> Surveillance is generally a net negative, but it's also bad when you see people speeding around schools, rolling through stop signs, and running red lights.

The fact that these cameras are already pervasive and the problem of bad drivers hasn't been solved anywhere doesn't give me a lot of hope that these cameras are the solution to that particular problem.

It seems like police can do a lot to increase enforcement without the need of these devices. We have evidence that they've been doing less traffic enforcement so maybe start there. Increasing our standards for driving tests (some of which were eliminated entirely over the first few years of the pandemic) would probably help. Automatically shutting off/disabling or limiting the use of cell phones (all of which come with sensors that can detect when you are going at speeds you'd expect while in cars) might help. Bringing physical buttons and dials back to cars instead of burying common functions in touchscreen menus might help.

There's a whole lot of places to look for solutions to safer roads before we have to resort to tracking everyone's movements at all times.

We have very few alternatives to driving in the US so we have very lax driver training and testing.

Across the US we have roads and infrastructure that encourage speed right next to decaying pedestrian infrastructure. It's very difficult to get state DOTs to roll back or do traffic calming. They often prohibit the use of bollards or barriers near these roadways.

In a lot, not all, physical changes to the environment could drastically reduce traffic fatalities without surveillance.

  > but it's also bad when you see people speeding around schools, rolling through stop signs, and running red lights.

IMO the issue is that there's little to no enforcement outside of speeding. I see people get pulled over for speeding in a straight line even if it's relatively safe to do so, but never for talking on their phone, messing with the touch screen in their vehicle, left turns from the right lane and vice versa, failure to keep lane, failure to yield, failure to signal, cutting people off, driving a vehicle unfit for the road, etc.

It usually takes about 5 minutes of driving to observe someone doing something that I would pull them over for. I don't think cops need all this automated surveillance, they just need to drive around and be proactive.

A camera doesn't stop those acts though, it may only discourage those who know about it at a huge cost of privacy and rights.

How about we build better infrastructure and regulate vehicles since those do actually stop this behavior. Most of those red lights and stoplights in the US should be roundabouts. Narrower lanes and other traffic calming measures should be much more pervasive. Vehicle size, specifically bumper height is out of control.

Compare US traffic and pedestrian deaths to the rest of the world, or at least a lot of EU countries. Its embarrassing.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/74/wr/mm7408a2.htm#F1_down

I agree. It's frustrating that we have ended up in a reality where vehicle movement is heavily tracked, but we're not using that technology to do the most obvious and productive thing.

My city spent a few million dollars installing Flock cameras to all its municipal parking garages in a matter of months, but has been hemming and hawing over adding a few speed cameras for years, despite petitioning the state for an allowance do so back in 2023.

Traffic enforcement cameras don't even have to become the networked surveillance system that Flock offers. Most are still cameras triggered by radar rather than perpetually recording all drivers.

On my way home, I noticed at a stoplight across the street from Apple Park that the driver in the lane next to me had his phone mounted up high in landscape mode and was watching the Simpsons. Just absolutely unhinged behavior lately.

I live in NYC. People used to be afraid of double parking. Like you I regularly see the same bat-shit driving and no one seems to care to say or do anything. It's bonkers.

Your examples don't seem to represent the leading causes of fatalities from traffic accidents in the US, which remain distracted driving (phones and crappy touchscreen controls, etc) and drunk driving. People rolling through a stop sign / performing a 'California' stop are nowhere near the massive security concern to authorize the ideal surveillance state. To deal with the bigger issues you would have to film peoples actions in their cars and run it all through ai to accuse them of driving while drowsy. That would be an incredible and lazy failure. Also, fatalities per mile had a massive surge in 2020-2021, but they have been steadily dropping since then (2024 in wikipedia estimated a 1.27 per 1m miles, about the same as 2008). If the trend continues, in a year or two we will be back to the early 2010s lows without draconian measures.

The solution, as always, is better infrastructure and support at multiple levels, not beating everybody with a stick.

These cameras are currently not used at all for traffic/speed enforcement. The best they would do is track more serious crimes like hit-and-runs by photographing cars in the area.

I agree. And Flock doesn’t help one bit with reducing reckless driving.

We cracked down on driving under the influence with changes from DWI to DUI. In the 10-15 years you mention, the prevalence of distracted driving from mobile devices has gotten out of hand. There's no field sobriety test that can prove one was distracted by a device. That makes this much more difficult to crack down on.

Part of the public pushback is that people almost always drive the “feels like” speed and not the posted speedlimit. We build 6 lane roads and then wonder why people go 50mph when it’s 35 posted, it’s because it’s 6 lanes and 35 feels slow. Cities profit from this in the form of speed cameras, which is why they’ve been outlawed in a lot of places.

Eventually we’ll have autonomous vehicles which will mitigate many of these issues, but will the surveillance infrastructure then be reduced? Probably not.

War is peace.

Surveillance is safety.

The solution is to have you abused by the system so that you realize that petty deviance is not something the dragnet should be brought to bear on if it must exist at all.

Your opinions are directly counterproductive on these petty issues. You ask for the state to use the jackboot. The jackboot just makes people hate the state and think in terms of "will I get caught". If not for you people trying to force compliance on this, that and the next thing the state would be in higher standing in people's minds and voluntary "when it matters" or "because it's the right thing to do" compliance would be higher. Sure, we could add more jackboot, but that costs money and no democratic-ish system is gonna allocate a bunch of money to do stuff everyone hates.

> driving is getting more dangerous year by year

My observation has been that the danger increase is a combination of three things:

1. Lack of situational awareness/awareness of surroundings. This manifests in various ways like improper merging, improper turns into traffic, turning across multiple lanes, and left-lane hogs.

2. Frustration becomes aggression. This also manifests in multiple ways, but primarily is seen through tail-gating (in response to left-lane hogs) and swimming through traffic (in response to left-lane hogs), as well as road-rage (mostly in response to the other misbehavior).

3. Constant distraction. I have seen SO MANY drivers literally watching videos on a tablet, playing games, or otherwise driving at high rates of speed (70mph+) while fully engaged in something other than driving. It's at epidemic proportions.

The issue is, by and large, not people doing rolling stops (which by the way have never been proven to cause an increase in accidents when performed properly) or speeding (generally, some exceptions like school zones do matter). Running red lights is definitely a problem that is more common place, and is likely a part of all 3 of these these.

I feel like to a large degree all of this is a symptom of a wider societial issue where everyone acts in selfish and self-centered ways, completely ignoring their impacts on others, and moving from moments to moments where they can engage with their phone/social-media, to the exclusion of all else. I don't think phones/social-media /caused/ the problem, I think it exacerbates it though. Every aspect of our society is worsening because the revealed behavior of our population is one of lack of care or outright disdain for everyone else around them and an absolute obsession with serving their own interests above all else. That this manifests in driving is unsurprising.

I would actually be for civil asset forfeiture in these cases. The laws of physics don't care about due process; sue the car and save the video. Let the owner pay the fines and if they can prove some other driver did it, let them file civil suit against them to recoup the fines. Driving on public property is not a right.

> Surveillance is generally a net negative, but it's also bad when you see people speeding around schools, rolling through stop signs, and running red lights.

Speeding and running red lights can be combated without affecting the privacy of innocents on the road. A debate can and should be had about the placement of radar traps though, many are straight off highway robberies trapping people who don't notice a speed-limit sign that is visually hard to notice.

> driving is getting more dangerous year by year

Not over the long term, no. There may have been a recent uptick in the post-pandemic US but it's mostly just noise. Fatalities per mile driven have been going down markedly in recent decades. Driving was twice as dangerous in the 80's as it is now.

Retention is one good line between enforcement and tracking.

If we wanted to solve this problem while retaining the benefits, what we'd do is have stiff penalties for warrantless retention and required yearly independent audits of systems.

https://ringmast4r.github.io/FLOCK/

https://deflock.me/

DeFlock is the first link in the "Related ALPR & Flock Projects" section, it contains a map.

I think we have a surplus of "awareness" tools/websites that are great at what they do, but not much "rubber meets the road" tools to guide the user in actually taking action based on the information presented. I, for one, feel a huge sense of fatigue at the amount of awareness I have of problems I don't have the tools/strategies/knowledge/time to solve.

(This is not a negative comment about this post btw, more just commentary on how the fire hose of "look at how bad this is in excruciating detail" can be overwhelming.)

It pulls counties from OSM administrative boundaries of level 6, which according to the OSM wiki, is "State counties and county equivalents, Territorial municipalities" (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag%3aboundary=administr...). It does lead to some weird oddities, like counties with under 10 homes... I'd rather not manually correct it, since I want to rely on pure OSM data. (Unless you mean there is an actual bug in the processing and there's counties listed that aren't in the right states...)

I'll add a link to the OSM relation for the county to each county page, so you can see the source data on OSM to verify/edit.

One of those counties is Rockland, which is in NY. I wonder if it's counting bordering counties for states, since the assumption may be that the closest essential services for some Rockland residents may be in New Jersey.

California includes a number of counties which are actually in Baja California and Baja California del Sur.

yeah we have 8 counties in CT, not 14. The names are also wrong.

> 100% coverage seems like an inevitability in a country where filming in public is a constitutionally protected right a

It really doesn't have to be though. The rights of individuals to record in public doesn't have to translate to the right of corporations (flock, amazon, etc.) to do it without restriction. Time, place, and manner restrictions on our rights already exist, it just needs to be found that this manner is unacceptable as an imposition on our freedom which should be protected under the fourth amendment.

> filming in public is a constitutionally protected right

As with everything, there's much nuance to this "right".

https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Common_Questions,_Arguments,_%...

It is an inevitability, because a critical mass of municipalities are going to roll these out such that there isn't a practical route to take through any major metro without being recorded.

I'm a private citizen. On my house we have an ALPR Axis camera pointing down the street (in addition to Axis cameras around the whole perimiter.) And when the police ask, we almost always provide them with data. I feel perfectly justified doing this, and we've helped solved several crimes.

Vets/hospitals are far less common (and the former probably suffers from less tags as hospitals are more important) so the distance one must travel increases, so higher likelihood of crossing one. Especially compared to how common everything else is.

If you check deflock.me, would you say that 0.0% aligns with what you expect?

Perhaps there's some large chain of vets run by a PE firm where the PE firm did a blanket deal.

Or the Tesla could just record where it is at all times.

As an aside, there are currently companies that do this but for delinquent auto loans to expedite the repo process.

Bluetooth? You're overthinking this. We've been mandated to carry 4-5 transmitters per vehicle broadcasting their UIDs at 315 MHz since the mid 2000s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_TPMS

Including the camera and microphone in our pocket that pings every cell tower every time we move.

Recent car tracking discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46097624

To an extent this data is within our reach to stop (buy old car, unplug cellular modules, etc). With ALPRs the only option is moving.

I swear it's about 75% of houses I come across that have ring (or similar) cameras