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Italian Red Lights Rigged With Short Yellow Light
suraj.sun writes with an excerpt from Ars Technica which brings to mind the importance of auditable code for hardware used in law enforcement: "It's no secret that red light cameras are often used to generate more ticket revenue for the cities that implement them, but a scam has been uncovered in Italy that has led to one arrest and 108 investigations over traffic systems being rigged to stop sooner for the sole purpose of ticketing more motorists."
the lights near me which were changed to camera enforced had their yellow reduced the minimum allowed by the law.
The formula for this is pretty swift, http://safety.transportation.org/htmlguides/sgn_int/App02.htm
It is very common to see people lock down when it goes yellow so approaching either of the two I go through does require extra caution. The fortunate application is that they did concentrate on those crossings with the most amount of accidents from people running red lights. They have not applied them to intersections for leaving or entering an interstate where the rule seems to be five cars on red.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Hacking Italian traffic lights for financial gain has been thought of before. The Italian Job
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
At least we know that it doesn't happen in America. Except in about 6 cities or so.
um, are you implying that this isn't news because all traffic signals are rigged with short yellow lights?
assuming that this is a common practice, the fact that those responsible for rigging the traffic lights are being prosecuted is still newsworthy. it's not everyday that 63 municipal police, 39 municipal government officials, and 7 government contractors are accused of conspiracy and corruption.
if nothing, this case has brought international media attention to a potentially widespread problem--and not just with rigged lights but all traffic camera systems. if journalists don't report on such stories, then the issue would probably be ignored rather than bringing traffic cameras under public scrutiny.
and if you know that your hometown has rigged traffic cameras, then maybe you should report the problem to the proper authorities or file a lawsuit against the city. acting as if government corruption should just be accepted (or ignored) is precisely the kind of public complacency that allows corrupt officials to remain in power.
If you don't have time to create sufficient separation when approaching an intersection then just assume it's red and start to stop until you can verify that the light is actually green.
Unfortunately there are cars behind you, and if their drivers can see the [green] light (because they are farther and their view is not obstructed) they'd have no reason to think that you will be slowing down, and so they might slam right into you.
What's true in theory is entirely irrelevant when in reality shorter yellows have been found to be more dangerous.
But they're also more profitable, so I guess that's a win for the state.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
it's not everyday that 63 municipal police, 39 municipal government officials, and 7 government contractors are accused of conspiracy and corruption.
I guess you've never heard of Chicago.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I think the problem is that people try to stop more quickly than is prudent in fear of getting nailed by the camera and the result is an increase in rear end collisions from tailgaters behind them or skidding out of control into other cars/objects.
Although, of course, one should not tailgate the car in front of them, they have no control over the car behind them. At times when someone is tailgating me in heavy traffic, I've made a decision to not stop at a yellow light that I could have stopped at. The reason being, I felt that given normal signal timing, if I didn't stop, I would still enter the intersection on the yellow but if I did stop, I would get rear ended. I placed my obligation to avoid an accident higher than the slight risk of a "fast yellow" set to the theoretically shortest possible timing and confident that if a cop happened to be watching, he might nail the guy behind me instead of me (as, the second guy entering on a red is somehow "more guilty" IMHO). If I know there's a red light camera at the intersection, sorry, I assume that the yellow is as short as possible and I stop even if it increases the risk of being rear ended (his insurance company pays for my car repairs, he doesn't pay for the red light ticket). In fact, I had a couple of close calls (guy behind me smoking squealing tires, skidding etc. while I stopped safely behind the limit line without fanfare) at a local intersection that I drive through regularly -- and was annoyed when I read in the paper much later that the cameras had been turned off at that intersection for over a year!
When someone is tailgating you in heavy traffic, you have few options to stopping that behavior quickly - changing lanes isn't always an option, slowing down may just make the problem worse if you're approaching a signal which may turn yellow suddenly since the distance between yourself and the following car - i.e. the margin of safety - is reduced (because the gap is shorter and you're going slower so actually stop more quickly) if the tailgater doesn't take heed of your speed change before you decide to stop for a yellow.
Even with all this care, twice I've been rear ended by a tailgater when I stopped quickly - once for a yellow light, another time for another reason. One of these times, three cars behind me ended up hitting each other also. The car behind me was lighter, more fragile, and had a lower bumper than my car (his was a small Fiat I think) so his impact on my bumper just scuffed the underside of my bumper cover but his bumper, grill, lights, and hood were seriously trashed. (After determining I had no damage I cared about, the officer noted that there was only room for three cars on the standard accident report he had to fill out so, unless I needed the report for my uses, he would just leave me off and I could go on my way -- I always wondered how the guy behind me explained to his insurance company how his car had thousands of dollars of damage and the car he hit didn't even exist on the accident report).
Stopping "as quickly as you can" is just a bad idea unless it's necessary and safe.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
I guess you've never heard of Chicago.
I heard Chicago was founded when a bunch of New Yorkers got together and said, "Gee, I'm really loving all of the crime and the traffic, but it's just not cold enough."
DATABASE WOW WOW
We are talking about Italy, where the more corrupt you are, the more likely you are to end up in the national government. As an Italian, however, I am positive that no politician will be held accountable for this: our legal system effectively prevents corruption from being prosecuted.
How is that? Well, corruption is still a crime, and politicians have not yet managed to make investigations discretionary—any report on illegal activities still must be investigated, no matter the opinion of the prosecutors; this is a good thing because the politicians cannot tell prosecutors what to do. However, at the same time, Italy is unique in that we have a system with three degrees of appeal that are almost always granted, and statutory terms that continue running during the trial.
So, what do criminal politicians do? They remove all the funding they can from the judiciary. Italy's judiciary system is in a condition in which they actually lack paper and toner for printers, not to mention judiciary police being short on petrol. Add in a lot of legislation designed to slow down trials on crimes likely to be committed by politicians, note that complete trials may take a decade while statutory terms are much shorter, and and you can be sure that no person with enough money in their pockets to pay for lawyers will ever land in jail, unless they did something particularly heavy and/or lost support among their caste.
Our prime minister has used this trick a few times already, some of which after having changed the law in order to shorten statutory terms.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y