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Seattle Sets the Stage for Automatic Traffic Camera Expansion - The Urbanist
(www.theurbanist.org)
this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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Mix an increasingly affordable and easy implementation of nanny-state technology to a shift towards tyrannical governance, and things will likely start getting ugly fast.
I would prefer to be judged by a person. I truly hate cars but here in the general Seattle area if you don't have a car you just can't function. So, say you are late to work every day but you blow thru every intersection to get to work not too late, just late. That's obviously a you problem and one day it will be someone getting hit by you and you end up in jail. But if you're just a random person or a visitor to the city, you'll get a ticket by surprise one day.
There is also a complete lack of segregation of duties with these things. The companies that install, configure, and maintain also get a cut of the income. This is really bad.
Right; I'm considering requesting cameras in my city to protect crosswalks, pedestrians and cyclists as none of the laws are currently enforced in any meaningful way. One of the most cost-reasonable, effective ways to do that would be to have automatic cameras but the lecherous vendors that want 20-30% of the cut and authoritarian state are two massive concerns I have that make me, at the cost of my own daily safety, hesitant to call this stuff out.
Keep in mind too that they’re not always accurate. I know of one in my city that regularly takes photos of people going through on the green because it’s a bit of a wonky intersection. And that means a person gets to spend their day in court instead of at work fighting a ticket they did not deserve.
Yeah, that at least can be systematically identified and corrected; the bias and also inaccuracy of judgement of current human officers seems far worse and when combined with the fact non-vehicular safety is seen as a low priority or completely ignored, getting to "good" for safety of non-vehicular traffic is life and death. A few tickets that get waived, or in my city, Portland Oregon, a citizen sued to prove the cameras inaccurate where they were and won vs. engineers, is a small price to pay vs. the current state of zero enforcement and bodies littering crosswalks and cyclists mown down in "bike lanes".
As someone likely to be profiled by cops, I like the concept of objectivity with automated patrolling, but this comes at such an overbearing scalability and privacy violation that it's still the greater evil. I just hope automated driving becomes the norm soon enough to obviate the need for this. That comes at a cost too, but the lives saved from that will be on the order of what some vaccines have accomplished and the efficiency with regards to time and energy all add up to make that a worthwhile change in my book.
driving while bot stops are going to be a thing.