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Speeding Ticket Robots — Laws As Algorithms
An anonymous reader writes "As the age of autonomous cars and drone surveillance draws nearer, it's reasonable to expect government to increasingly automate enforcement of traffic laws. We already deal with red light cameras, speed limit cameras, and special lane cameras. But they aren't widespread, and there are a host of problems with them. Now, Ars reports on a group of academics who are attempting to solve the problem of converting simple laws to machine-readable code. They found that when the human filter was removed from the system, results became unreasonable very quickly. For example, if you aren't shy about going 5 mph over the limit, you'll likely break the law dozens of times during an hour of city driving. On the freeway, you might break it continuously for an hour. But it's highly unlikely you'd get more than one ticket for either transgression. Not so with computers (PDF): 'An automated system, however, could maintain a continuous flow of samples based on driving behavior and thus issue tickets accordingly. This level of resolution is not possible in manual law enforcement. In our experiment, the programmers were faced with the choice of how to treat many continuous samples all showing speeding behavior. Should each instance of speeding (e.g. a single sample) be treated as a separate offense, or should all consecutive speeding samples be treated as a single offense? Should the duration of time exceeding the speed limit be considered in the severity of the offense?' One of the academics said, 'When you're talking about automated enforcement, all of the enforcement has to be put in before implementation of the law—you have to be able to predict different circumstances.'"
rather than risk a speeding ticket every clock cycle.
What the hell are they going to do when we're all in autonomous vehicles that always obey the speed limit and their revenue stream dries up?
(Actually, I don't even think we'll need speed limits once autonomous cars are commonplace -- at least, not on highways)
sig: sauer
Just visit the UK, your favorite 1984 country.
Last time I visited (been a while though) they had automated cams on highways, capturing your license plate (with timestamp). At the next surveillance point, next cam recognizes your plate again.
If distance / (time2 - time1) exceeds speed limit, voila, ticket.
There are fewer illiterates than people who can't read.
ng above the limit by 15% on a nice, dry, sunny summer day isn't as bad as being 15% above on a snowy/icey winter morning/evening.
Except, it's not safe to pull cars over in the rain or heavy traffic, so you only get speeding tickets when it's perfectly safe to speed. Sadly, I don't believe ticketing and safety have anything to do with each other any more. Personally, I'd love to see some ticketing for lack of turn signals, failure to yield and tail gating. Then again, I'd like to see the cops start obeying those laws.
Or because the cop in question needs a few more tickets issued to make his quota.
Or perhaps the area is a "speed trap".
If ALL speedlimits were based on safety requirements ONLY, there's not be all that much speeding. As witnessed by the fact that virtually everyone speeds, and yet the carnage level on the roads is mostly based on the alcohol content of the drivers. Or the features on their phones....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Yes but that system works spectacularly well - far better than radar traps - because you have to stick to the speed limit over long stretches of driving not at isolated points in the road. Also you do not have to worry about keeping your eye on the speedometer every second because if your speed creeps a little high you can easily compensate by driving a little slower. Finally the one effect I have noted on some really busy roads is that the flow of traffic is a lot smoother because now everyone is going just under the speed limit.
It's more about driver intoxication level and the number of other vehicles on the road. 600 cars going 50 MPH on a one-mile stretch of 4-lane freeway is extremely dangerous. 60 cars going 80 MPH on that same mile of freeway is must less dangerous.
The trouble is with making laws that can represent the danger inherent in widely varying situations. So we end with laws that make sense some of the time (at best) but have no rationale for existence at other times. For example, who cares if you run a red light at a rural intersection instead of waiting 2 minutes for the light to cycle when there are no other cars? The police will definitely ticket you if they see it, but there's nothing unsafe about stopping, looking both ways, and then proceeding if there is no cross traffic.