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Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

sfchronicle.com

291–300 of 683 posts

Re: Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

#291
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Red light cameras have perverse incentives that have led to municipal corruption and made intersections more dangerous.

Can you perhaps expand on the incentives and the mechanism of increased danger?

The goal of a red light camera is ostensibly to make an intersection safer, but the fact that the city gets money when people get tickets incentivizes them to actually keep the intersection difficult to navigate correctly. They lose money if they adjust timings to be more appropriate for the situation or if they make the lights more visible or if they replace the light with a roundabout.

It also penalizes driving behaviors that are objectively not very dangerous far more harshly than a human police officer would—a lot of the profit from a red light camera comes from rolling right turns on red, which is very often a perfectly safe behavior that actually helps traffic move more smoothly (for example, when you technically have a red but there's a left turn crossing in the opposite direction providing complete cover for your move).

Re: Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

#292
post #6

Genuine question: What is stopping some small percent of drivers from installing cameras and using ML to identify cars driving dangerously (e.g. speeding, running reds, changing multiple lanes at once, etc.), and when their license plate is identifiable, finding and informing their insurance company? If even a small subset of users did this, and insurers did something with this information, it would substantially dis…

Informing the insurance company… how? Everything done by a large corp like an insurer has a specific workflow. There is no form to upload a video of someone behaving badly. Emailing some rando at Geico with an mp4 is going to be met with total indifference because the corporate drone answering whatever emails aren’t autoreplied or spamcanned will have no process by which to respond

Re: Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

#293

As a somewhat regular user of Waymo, these types of conversations seem like they're going to be more and more in the (sorry!) rearview mirror because we won't own the car nor the cameras that are recording the world as we "drive" around. That's not to say that we should give up fighting for some level of privacy even when we don't own the cars, but seems more likely that legislation would be passed that forces the ve…

> these types of conversations seem like they're going to be more and more in the (sorry!) rearview mirror because we won't own the car nor the cameras that are recording the world as we "drive" around.

Perhaps in the urban setting but the majority of this country is not contained within cities. Even then are you planning on banning motorcycles and RVs?

> because they will consider it their right to drive themselves

Until a law is passed otherwise they are absolutely correct.

> the right-to-drive-oneself into the state constitution.

I doubt it. The real fight is likely to be whether we continue using mixed vehicle and pedestrian infrastructure or if we force pedestrians off the roadway entirely. Then we'll have a "right to walk" constitutional crisis.

Re: Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

#294

I used to keep my Sentry mode on all the time. Then my car got broken into twice. The police didn’t bother to follow up despite having a video footage of what happened. Now I never turn it on. And now police wants to tow vehicles for the footage.

It saved me $2000 bill by recording a hit an runner

Can you elaborate why? As in, you got hit by an insured driver and so your insurance was able to bill them, whereas you didn't have collision coverage of your own?

Re: Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You clearly haven’t received a letter in the mail for $250 because a camera saw you barely not fully stop for a red light right turn at 3am with zero traffic A human in the loop needs to be the first line of defense, if an officer isn’t willing to be in the field to issue the ticket and show up in court to defend it then there shouldn’t be a ticket in the first place, full stop

Were you in that much of a hurry to not be able to wait 30 seconds for the traffic light?

That’s not the point, a surveillance state where the panopticon autonomously gives $250 tickets is the issue

Rules aren’t meant to be cold hard algorithms to blindly punish people with; we wouldn’t automate a judge with an algorithm why is it somehow different to automate a police officer with one?

Re: Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

#296
post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m struggling to understand your point, or to imagine many examples which support it. I agree that brief minor parking infringements may occasionally make people’s lives more efficient; but I can’t think of any examples where traffic lights and speed limits need to be routinely disregarded?

From what I remember of my CA driver’s license test (had to re-take the written test when I moved to CA), there is no actual speed limit in CA. The speed limit is “whatever conditions deem safe”. Maybe OP meant something like that?

As someone who got their first drivers license in California, I can say with certainty that there are in fact speed limits.

Re: Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

#297
post #6

Genuine question: What is stopping some small percent of drivers from installing cameras and using ML to identify cars driving dangerously (e.g. speeding, running reds, changing multiple lanes at once, etc.), and when their license plate is identifiable, finding and informing their insurance company? If even a small subset of users did this, and insurers did something with this information, it would substantially dis…

> it would substantially disincentivize driving like a complete maniac.

You are presuming that the manics are otherwise legally entitled to drive and have valid insurance. It should be no surprise to learn that they, very largely, do not.

They already don't care about your incentive system.

Re: Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sometimes safer to speed up 5mph over the limit to get through a yellow light, than to slam your brakes with someone behind you. It's frequently safer to speed to match people speeding around you then to match the stated speed limit (usually on freeways).

These are both problems caused by poor driving (other peoples' in this case). Maybe with a traffic law panopticon everyone would drive better and these would disappear

This is actually a problem with speed limits that don't match the road or alternatively, roads that aren't designed to incentivize people driving the intended speed.

In theory, the speed limit should be set to the 80th or 85th percentile speed of traffic, and the road should be engineered so that the 80th percentile speed is appropriate to the surroundings.

https://www.mikeontraffic.com/85th-percentile-speed-explaine...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_calming

Re: Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You clearly haven’t received a letter in the mail for $250 because a camera saw you barely not fully stop for a red light right turn at 3am with zero traffic A human in the loop needs to be the first line of defense, if an officer isn’t willing to be in the field to issue the ticket and show up in court to defend it then there shouldn’t be a ticket in the first place, full stop

Were you in that much of a hurry to not be able to wait 30 seconds for the traffic light?

At 3am? Bed presumably.

Re: Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You clearly haven’t received a letter in the mail for $250 because a camera saw you barely not fully stop for a red light right turn at 3am with zero traffic A human in the loop needs to be the first line of defense, if an officer isn’t willing to be in the field to issue the ticket and show up in court to defend it then there shouldn’t be a ticket in the first place, full stop

Were you in that much of a hurry to not be able to wait 30 seconds for the traffic light?

We're talking about a rolling right turn on red, not crossing the whole intersection on red. The turn is allowed but the camera took issue with how much of a stop came first.

I don't know very many drivers who wouldn't recognize that camera behavior at 3:00 in the morning as unreasonable.

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