. Getting more cars through one intersection only to have them completely gridlock a little further in is a net negative.

I'd further suspect that enforcing the signals reduces aggressive driving and road rage -- because people get irate when they have a green light and a stream of traffic running the red light prevents them from starting, and only reinforces the urge to run the red light yourself when presented with the situation.

Even if it helped, a traffic circle would help more

Maybe. I like roundabouts, and traffic circles. I supported having one put on my street during the public consultation period when they were reassessing the intersection. But they don't work everywhere. Roundabouts aren't easy to navigate for large trucks so they don't make sense on truck routes, highways, etc. And and proper multi-lane traffic circles need space -- are you proposing we knock down downtown skyscrapers to put one in at every intersection? How exactly is that a simple cost effective solution without conflict of interest?

so why bother with a solution that costs good people money

That's just it. Red light cameras don't cost good people money. Good responsible people don't habitually run red lights*, so its a non-issue. The cameras, with the threat of a fine, were effective at altering good peoples behavior at intersections, which was the goal. I've never gotten a red light camera ticket; my wife has never gotten one. We both drive through camera protected intersections every single day, we aren't even conscious of them.

Policing should not be automated.

I generally agree. But I'm not outraged by red light cameras.

Alhtough I do think any enforcement revenue collected by automated systems should simply be paid back to the residents as a dividend against their property taxes. It shouldn't go to the police. It shouldn't go to general revenue. It shouldn't create entities dependent on the money.

* Speed enforcement is completely different because the conflicting objectives of driving with the flow of traffic combined with speed limit changes, terrain changes, vague signage, plus the imprecise nature of vehicle speed measurement means that yes, the majority of good responsible conscientious drivers DO habitually exceed the limit, at least sometimes, by a little.

It would make sense to at least test the whole concept in the cloud before buying hardware. That costs almost nothing to do, and then it can point you to just what you need in a server.

It seems like most of the proposals on that website are MORE MORE MORE of everything. What about RAM? 64GB, ECC! What about disk? 4 250GB SSDs in RAID10! What about multi-thread? Gotta have 16 cores! What about single-thread? Better make that dual Xeons so that we can use the ECC RAM and since those are the best! Does it need fancy graphics? Nope, so we better build a second system to use as a console for the big one so that it can be put in another room so that you don't hear the hurricane of fans! Wait, noise? Ok, scratch that, let's buy some big fancy cooling rigs even though we aren't overclocking so that it is as quiet as a mouse, but let's still build that second console!

Why not at least profile the thing in the cloud and figure out what you really need?

Let's assume that a conversion takes 5 hours on EC2 at 25 cents/hour. Do we really think that there are 2000 repositories out there that need to be converted?

And if there are, then wouldn't it be nice to be able to convert them 10 at a time instead of doing them sequentially?

This is really a model case for a cloud solution.

Running a light that is obviously red is very dangerous, so it is rarely done on purpose.

Running a late red on purpose is very dangerous and nobody does it on purpose. And people who do it by accident aren't going to be any more deterred by a red light camera, because if they'd realized they it was a red light they would have stopped, with or without a camera.

However, in some cities I've been in, during rush hour, at busy intersections I've observed a pattern where the light is green and cars flow through the intersection, the light turns yellow, and cars continue to flow, the light turns red and cars keep flowing through. Its not particularly "dangerous" because traffic is heavy enough that the opposing lanes are all stopped and backed up themselves, and they won't start while the intersection still has an uninterrupted stream of cars flowing through it, even though they might have a green light.

Another related pattern is left turns on regular green lights, where by law (at least where I live), a car can 'establish' itself in the intersection during a green (or yellow), and then when oncoming traffic clears, it completes its left turn. It might enter on a green, and have to wait until yellow, or even red before completing the turn. And this is legal.

But again, I often see cases where multiple cars complete the turn, even cars not 'established' in the intersection, but several cars queued up, the last several are entering the intersection on a red, and again this is only mildly dangerous as opposing traffic has been stopped, and is waiting for the intersection to clear, and again the cars running the red are part of an uninterrupted stream.

I've seen it in some cases, where more than half the opposing traffics green light is blocked by a constant stream of red-light runners. Each one 'secure' that as long as they are in the stream, opposing traffic isn't going to start.

Red light cameras effectively curb this undesirable behaviour.

This is supported by a large amount of data that show that accident rates either stayed flat or increased in almost every case

Provided they don't mess with the timings, there may be a rash of relatively miner rear ender as drivers adjust to the idea that they can't run red lights anymore. And this isn't necessarily a 'bad thing'. A bit of mild short term pain for long term gain, and a reason why looking at the accident rate doesn't tell the whole story.

Here's the real question - why do people continue to push red light cameras for safety when there is real data that shows that red light cameras have no net positive effect on safety?

Red light cameras as revenue generation is asinine. And red light cameras for 'safety' is dubious at best.

But they can improve traffic flow by enforcing the timings as displayed by the lights. (per the scenarios above). And indeed they are an appropriate solution here.

And I generally support responsibly installed red light cameras. (Ie those installed without tampering with yellow duration).

The average responsible driver will never run afoul of them.

I despise speed cameras though. (And not because I get speeding tickets, but because they are misused in ways that are just disgusting... I was recently in Melbourne, and the tolerance there is crazy low. They automatically ticket people for doing 62 in a 60. And they'll do things like set up traps just in front of the 100km/h sign -- and ticket people transitioning from 50/60km/h to 100km/h as they approach the sign (since its not technically 100km/h until after the sign...)

That's not about safety. That's not about traffic flow. That's just revenue generation.

The silence is deafening :)

BTW I think you are entirely correct. People are people - one person's relationship to another doesn't magically imbue either party with some magic quality, or even if one were to assume it does, that would then apply to everyone else, rendering the "magic quality" moot. It might not be the most comforting thought in the world for some, but the logic behind it is undeniable.

You might as well say the constitution is based on words, so we can do whatever we want.

Here's the legit deal: The judges get judicial power. Guilty or innocent, sentencing.

The feds, congress get enumerated powers.

The states get anything else that isn't outright forbidden to them (ex post facto laws, for instance.)

Anything left after that goes to the people.

See how those powers slide in a very particular direction? See why it's downright silly to claim that they magically slide UPHILL to the judiciary, when there's no such indication, anywhere, that such is the case? AND, to hammer it home, the thing explicitly says that if it's not in here, it belongs to the states or the people. There is NO authority for SCOTUS to do most of what it does. None whatsoever. And hell, even if there were, there they go rubber stamping the inversion of the commerce clause, ex post facto laws, rights violations left, right and sideways... you're looking right at them, and you don't see what they've done to you, and the rest of us. Pity.

This is all about direct usurpation of power that belonged to the people, frankly. Although we still have just the barest sliver of it left, which we can apply via jury nullification. Although, as you probably know, we're not even allowed to talk about that in court because judges(!) don't like it. Funny thing, that. Judges. They seem to be doing a lot of unauthorized things, don't they?

There's no such thing as a "well designed lawful age metric." Though I'm not sure you were even implying there was. But in any case:

It's about comprehension, consent, and physical development. Age cannot serve to draw such a multidimensional line effectively. There are obvious cases of young teens who know exactly what they are doing, are doing it carefully, and not in any way coming to harm. There are obvious cases of "adults" who are so unready for sex by the "comprehension" and "informed" metrics that it is painful to even consider it. And everything you can think of in between.

Verizon, as a telephone company, doesn't censor "illegal" voice traffic, does it? They do not, last I checked. That's because Verizon is a common-carrier and is not held liable for telephone content over its wires.

No, it's because they make sure every word you say is parsed by the government. The government decides if it doesn't like what you said if and when it becomes convenient for them to do so. Not only is your speech free, it's on deposit in special government accounts with your name right on them. You had just better hope it doesn't start earning "interest."

You're being disingenuous here.

We know loud sound and loss of sleep can cause direct physical harm. That's the basis for not yelling, bullhorns, and so on.

There is no sane basis for banning words, drawings, sculptures, renderings, woodcarvings and so on. None whatsoever.

The only sane basis for banning *anything* is it either causes such immediate harm to purse or person, or it is so likely to do so (ex, massively drunk driving) that the activity must be interfered with to lessen the odds of that potential becoming reality.

When speech gets loud or amplified, the legit question is not what was said. Ever. The question is what were you thinking putting people's hearing and/or sleep cycles at risk?

There is no reasonable argument that can justify a "right not to be offended", and there never, ever should be such a thing encoded in law. It should be painfully obvious as to why. If it isn't... oy.

So, when people devise these tests, are they just out of their fucking minds, or what?

Awesome. You get it. You and a few others. Everyone else has a torch in one hand, a pitchfork in the other, and they like it that way.

Yes, but it's the Supreme Court's job to decide if the law about it is Constitutional.

Only because they said so (Marbury v. Madson, ca 1802 -- they made it up out of thin air.) The constitution says they have judicial power. That's guilty or not, assign punishment if so. Not "the law is whatever I think it is today."

The constitution is crystal clear about many things that the judges, in explicit violation of their oaths, have made mean something else entirely. Previous poster is quite correct. The experiment failed.

This is a corporate oligarchy. Not a constitutional republic. It's been that way for a while, but it's right out in the open now. Corporations are people. Money is speech. Those two ideas, taken together, directly disenfranchise the people. You think you can outspend a corporation? If you can, you probably own one. Or more. And you're part of the problem. The rest of us are just along for the ride now... a brave new world, indeed.

No, a better analogy would be locking up people for having a drawing of a copyrighted song. Because, you know, people might THINK of hearing the song, and we can't have THAT.

It's. A. Drawing.

People do get that the only thing that knocked RIM from the top of the heap was the lawsuit filed by patent troll NTP, right?

They weren't beaten on technical merits. They weren't beaten because they "don't understand consumers". They weren't beaten on style, or execution, or anything else.

They were beaten by a corrupt US legal system that forced the guys running the company to stop running the company, hang around in a court room for years and in the end pay over half a trillion dollars to patent trolls.

Looking back, what they should have done was shut down US operations immediately, allowed the US government to implode and gone on to greener pastures.

Moral of the story, don't do business with Americans. One way or another, they'll fuck you over in the end. That's how they got where they are today.

Smart men just don't do business with the sharpest horse trader in town.