Happened with my step daughter. Traffic light at intersection. She said she had a green light, so did the other driver.

Cops -did- show up. "Did you have a green light" "I did." Less than 30 seconds of questions. Goes to the other driver, same, is back in under a minute. "Well, he said he's absolutely sure he had a green light, so I'm citing you for failing to obey a traffic signal".

There were no cameras in the area, no witnesses, just the two drivers. But the other driver was a 50 something male, and my step daughter was 17 and upset because it was our car. So the cop took his word and cited her.

Hmm, vehicle black box? If that showed that she had come to and been at a stop, and then accelerated, that would at least imply she had been at a red light, and gone when it turned green, as she said.

No, no interest there. Even the insurer (fine, whatever), said "unless we're facing a six digit payout, we're not pulling the black box".

Don't even start me on the fact that after our insurance denied liability, the other driver sued her in small claims court for $10,000 for a car that had a KBB of $1,450. And the small claims judge noted that he technically couldn't sue a minor in small claims, but required us to go to mandatory arbitration, where the arbitrator said, quote, "I don't understand why, as a decent human being, if insurance will pay out, you don't just accept the claim." (Yeahhhh, filed a complaint about that, too. And here I stop, because I feel my blood pressure rising lol).

So the system worked exactly as intended?

It's not just auto insurance. Every government, government adjacent and highly regulated process is just like that.

It's not about right and wrong or fairness or making the responsible party pay or saving the children or protecting the environment or preventing sub-prime loans or enforcing building code or or whatever the alleged pretext is. It's about having an efficient process turn the subjective into the quantifiable and/or assign financial responsibility and do so in a manner that's not flagrantly wrong so often that a "large enough to be a problem" amount of people seek recourse outside the system (like smoking the CEO on the sidewalk or armoring a bulldozer or whatever).

But of course, marketing the system as though it's about right and wrong or fairness or whatever is what they do as a means toward what the point actually is so it's easy to understand why you think it failed instead of worked perfectly.