New York officials want speed-limiting devices installed in the cars of drivers who get more than 16 speeding tickets in a year
3d 18h ago by lemmy.zip/u/Valuy in mildlyinfuriating from www.nytimes.com
That's fine, so long as the limit is set to 0MPH. Anyone getting that many speeding tickets shouldn't be driving.
There's a points based system here and you would definitely be in suspended license stage at 16 tickets in a year. It's a crazy amount.
More than 16 tickets in a year should get your licence revoked, what the hell are you guys doing up there?
There's a cop there that has racked up something like 560 tickets in the last 4 or 5 years. I just watched a YouTube video about it a few days ago. Some news channel was reviewing the most ticketed license plates in the city and discovered it.
Not sure if I remember wrong but I thought massive chunk were in fact police.
Lot of capital to be extracted by issuing tickets, not so much by revoking licenses
Drivers who get more than 16 speeding tickets in a year should get a restraining order where they can't come closer than 500 feet to any car.
Lol, exile form NYC, love it.
Got 16 speeding tickets? Instant banishment to Lancaster. Good luck speeding on a horse and buggy.
Just take their fucking license away, jesus
You have to keep in mind that that's a country with a dysfunctional to nonexistent public transport system, that also considers cars the pinnacle of personal freedom.
Revoking someone's driver's licence is unthinkable to them.
Imprisoning or shooting them for the crime of having the wrong skin color is fair game, though.
Note that these speed camera "tickets" are different than normal tickets. No cop is pulling them over and issuing a citation to the driver directly. It's the car that is cited, and usually the registered owner ends up having to pay the fine. But since they can't prove who is driving it, they can't issue the same type of conventional ticket. (And that's also why the fine is so low -- make it much higher and people will flood the courts trying to get out of it by saying they weren't driving it at the time).
And that's why they can't just suspend someone's license instead. Because they can't tell who is driving in the picture, and even if someone gets their license suspended, they might just keep driving as long as they don't get pulled over.
I generally don't like technical solutions to social problems. Our cars are getting too smart for their own good anyway. The car companies are putting all this telemetry in there, and some have been recently caught selling your driving history to insurance companies. I definitely don't want the government punishing people based on cameras they can't see. We could decide "hey, why not let the government install nannys into the cars of people who speed". But then there's not much of a stretch between that and having the government give everyone a nanny.
Here in austrlaia, the fine goes to the owner unless they make a declaration as to who was actually driving.
You get penalty points on your licence for speeding and other offences. Get enough points in a period and you lose your licence.
At high risk times, like public holiday weekends, where lots of people travel, there are double points.
Yeah, but we're talking about the USA, where everything is stupid.
They're building to a place where they could do this remotely and that's ripe for abuses of power. The AI will see that your social karma is low and use parallel construction to develop a reason for suspending your driving privileges effective immediately. Appealing it will probably involve talking to an endless string of clankers on the phone. Ultimately there will be no humans in the chain to accept any kind of responsibility.
Or they change the law so that it doesn't matter who was driving. Unless it was stolen, the owner could still be held responsible. Stop the nonsense
We already have such Nannies for repeat drunk drivers so how is this different? It even fits with the narrative that we don’t know who is driving- we know the car is being driven dangerously so should prevent that regardless of driver
- https://roadlawguide.com/dui-dwi-laws/ignition-interlock/
You realized you just proved my point. "We already have nannies for X, why not for Y" leads quickly to "Why not have nannies in all cars", and then to "We have nannies in all the cars why can't we turn off cars with criminals in them?".
Can you imagine how much worse things could be if Trump's gestapo could disable cars remotely?
And yet they’re talking about a nanny as a local device temporarily attached to a car and that does not necessarily “phone home”. Not everything is a “slippery slope”
And yes, speed governors were all too common after the 1970s fuel crisis. As far as I know they still are on trucks, like rental moving trucks. This is not a new thing, except to allow a court to mandate it for repeat egregious offenders
And yet they’re talking about a nanny as a local device temporarily attached to a car and that does not necessarily “phone home”.
Oh, my sweet summer child. You don't actually believe that, do you? Read up on the stuff coming to new cars in the US next year ....
For those unfamiliar:
TL;DR: The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act requires all new cars sold after September 2027 to include technology that monitors whether you're impaired or distracted—and can prevent you from driving. Infrared cameras will track your eyes, breath sensors will measure alcohol, and your car can refuse to start or limit its speed. Privacy advocates warn this biometric data could be shared with insurance companies, law enforcement, or sold to data brokers.
It's funny, I read a separate article on Lemmy earlier this week about the worst traffic offender in NYC actually being a NYPD cop...
We have a points system here in the UK, first offence you'll typically be offered re-education if it's only minor. After that, if you don't contest a minor offence it's a £100 fine, plus costs, plus 3 points on your license per offence. If you contest it and lose, or it's such a major offence that you get taken straight to court, you'll be fined a percentage of your weekly income (depending on how bad it was), court costs and surcharges, and extra points. 12 points in three years is called "totting-up" and you automatically get your license revoked, so as an absolute maximum you can get away with four speeding tickets in three years. Any more than that, and you lose your license. Or if you're a new driver, if you get 6 points in the first two years you have to start over with taking your driving tests again.
All this to say... someone getting 16 speeding tickets and not having their license taken away is baffling to me.
Every state is different - while I’m not sure how mine handles multiple speeding tickets, ask me how I know that 30 mph over counts as a major accident on your insurance. At that point, the cost of the ticket is almost irrelevant (approaching a toll both on a highway, when I passed the new speed sign I hadn’t yet slowed enough, the assholes. If they looked at my speed like 50’ later…).
Anyhow I have to expect it’s more “good old boy” corruption, where at each step he gets dismissed or charge reduced
Edit: oh, speed camera infractions. I believe those can’t be criminal since you have the right to face your accuser.
Start with that one cop in that city that drives a pickup and has gotten hundreds of tickets. Then we’ll talk.
Why not an exponentially growing fine? A $10 ticket (honest mistake) doubled 16 times makes it $650k
Honestly it should be a % of your yearly income. I remember a dude in Europe got a million euro fine or some shit
Great, first offense is 1%, doubles each time time. For the 16th ticket offemce it would be 65,536%.
Clearly that's impossible for one person to pay off, so every ticket after 5 gets crowd funded by all the people involved in not revoking the license after 5 offences.
To be generous, every 5 years with no new ticket, one offence is removed from the percentage count.
Drunk/impaired driving starts at 5% and quadruples each time, and never goes away. If you get a ticket for drinking and driving at 20, and then again 72, that's 20%.
16 speeding tickets in a year is fucking insane. I think in many states you would have enough points to lose your license.
I've been driving for 35 years, I've had 2 speeding tickets.
I don't drive slow I just know where Cops like to sit.
Infuriating because 16 is a number too high, right?
Ok but how are they going to deal with the fact that LEO in their personal civilian cars are the ones speeding and going through red lights with impunity?
Cool. Fuck cars. Take transit in NYC.
Nobody drives in nyc because there’s too much traffic
Exactly, how does one even speed there
While I agree cars can suck, I would rather not build the torment nexus
Cars (well, the car-first infrastructure in most of the US) is already a pretty effective forment nexus.
This is coming from the same legislators who want to restrict 3d printing
New York is really doing a good job of leading us into a dystopian hellscape
Those are two very different things, and more than one ticket per month over the course of a year (and those are just the times you get caught) is more than generous.
If anything people should lose their license
Let's not build the torment nexus
Let's not build the torment nexus
Those are definitely words
Normal countries use a point system for drivers licenses.
Hope it gets approved
Speed limiting devices aren't bad, it's the GPS tracking that bugs people. I'm waiting for the day Germany finally gets a speed limit and the EU starts asking for a limiter to 140kmh or something on every car
Unpopular opinion:
Cars should come pre-configured with a speed limit matching tge highest speed limit in tge country (ie if tge highest legal speed limit is 120kph, all cars should have a default unchangeable limit of 120kph)
The device, known as Intelligent Speed Assistance, is a small box affixed to the dashboard that uses GPS to identify the speed limit — 25 m.p.h. or less on most local streets, and higher on highways — and caps the driver slightly above it. The driver may temporarily override the device, in certain circumstances, with the tap of a button.
"The entire economy should collapse if GPS has a temporary outage"
This, but unironically.
It's much more efficient to just build traffic calming. It's so nice. North America could be a biking paradise while maintaining 2 or 4 lane roads, it just isn't. I oppose these kind of ""solution""s aren't as good as stuff that's been proven to work in both traffic flow, people flow, cost, and safety.
Americans love their cars. There will be people who disable it to drive 80mph on surface streets at night and hit someone who didn't want to add an additional half mile to go to the crosswalk.
There's a limit to it though.
Biking is great for cities, unless you'd have to cross most of it to reach work, hospitals, or healthy foods and bring them home. I've known people that did it, but I don't think most of the country could qualify as a paradise, even if we tore down and rebuilt cities from the ground up.
Plus, it doesn't address the needs of those that can't bike, or maybe even not walk. The elderly, the disabled, the temporarily sick, and even kids considering the way the world has gotten populated ( bigger numbers mean the percentage of predators also returns bigger numbers of those).
And it really only works in some cities, and would require shifting all of the shipping to retail connections. You can't get supplies from a train to a warehouse on pedal power realistically, nor from warehouse to citizen available stations like stores.
Unless you're suggesting a total death of modern civilization. Which is cool, but not at all going to happen. Because without the supply infrastructure that gets materials from suppliers to where the goods need to be, they can't get there. Even if we went back to horses and carriages for that, we'd still need well built roads that connect things. Doing that leaves biking in the same category it does with cars, so the only improvement is in not having to suck exhaust. Which would be great, just not sure it's a realistic thing
Part of the way to build a nation with good bike infrastructure is to bring all those things closer together. People that bike don't want to need to cross most of the city to reach places they want to go, so they are going to find somewhere to live where they don't have to. Also importantly, bike infrastructure doesn't mean no automobile infrastructure, it just means less of it, not the least because less is needed.
The article even helps with priorities, with special outrage for speeding in school zones. Fine, let’s start there. It ought to be an easy argument that every school zone should prioritize pedestrian safety, and be difficult to speed in. Even if it’s as simple as directing through drivers elsewhere, it’s a win
North America isn't getting rid of its commuter highways anytime soon.
Cars can still exist. We have so much space for it.
Buses and lorries. We transport the people on the buses and cargo on lorries, just like we do now.
This is what people mean when they talk about car brain - you're so focused on the need for a car that you forgot that cars aren't even used for moving your examples.
Busses take forever because they stop at every block and only drive predetermined routes. It turns every 10 minute drive by car to an hour+ long trip which doesn't work with our culture where people need to work 16 jobs in order to get by.
You might as well be arguing for transporter technology as that's just as likely as a solution.
Buses are slow because of the traffic caused by cars, and have few routes because of the number of people using cars instead. Getting rid of the cars solves the bus problems, genius.
Can't say I've ever seen a city bus stuck in a traffic jam which is the only way cars would slow them down. They're slow because they're stopping every block and only come so often so each transfer comes with a 15+ minute wait. This is the same reason Amtrak is slow and they don't have to deal with traffic either.
Surely widespread surveillance technology has no possible unintended consequences, certainly this can only end well
(It uses GPS. At a minimum it would lay the groundwork for location tracking of every new vehicle sold. Nevermind any consequences that are actually unforeseeable.)
It's not built into cars inherently, so at least that's not a concern.
Yeah, I meant specifically in reply to someone saying it should be standard. Well designed as an installed device like a breathalyzer to start the car I could see it potentially being a worthwhile tool in addition to licence revocation, since folks often still drive on revoked licenses.
But I think you'd need to design it very carefully for a variety of reasons including road saftey- taking away agency from the person operating the vehicle always has potential risks that would need to be carefully considered and mitigated as best as possible
Fair enough then, I can't see the comment you were replying to so I didn't know that. As for the revoked license thing, I honestly think you should be forced to sell your car if your license gets revoked, with significant penalties for anyone else that allows someone with a revoked license to drive their car.
All good :)
I feel like that has too many practical implications to be great policy in practice, but I can certainly agree with the sentiment
Im pretty sure all new cars already have GPS and cellular service installed. The federal government also passed legislation to mandate "driver fatigue" cameras in the dash stating in 2027 (part of Biden's big infrastructure bill), which will monitor your face and track your eyes constantly and not allow you to drive if it thinks you're fatigued or impaired.
I have a brand new car. It has a DCM, a digital communications module. The module has a single fuse. Did you know you can pull the fuse out, and suddenly your car is deaf, dumb, blind, and mute? Sure, no more GPS, but IDGAF. For a better, more permanent solution, you can disconnect the wires going to the DCM, and install a wiring sub-harness to completely bypass it. It can't receive data from the car anymore--which means it's also not able to store data that can be downloaded by a mechanic later--and the battery that powers the eSIM will die in a day or so.
Fuck big data, and fuck you for suggesting that it's okay just because it's existed in some form for ~50 years.
It'd be the first thing I bypassed in a car.
Why?
Surely you can think of some way that government installed GPS devices in someone's cars might be worth choosing not to play along with...
The "be ungovernable" sentiment is pretty common for folks on this platform, right up until the cops could maybe stop people from doing something they dont like and then suddenly surveillance and policing are totally viable solutions that definitely couldn't possibly backfire or have unintended side effects 😅
I'd rather stick to traffic calming road design and better pedestrian infrastructure, personally
test
Test successful, you have tested quite testily.
Test test test
Do you have a cell phone powered on and with you while you drive?
I am sure, so do you. So you'll certainly have no issue posting the GPS coordinates of your home and workplace here in this thread. After all, you're already OK with strangers tracking you.
I'm waiting...
Point is, gov can see it anyway. After like 25mph, its pretty evident you're in a vehicle.
Yes, and my point is, if you say more government tracking doesn't matter since you're already tracked by Google, then it doesn't matter if strangers also track you. Since government officials and Google employees are also strangers to you.
Correct. Those aren't the only two entities that can track you.
Then where are your coordinates?
37.34904° N, 121.90544° W
Show me your warrant now
So you actually don't think giving up your location doesn't matter.
Glad we agree on this.
Gov needs a warrant to obtain gps coordinates. Show me your warrant.
They don't need a warrant, you're allowed to just tell people your coordinates. A warrant would just permit Pommes to commit illegal acts until you give it up.
GPS doesn't need an active internet connection. Maps can be offline.
...what? I'm saying you don't understand how warrants work, not whatever you're rambling about.
The entire point of this thread is about putting GPS in vehicles, FYI. Dude was asking me to post my coordinates, like it was some kind of gotcha.
If someone really wanted my GPS coordinates, they would need them stored online somewhere, and a warrant would be needed to access them.
Yes, if they were stored online somewhere, then whatever entity is keeping track of it would have access to them at all times, but if a government wanted that information, they would need a warrant.
Luckily, GPS doesn't need an active internet connection, so if you have offline maps, you can not only navigate roads, but the GPS device COULD be used as a speed limiter effectively, with no privacy loss whatsoever.
The guy replying to you isn't the government, and he still doesn't need a warrant for you to just tell him your current coordinates. Everything you've said is completely irrelevant.
Why do you think he is asking for my GPS coordinates?
I have a faraday wallet. Every so often I put my phone in the wallet so that it can't be detected by RF emissions.
Im sure it works great when you use it.
It does, yeah. You do have to use it though; just having it does nothing.
Yes and I don't want them to be able to track that either. I'm not sure having an existing surveillance issue is good reason to add more surveillance 😅
Again, we have lots of options to solve this problem structurally with traffic calming and pedestrian friendly road and infrastructure design
Because a wide swath of speed limits are not credible, and are deliberately set unrealistically low in contravention of traffic studies, civil engineers' best practices and experience, and common sense simply as a revenue grab via fines and to have a convenient legal justification to pull over and harass undesirable people, i.e. minorities.
You ever drive through an all-white beach down in Nowhere, Florida or someplace and wonder why all of the sudden the speed limit on their major six lane thoroughfare is suddenly 20 MPH? You'd better believe the people who live there aren't the targets of getting pulled over constantly.
Edit to add: This is before getting into the possibility of emergencies, fleeing disasters, getting someone to the hospital, etc.
Yeah, America would rather enforce with tickets than with good engineering and reasonable rules.
My city, medium-sized and in the US, used to post 85th percentile speeds and quartiles whenever they did speed studies. Sometimes they overrode it, rarely did they explain why, but at least they showed that they had gone out and observed that actual section of road. We have a different mayor and probably a different council at this point and I haven't seen a speed study on the city website in some time, though they seem to be paving and doing a better job of making car friendly and bike friendly routes interact better. I am a firm believer that road design is 2/3 of how people drive and only the tiniest portion is fear of enforcement. We should keep in mind though that speed doesn't have to be the enemy. Germany has speed too, but their 30kph neighborhood roads don't look like wide open airport runways. That's why I'm baffled by the freeway speed cams some states are doing. The freeway is statistically the safest place for an American to drive (except maybe on their gaming console). Suburbia and rural roads are much less safe because of higher speeds, intersections, 2 way traffic, and unprotected turns across oncoming lanes.
To your point about little towns, I'm still irritated with Wyoming State Patrol in Rawlins, WY for giving my a ticket for passing a Semi at 79 in a 70 on a clear and sunny day, safely, and carefully. It's just the ticket lottery. Set a low enough limit and you can pull over Mother-fucking-Theresa for breaking the law.
Surely you can think of some way that government installed GPS devices in someone's cars might be worth choosing not to play along with...
The "be ungovernable" sentiment is pretty common for folks on this platform, right up until the cops could maybe stop people from doing something they dont like and then suddenly surveillance and policing might be entirely viable solutions that definitely couldn't possibly backfire or have unintended side effects 😅. Installing a government mandated GPS device in a car doesnt just have implications for how fast you can go. Surveillance technology always carries the risk of enabling the government to surveil, intervene in, and persocute people for things that ought to be protected activity. You never know how this kind of far reaching increase of governmental power may affect people's rights.
I'd rather stick to traffic calming road design and better pedestrian infrastructure, personally
My town has been increasingly prioritizing road redesign for safety - my favorite example is a major road lined with strip malls was restriped down to one lane and is now noticeably slower, calmer and safer yet we get through it noticeably faster. The magic of doing it right
To get to a common destination through there used to take me 12-16 minutes. Now I drive slower and it’s consistently 9 minutes or less!
Love the hear that, thats rad as fuck!
I live 115 miles from the nearest hospital that has critical care abilities. I live 30 miles from the nearest hospital of any kind. What's faster, do you think? Pegging the speedometer on my car trying to get to a hospital, and meeting the ambulance on the way? Or waiting?
You've apparently never had to make it to a hospital before someone dies.
I happened to catch the comment before you deleted it, and I'm sorry that happened to anyone, and I'm sorry it was someone you obviously care about. Not gonna argue the point under discussion because I don't want to cause any distress beyond what's inevitable.
I didn't catch the comment before deleted, but regardless of different ways of looking at this subject, I'm sending love and hugs
Please take good care of yourself my friend 🫂