In Massachusetts, USA, red light cameras were illegal until very recently, due to a 70s era law specifying that a live policeman had to issue a citation for something like that. From well before traffic cameras were common.

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Scoundreller 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Before they were common, yes, but they existed in active use back in the 1960s in the Netherlands: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_enforcement_camera

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rvnx 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Put a single live policeman in front of 100 camera screens

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joecool1029 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

We had a pilot program in NJ for them, they were universally hated. People would slam brakes on and be hanging over the edge into intersection and throw their car into reverse panicking to avoid the ticket, ended up causing a ton of new accidents so the program was never continued. In newark people shot at the cameras: https://www.nj.com/news/2012/08/shoot_out_the_red_lights_2_t...

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0_____0 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

That's an insufficient yellow phase rather than a camera problem. Not sure why NJ would think their population are special snowflakes that can't deal with red light cameras otherwise.

	▲	peterfirefly 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Italians?

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rcpt 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hitting the brakes and getting rear ended is barely even a crash compared to T-boning someone or plowing over pedestrians

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joecool1029 3 days ago | parent [-]

I didn't say that. I said they'd panic and throw their vehicle into reverse. Cars/trucks can take the hit, motorcycles/bicycles not so much.

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rcpt 3 days ago | parent [-]

Huge skepticism that bicycles and motorcycles were getting backed into in any appreciable quantities.

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joecool1029 a day ago | parent | next [-]

If not that then rear-ended, here's the state's report on how red light cameras increased accidents: https://dot.nj.gov/transportation/about/publicat/lmreports/p...

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potato3732842 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

How many people you willing to put in the hospital to prevent people from technically running reds on the yellow-red transition?

	▲	rcpt a day ago \| parent [-]
		> in 2023, 1,086 people were killed in crashes that involved red light running https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/red-light-running So let's use that as an upper bound. How many people were killed by these backups you're talking about?

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rahkiin 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sounds like NJ has some terrible drivers

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renewiltord 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[flagged]

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Scoundreller 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Thankfully sawzalls are cheap and plentiful so people can use much safer practices to disable/remove them:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/parkside-drive-speed-...

	▲	AlexeyBelov 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The comments is written as if you specifically advocate for this. Why?
	▲	potato3732842 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I bet if you come back after they've removed the old one but before they install the new one you can wreck the threads on the threaded anchors by impacting the wrong size higher grade nut on.