I just don't think there's that much copper in a camera. That's a lot of weight for a camera by itself.
this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2025
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It's true! Little known fact, they also have their own catalytic converter
Gold coin pop out the top WAA-HOO
There seems to be 2 main camps in this thread.
Fuck the police, and fuck shitty drivers.
Both camps are correct.
Gonna be downvoted, because apparently this is car brain central, but the amount of mental gymnastics people will do to make red light camera enforcement "bad" is crazy.
The US' private company control over these cameras notwithstanding.
Fuck me, so many people die on on roads, and especially at intersections.
The US’ private companies
this is entirely the problem, because they're turning over info to ICE and other agencies and it's being used oppressively.
Hence my carve out. I don't support the privacy nightmare the US has.
I do support road safety cameras in general, if managed properly.
People don't have the right to have no consequences for their dangerous behaviour.
I do support road safety cameras in general, if managed properly.
yeah that's the rub. what municipality do you trust to manage them properly in this day and age? I've seen horror stories from all over the US, UK....
I fucking hate, absolutely despise the vroom vroom dickheads who make these technologies desirable. I want them to be held accountable but am not sure it's worth the ice goons and yokel yokels who will abuse their capabilities.
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The city I work for put up Flock cameras with specific instructions from Council that they were only to be used for identification of cars flagged in active warrants.
Within a week of their installation, police used the cameras to track the movements of someone who filed a complaint.
Sounds like a police/privacy problem, not the idea of having cameras at all.
Police should need a warrant to access the videos.
The software should not log licence plates of every single car that comes past.
The software should be open source and developed by the public sector.
I agree what's in place in the US is a privacy nightmare, but the idea of having cameras in general isn't fundamentally bad.
Skill issue USA, git gud.
Fuck the police
I just don't think having this kind of surveillance state apparatus is ever worth it I don't want the government or private companies tracking my every move.
I don't even own a car and I want these cameras gone.
I don't want the government or private companies tracking my every move
This is an issue with how the cameras are operated. I'm taking issue with people complaining that these cameras exist at all.
People claiming no system could ever be privacy-preserving aren't being very imaginative.
I agree the surveillance state is bad, but taking a picture of someone running a red light and sending them a fine is a good thing, sorry.
What's bad is allowing cameras to passively record every single licence plate at all times and store that information. A speed or red light camera should only take a photo/video when it detects someone speeding/running a red light, and no other information should be stored.
I can condone taking down pedestrian surveillance, but people who drive cars should follow the rules or get fucked.
It is not necessary to install photo enforcement cameras to get people to follow the rules.
What better ideas do you have in mind?
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Government surveillance tracking device you mean? Enrich the local cops devices? Over half of violations monies collected goes to the corporations that market them to local and state officials with lavish dinners and vacations devices? Financial incentive to calibrate them to flag innocent drivers knowing there is little to no recourse against the company devices? 5.5 lbs you say?
On the one hand, omnipresent surveillance is bad and ripe for abuse.
On the other, I feel like the haphazard and selective enforcement of traffic laws by police officers is also really bad. Cops can selectively enforce laws so poor people or black people or whatever out-group suffers more. A machine should be impartial.
On the last hand, no traffic enforcement is probably going to get people killed. So that's not desirable.
Also, fines are problematic. Fines should probably scale with wealth, but also it shouldn't be a revenue source because that's a perverse incentive.
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Ea Nasir is a really interesting case study of how one piece of information can be interpreted in two completely different ways.
One interpretation, and the one most people know, is that the authors of the clay tablets complaints are legitimate.
The other is that Ea Nasir kept them as a record of people attempting to harm his reputation. So he could remember who to avoid doing business with in the future.
Why don't y'all just get to machine learn all those fucking tablets you dug up, like hundreds of thousands of them, and train a fucking AI on that shit and tell us what it says instead of sitting here being a besserwisser online, HMM? If there was one good cause for AI, cuneiform would be it. Just god damned saying.
Edit: just btw I happen to know that the problem is mainly the first training set, you need cuneiformers to correctly give the answers so the model knows what to train on, and there's like seven people in the world who do that, but I'm thinking, what if we trained an AI model on all the cuneiform we do know? Hit me up for proposals, I'm serious about this shit
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I'm a little confused, do you want people running red lights in the name of "personal liberty, yeehaw" because that seems like a bad idea.
No, I just haven't seen any evidence red light cameras are effective.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/red-light-cameras-may-not-make-streets-safer/
Also I don't like everything being under camera surveillance, so I need a strong justification to be fine with more of it
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Big problem with these is profit motivation. They are usually operated by a for profit business that the city contracts to. One of the cities near me had a few installed. The company made 5 million a year in fines, city ended up with pennies. The road is built like a 40mph road but has a 25mph speed limit only where the cameras are. There is no money to update the road to actually make it safer because it all goes to the company operating the cameras.
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Sure, remove the red light but please also remove cars.
I mean, being anti-authority is fine, but even if you achieve your stateless society, don't you still want your stateless society to still have traffic co-ordination somehow?
Stateless =/= rule-less
Photo enforcement cameras are problematic for several reasons.
A) It has been shown that yellow lights with such cameras are very often set to a yellow duration briefer than generally accepted engineering practices to increase revenue *1
B) They discourage a rare misbehavior, actually running red lights, whilst causing another to become common. That is slamming on the brakes even when it isn't safe to stop. Exacerbated by A. Better slam on the brakes when it flicks yellow even if you are way too close to reasonably stop whilst going only the speed limit.
People who are caught up by it are almost always those who found themselves a bit too far into the intersection to safely stop. EG those who cross the threshold right as it is changing. There is for reasons of safety a few seconds between one light turning red and another green. At 30 mph (44 feet per second) someone will fully clear a 40 foot intersection in less than a second. That is to say the only people you catch aren't those who would have collided.
They are those
- you fucked with the shorter duration yellow oops
- people who hesitated because of 1 and slowed but ultimately decided to proceed thinking they can make it
- People with poorer brakes and or dealing with rainy conditions reducing stopping time.
C) Most of the money goes to the contractor who owns the cameras. Essentially you are letting a private company prey on your citizens as long as government gets to keep the scraps.
*1 https://ww2.motorists.org/blog/6-cities-that-were-caught-shortening-yellow-light-times-for-profit/
I'm not arguing for police states and surveillance, but this is wrong:
a rare misbehavior
Nearly half of all motor accidents are at intersections. It's estimated there are annually a quarter million red light running accidents, and somewhere between 700 - 1000 fatalities yearly from these accidents. I suppose you could argue that with the number of deaths yearly from auto accidents (30,000 - 40,000 in the US) that a thousand "isn't that much" but I feel like if a thousand people a year died to anything else we would be up in arms and demanding something be done about it.
Red light cameras have been demonstrated to reduce crashes at intersections, actual studies and data, so maybe check for all sources on all angles of a problem. The reduction isn't drastic but it is there. It shows that there are ARE things that can be done about intersection accidents, but whether or not it's cameras is a separate debate. I don't think the harm of illicit data collection or the instances of some cities using corrupt methods for collecting funds outweighs the lives saved, but I guess you can ask the families of people who died how they feel.
I am open to better ideas for reducing auto accidents but everyone seems pretty stuck on the idea that we should have the freedom to pilot thousands of pounds of steel as fast as we can as a method for compensating for bad time management, and I think it's safe to say that a LOT of the opposition to automated methods for managing traffic laws irritates people because they don't feel like they have a way to "get away" with breaking the rules.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10487344/
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/05049/
I'll add one more. They subvert our right to a trial and seeing our accuser. The fines are all supposed to be viewed by some sort of officer that is supposed to show up if you challenge the ticket. The only one I've received didn't have any info on how to challenge it. It was like a bill that obfuscated my right to a trial. Guilt is assumed and forgiveness is ignored. 28 in a school zone in an unfamiliar city, instant fine with no "oops I fucked up" recourse.
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If only it were possible to transport humans and goods without a network of cameras invading everyone's privacy.
If only that was the natural state of the world for more of human history until just a few years ago.
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And flock cameras are apparently easily rooted and repurposed.
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