You can bypass this surveillance by not illegally passing school busses. A lot of the advancement in surveillance is driven by people doing stupid shit…
As noted by Reason, stop-arm cameras have been criticized for not delivering promised safety benefits, but they’ve nonetheless generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue for the companies that deploy them. And according to the report, BusPatrol now wants to turn those cameras into license plate readers. Instead of activating when a specific law is allegedly being violated, they’ll now reportedly be live at all times, capturing data on any vehicle within sight of a school bus that can then be sold to the law-enforcement agencies BusPatrol already counts as customers.
You can bypass this surveillance by not existing near school busses /s
FYI I’m a school bus driver and our buses are equipped with these BusPatrol cameras. Our director of transportation told me about the financial arrangement, which I’m not sure most people know about. BusPatrol pays all costs relating to the cameras and their installation. They then get all of the ticket revenue generated ($300 per incident) until the cameras are paid for, after which the company splits the revenue with the school district (my boss told me this is a 50/50 split but Google says it’s about 60/40 in favor of the company). The money that goes to the school district is further split (50/50) between the school system and the police department, who have the responsibility for reviewing the recordings and mailing out the tickets. The “until the cameras are paid for” part is interesting: according to my boss, the installation cost of the cameras for our 40 buses was in the neighborhood of $1.5 million dollars, which seems a bit improbable. $37,500 per camera?
The revenue these things generate has to be fucking enormous. I’ve had runs where I get passed by 10 to 15 cars with my lights on and stop sign out. The main benefit to me personally is lowered stress. I used to get genuinely angry at cars doing this, and I would waste time and attention span horn-blasting them (one time I even had a cop pass me like this, driving with one hand and looking at his cell phone in the other hand). Now I don’t give a shit, knowing that they’re (likely) getting a big ticket for it.
It depends on the directionality. Download a crusty old Miley Cyrus MP3 with a virus? Money goes to the RIAA. Huge mega-corp rakes their customers over the coals for years? The government collects the fine and keeps it.
My wife got a ticket from one of these things, along with 4 other people that you can clearly see in the evidence video they send you. A couple other cars knew to stop.
We live on the border with a state whose bus law makes no exception to the road being a divided highway. Apparently not even people who live in that state are aware, either. We learned the hard way.
The bus stopped on the other side of a 55mph road with a physical barrier down the middle. 4 lanes total.
Now we know the stupid law across the border. That bus alone probably generates $1200+ a day on that single stop on the highway.
I’m a school bus driver and we have these BusPatrol cameras on our buses. One of my stops in the morning is at a place where a divided highway becomes not-divided. In my state you don’t have to stop for school buses on divided highways, but my stop is about ten feet into the not-divided area. Most people stop anyway but a lot of people don’t. I’ve had people ask me whether they’re supposed to stop or not and I have to tell them that I have no idea. The drivers are not involved with the cameras at all – we don’t make the determination of whether somebody gets a ticket or not and we’re not told anything about how many tickets our cameras are generating.
Not sure where you live, but here’s the law for Utah (where I live):
(3) The operator of a vehicle need not stop upon meeting or passing a school bus displaying alternating flashing red light signals if the school bus is traveling in the opposite direction when:
a) traveling on a divided highway;
b) the bus is stopped at an intersection or other place controlled by a traffic-control signal or by a peace officer; or
c) on a highway of five or more lanes, which may include a left-turn lane or two-way left turn lane.
Note how it only specifies driving in the opposite direction of the bus.
the bus is stopped at an intersection or other place controlled by a traffic-control signal
This one seems kinda crazy. Like, are stop signs traffic-control signals? I have many stops at stop sign intersections and it’s not at all unusual for late kids to be sprinting through the intersection to get to the bus. That’s exactly the kind of situation you want cars to be stopping for just in case.
The only “highway” in the US where you’re absolutely not allowed to stop (under normal circumstances) is a “controlled-access highway”. The majority of which is the US Interstate system. Some state highways are controlled-access as well.
But I feel it’s important to clarify: School buses do not stop to pick up children on those sort of roads. That would be insane.
“Highway” means a lot of things depending on the context. Sometimes it’s an interstate system with on and off ramps, but it also refers to a non-residential road (though in western New York, I’ve seen houses with driveways that connect with I-84, so who the fuck knows what the deal there is).
For the purposes of stopping for buses/emergency vehicles, a divided highway is any nonresidential road with a raised median such that a car is unable to turn around at any given place. At least in my state.
After we got the ticket in the mail I did some brief research on what a divided highway is, but non-residential didn’t pop up in any of the reading I did. Granted, I just got an answer and moved on, but maybe there are different definitions in each state. It seems like something that should be the same in every state, though.
To be fair, people should definitely get fines for passing school buses. I’m more mad at the state for being different than the rest of the country and including divided highways in their school bus law.
That’s the point of laws. You start with a concept everyone basically agrees with, then use it as a pretense to exploit whoever you want, and call it protection. Gradually fine-tune the targeting and expand the scope of the oppression, and often forget the original point.
including divided highways in their school bus law
Rural state? Whether or not divided highways make sense depends on whether or not kids are crossing these highways to get to their stops. Seems like that wouldn’t happen anywhere but you never know. In my district (Philly suburb) we design our runs so that kids rarely have to cross any street at all, and never have to cross even just multi-lane roads (let alone divided highways).
NY. If the law was designed around rural areas, I would assume those areas would either have interstate highways with no houses on them, or two lane, non-divided highways with houses so you’d have to stop for a school bus in that case.
Divided highway can also be a little vague. In this case, the division is just a raised median. Not one of those angled concrete walls designed to lift cars and turn them back into their lane. Still, by definition it’s divided.
The place where my wife got tagged doesn’t require kids to cross the highway. The bus stops in front of their house, and there are no houses on the other side of the highway. Even if kids did have to cross a 4 lane road, they’d do it before the bus arrives, right? I’m not sure.
I don’t know the logic they used when making it different than most other states. I think PA is similar, but I remember there being a small difference which made it a little more logical.
NY has generally slightly weird school bus laws. They require a driver’s side emergency exit door, two swing-out stop signs, seatbelts, and they don’t paint the rub rails black. I have no idea why they have yellow rub rails, makes no sense at all.
You got down voted to hell, and I see why, but I want to address the second part of your statement because I find it more interesting. I saw a stat a while back that the average American gets in a car accident once every 8 years. My city was ~9/10 years and a city near me was every 12. Pretty good. Then covid hit and everyone now drives like they spent six months straight playing GTA (some of them did). Accidents are up, racing happens every night in every neighborhood, and people are aggressive and careless in their driving at the same time people are turning left from the inside lane across the other turn lane into the lane against the far curb. Did this decent into idiocy also happen where you live?
I do think people gave them a great scapegoat to advance their surveillance capacities.
Absolutely that happened where I live. Still going on. People drive like shit and are really aggro about it. Police do very little about it and the community hates the police anyway so we just put up with it.
They recently started doing a lot more digital surveillance/enforcement around here. PD and FD now have drones. My buddy lives by the fire station and we saw it take off and land a few times when we were having a BBQ the other day. Parts of the state now use photo radar on the freeway and it’s coming to the rest of the state soon. We also have toll lanes and red light cameras. Flock has a presence, but I’m not sure how widespread. I’ve been riding my bikes because at least nobody bugs me on the trails apart from the occasional raccoon or flock of geese. I think it’s a real privacy concern and we need to slow down before we let this tech replace the current ways of doing things.
I do see the sentiment against enforcement, but that absolutely extends to Officer Clanker. I think we should shift to enforcement by design. Too many roads are built in ways that encouraged speeding and make it feel comfortable. If you put rumbly bricks in school zones, no one will miss a sign.
Too many roads are built in ways that encouraged speeding and make it feel comfortable.
A big part of the problem here is that speed limits are specified as the maximum speed on which the largest vehicle can safely traverse the road.
Example: Design a road where you can comfortably cruise at 35-40MPH, curves and everything, in a minivan full of kids and gear? Well too bad, that road is now 25MPH and radar-patrolled because a tractor-trailer can’t do 40MPH around one of the curves.
So you have these great, swooping roads with ridiculously low speed limits, because one trucker somewhere is a brainless dumbfuck and refuses to understand how physics works.
The core idea is good. A law that isn’t enforced is just a recommendation. There will be plenty of people who will just ignore it. Not unique to car drives, there are pretty much the same amount of people ignoring traffic laws with every transportation method, just when the size of the transportation method increases, so does the damage it can cause.
It would be kinda unfeasible for the bus driver to start writing down each cars license plate that passes by it when the bus has stopped.
So similarly to speeding cameras which do lower the speed of cars within it’s area of influence. A bus will carry around an area of influence inside which drivers are more inclined to follow the law.
Of course reality is that the system will be abused and badly implemented.
It would be kinda unfeasible for the bus driver to start writing down each cars license plate that passes by it when the bus has stopped.
Except that’s a rare thing to happen because it’s a serious crime. Plus there’s other people in the bus. When I was in school we were supposed to help take notes to identify any cars that passed when they weren’t supposed to
Except that’s a rare thing to happen because it’s a serious crime.
Lol it’s not rare at all. I’m a school bus driver and it happens multiple times on each run. It’s not uncommon to have multiple cars pass me at a single stop.
And that’s very good, but an automated system and video evidence is still better. It eliminates the unreliability of human memory and perception. While any false positives could be easily dealt with case by case basis as the video evidence can be used by both sides.
Though yeah whatever it’s actually necessary or current system is already good enough is up for a debate.
The entire concept of laws is insane delusional anti-materialism.
I’m not going to spend time on the inequities of punishment, the inefficacy of punishment (we’re still punishing people for murder! Tons of them! Every year! Can you name a culture where its generally legal? I fucking can’t!), the necessary selection and injustice of enforcement when trying to impose an often complex abstract ideal on reality through brute violence which is itself usually contradictory, the history of law as excuse, the inherent injustice of violence, or the problem brought up in this thread of variance between jurisdictions of law being used to exploit. Those are all issues that require volumes to fully understand or you’ve already picked a side on and its not worth arguing.
I’m just going to point out that if the goal was preventing bad thing, we would focus on training education infrastructure and constantly refined best practices to help us achieve the desired (lack of) result. That is what works. We know that’s what works, because in the places where there’s no power over others to be gained, or where the result is the most important to the powerful, that’s what we’ve done for over a century, arguably for millennia, across every border and language and nearly every religion. It is in fact the foundation of modern safety, infields as diverse as architecture and medicine, where procedures and design conventions are optimized to reduce room for error without reducing the agency of practitioners. Things like hoses for different parts of general anesthesia being different sizes and the switches being linked in an appropriate gear ratio, doctors signing areas to be operated on before a surgery, or railings being built over long falls anywhere a person the system cares about might ever stand.
If people –especially kids– getting where they’re going –especially school– safely and quickly were the priority, we would be building trains and getting cars off the use, with constant robust well maintained professional busses as a bridge to get us there. We don’t do that. We build more highways and more cars to the exclusion of all that.
The idea that anyone thinks laws are a good tool for avoiding bad outcomes is endlessly frustrating. They’re not in the top ten in use today, and that’s not even what they’re fucking for. That’s like arguing I should use a floppy silicone dildo to put a screw into a hole while we’re standing in the middle of a fully stocked hardware lending library. It was funny the first few times; now I just want to scream.
I do agree with your core idea and yeah we should work towards it, but in the meanwhile we cant ignore current reality either. It will take generations to unroot car centric worldview towards public transport and more people centric worldview and building said infrastructure takes time as well.
In the meanwhile there are people who ignore rules for their own benefit or just not caring and threat of an imminent punishment does reduce the amount of rule breaking until we can get to the society where the punishment is no longer necessary. Yes it’s not perfect, it’s just a patchwork solution and the efficacy of it can be questionable.
Like the current subject of full on surveillance camera is probably one of the worst and most exploitative ways to get the desired results, but at the same time. It can be rapidly implemented and will scare some people into more careful driving even if just around the bus.
Though i assume there probably are some less invasive methods that can be rapidly implemented and will have a similar results, if even necessary at all as i don’t have the data regarding how regular this occurance is.
If your goal is avoiding bad outcomes, you change the environment to avoid bad outcomes.
Even outside eliminating cars, things like sharp curbs and physically protected bike lanes save lives, especially children’s lives. If the goal were saving the lives of children, you do that first. Instead, over my lifetime, I have seen these things disappearing. Literally becoming more dangerous.
I know you think you’re arguing in good faith, but you are a puppet of some seriously malevolent mother fuckers who will endanger children for profit and an excuse to fuck my privacy. Yours too, if you care. Don’t tolerate a hand up your ass without at least a little foreplay.
I completely agree with you and yes it’s a constant struggle against drivers and politicians catering to them to get anything that’s even remotely pedestrian friendly.
The other person out of curiosity did ask the reasoning behind it and i can give one, even though it’s from a positive perspective which isn’t that accurate for the reason why those cameras have been implement. That doesn’t mean that i support it, in every response iv said how those cameras have become the worst ways to control traffic, but i can’t deny the beneficial effect of traffic cameras. Those do work, with a huge cost to privacy.
I’ve just seen too many drivers slowing down to speed limit when a map says a traffic camera is coming up. Same on intersections, it reduces how many drivers try to slip over when it’s “orange”(just turned red). Similar around police (excluding the corruption argument), people start to behave better.
So imminent threat of a punishment does have a positive, even if limited, effect.
And I can get the screw at least partway in if the dildo has a simulated dick hole I can squeeze it with and screw it in with, but relying on individual non-experts who are given no resources or expertise and just punishing them for not spontaneously coordinating while discouraging communication and putting a little Hobbesian wedge in there isn’t a good or sane system, you don’t get good results, you spend lots of resources.
Even philosophically; do we think people are hitting kids on their way out of school busses on purpose? Do we teach and refine best practices for avoiding accidental child murder? Or do we just threaten people who don’t do the thing and punish them when they don’t live up to our standards?
And crucially, it gives you a lot of latitude to abuse and violate people. Which is the actual goal of every single one of these systems. The dead kids are just an acceptable cost.
You can bypass this surveillance by not illegally passing school busses. A lot of the advancement in surveillance is driven by people doing stupid shit…
Just like I can bypass doorbell cams by not going on people’s porches?
Oh wait, that’s not true at all is it
You can bypass this surveillance by not existing near school busses /s
FYI I’m a school bus driver and our buses are equipped with these BusPatrol cameras. Our director of transportation told me about the financial arrangement, which I’m not sure most people know about. BusPatrol pays all costs relating to the cameras and their installation. They then get all of the ticket revenue generated ($300 per incident) until the cameras are paid for, after which the company splits the revenue with the school district (my boss told me this is a 50/50 split but Google says it’s about 60/40 in favor of the company). The money that goes to the school district is further split (50/50) between the school system and the police department, who have the responsibility for reviewing the recordings and mailing out the tickets. The “until the cameras are paid for” part is interesting: according to my boss, the installation cost of the cameras for our 40 buses was in the neighborhood of $1.5 million dollars, which seems a bit improbable. $37,500 per camera?
The revenue these things generate has to be fucking enormous. I’ve had runs where I get passed by 10 to 15 cars with my lights on and stop sign out. The main benefit to me personally is lowered stress. I used to get genuinely angry at cars doing this, and I would waste time and attention span horn-blasting them (one time I even had a cop pass me like this, driving with one hand and looking at his cell phone in the other hand). Now I don’t give a shit, knowing that they’re (likely) getting a big ticket for it.
It’s kind of insane that the fine for breaking the law goes to a company and not the government.
No argument here.
It depends on the directionality. Download a crusty old Miley Cyrus MP3 with a virus? Money goes to the RIAA. Huge mega-corp rakes their customers over the coals for years? The government collects the fine and keeps it.
Why not just have the school district/police department set up and host the cameras themselves and keep all the revenue?
Because it’s expensive.
Wait…
How are you supposed to do.that? They go to residential areas because their mission is to provide school transportation
Sorry, that was meant to be a joke reply to the original comment. I’ll add a “/s” to it
Wasn’t necessary imo
Never being in USA has worked so far.
The school buses will be equipped with license plate readers that read license plates of every car they drive past. Parked cars too.
Is parking your car “doing stupid shit”?
Did… Did you not read the article?
Or even finish reading the title?
My wife got a ticket from one of these things, along with 4 other people that you can clearly see in the evidence video they send you. A couple other cars knew to stop.
We live on the border with a state whose bus law makes no exception to the road being a divided highway. Apparently not even people who live in that state are aware, either. We learned the hard way.
The bus stopped on the other side of a 55mph road with a physical barrier down the middle. 4 lanes total.
Now we know the stupid law across the border. That bus alone probably generates $1200+ a day on that single stop on the highway.
I’m a school bus driver and we have these BusPatrol cameras on our buses. One of my stops in the morning is at a place where a divided highway becomes not-divided. In my state you don’t have to stop for school buses on divided highways, but my stop is about ten feet into the not-divided area. Most people stop anyway but a lot of people don’t. I’ve had people ask me whether they’re supposed to stop or not and I have to tell them that I have no idea. The drivers are not involved with the cameras at all – we don’t make the determination of whether somebody gets a ticket or not and we’re not told anything about how many tickets our cameras are generating.
Not sure where you live, but here’s the law for Utah (where I live):
Note how it only specifies driving in the opposite direction of the bus.
Source: https://le.utah.gov/xcode/Title41/Chapter6a/41-6a-S1302.html
This one seems kinda crazy. Like, are stop signs traffic-control signals? I have many stops at stop sign intersections and it’s not at all unusual for late kids to be sprinting through the intersection to get to the bus. That’s exactly the kind of situation you want cars to be stopping for just in case.
Are cars allowed to stop on the highway in the US? Sounds dangerous
The only “highway” in the US where you’re absolutely not allowed to stop (under normal circumstances) is a “controlled-access highway”. The majority of which is the US Interstate system. Some state highways are controlled-access as well.
But I feel it’s important to clarify: School buses do not stop to pick up children on those sort of roads. That would be insane.
“Highway” means a lot of things depending on the context. Sometimes it’s an interstate system with on and off ramps, but it also refers to a non-residential road (though in western New York, I’ve seen houses with driveways that connect with I-84, so who the fuck knows what the deal there is).
For the purposes of stopping for buses/emergency vehicles, a divided highway is any nonresidential road with a raised median such that a car is unable to turn around at any given place. At least in my state.
After we got the ticket in the mail I did some brief research on what a divided highway is, but non-residential didn’t pop up in any of the reading I did. Granted, I just got an answer and moved on, but maybe there are different definitions in each state. It seems like something that should be the same in every state, though.
To be honest, I was using “residential street” to give a general idea, I think the phrasing in my driver’s ed class was related to turning left
So even if they weren’t a walking surveillance apocalypse, they’re an effective poor tax.
To be fair, people should definitely get fines for passing school buses. I’m more mad at the state for being different than the rest of the country and including divided highways in their school bus law.
That’s the point of laws. You start with a concept everyone basically agrees with, then use it as a pretense to exploit whoever you want, and call it protection. Gradually fine-tune the targeting and expand the scope of the oppression, and often forget the original point.
Rural state? Whether or not divided highways make sense depends on whether or not kids are crossing these highways to get to their stops. Seems like that wouldn’t happen anywhere but you never know. In my district (Philly suburb) we design our runs so that kids rarely have to cross any street at all, and never have to cross even just multi-lane roads (let alone divided highways).
NY. If the law was designed around rural areas, I would assume those areas would either have interstate highways with no houses on them, or two lane, non-divided highways with houses so you’d have to stop for a school bus in that case.
Divided highway can also be a little vague. In this case, the division is just a raised median. Not one of those angled concrete walls designed to lift cars and turn them back into their lane. Still, by definition it’s divided.
The place where my wife got tagged doesn’t require kids to cross the highway. The bus stops in front of their house, and there are no houses on the other side of the highway. Even if kids did have to cross a 4 lane road, they’d do it before the bus arrives, right? I’m not sure.
I don’t know the logic they used when making it different than most other states. I think PA is similar, but I remember there being a small difference which made it a little more logical.
NY has generally slightly weird school bus laws. They require a driver’s side emergency exit door, two swing-out stop signs, seatbelts, and they don’t paint the rub rails black. I have no idea why they have yellow rub rails, makes no sense at all.
deleted by creator
You got down voted to hell, and I see why, but I want to address the second part of your statement because I find it more interesting. I saw a stat a while back that the average American gets in a car accident once every 8 years. My city was ~9/10 years and a city near me was every 12. Pretty good. Then covid hit and everyone now drives like they spent six months straight playing GTA (some of them did). Accidents are up, racing happens every night in every neighborhood, and people are aggressive and careless in their driving at the same time people are turning left from the inside lane across the other turn lane into the lane against the far curb. Did this decent into idiocy also happen where you live?
I do think people gave them a great scapegoat to advance their surveillance capacities.
Absolutely that happened where I live. Still going on. People drive like shit and are really aggro about it. Police do very little about it and the community hates the police anyway so we just put up with it.
They recently started doing a lot more digital surveillance/enforcement around here. PD and FD now have drones. My buddy lives by the fire station and we saw it take off and land a few times when we were having a BBQ the other day. Parts of the state now use photo radar on the freeway and it’s coming to the rest of the state soon. We also have toll lanes and red light cameras. Flock has a presence, but I’m not sure how widespread. I’ve been riding my bikes because at least nobody bugs me on the trails apart from the occasional raccoon or flock of geese. I think it’s a real privacy concern and we need to slow down before we let this tech replace the current ways of doing things.
I do see the sentiment against enforcement, but that absolutely extends to Officer Clanker. I think we should shift to enforcement by design. Too many roads are built in ways that encouraged speeding and make it feel comfortable. If you put rumbly bricks in school zones, no one will miss a sign.
A big part of the problem here is that speed limits are specified as the maximum speed on which the largest vehicle can safely traverse the road.
Example: Design a road where you can comfortably cruise at 35-40MPH, curves and everything, in a minivan full of kids and gear? Well too bad, that road is now 25MPH and radar-patrolled because a tractor-trailer can’t do 40MPH around one of the curves.
So you have these great, swooping roads with ridiculously low speed limits, because one trucker somewhere is a brainless dumbfuck and refuses to understand how physics works.
How does one come to ‘think’ like that? You’ve caught my morbid fascination.
The core idea is good. A law that isn’t enforced is just a recommendation. There will be plenty of people who will just ignore it. Not unique to car drives, there are pretty much the same amount of people ignoring traffic laws with every transportation method, just when the size of the transportation method increases, so does the damage it can cause.
It would be kinda unfeasible for the bus driver to start writing down each cars license plate that passes by it when the bus has stopped. So similarly to speeding cameras which do lower the speed of cars within it’s area of influence. A bus will carry around an area of influence inside which drivers are more inclined to follow the law.
Of course reality is that the system will be abused and badly implemented.
Except that’s a rare thing to happen because it’s a serious crime. Plus there’s other people in the bus. When I was in school we were supposed to help take notes to identify any cars that passed when they weren’t supposed to
Lol it’s not rare at all. I’m a school bus driver and it happens multiple times on each run. It’s not uncommon to have multiple cars pass me at a single stop.
And that’s very good, but an automated system and video evidence is still better. It eliminates the unreliability of human memory and perception. While any false positives could be easily dealt with case by case basis as the video evidence can be used by both sides.
Though yeah whatever it’s actually necessary or current system is already good enough is up for a debate.
The entire concept of laws is insane delusional anti-materialism.
I’m not going to spend time on the inequities of punishment, the inefficacy of punishment (we’re still punishing people for murder! Tons of them! Every year! Can you name a culture where its generally legal? I fucking can’t!), the necessary selection and injustice of enforcement when trying to impose an often complex abstract ideal on reality through brute violence which is itself usually contradictory, the history of law as excuse, the inherent injustice of violence, or the problem brought up in this thread of variance between jurisdictions of law being used to exploit. Those are all issues that require volumes to fully understand or you’ve already picked a side on and its not worth arguing.
I’m just going to point out that if the goal was preventing bad thing, we would focus on training education infrastructure and constantly refined best practices to help us achieve the desired (lack of) result. That is what works. We know that’s what works, because in the places where there’s no power over others to be gained, or where the result is the most important to the powerful, that’s what we’ve done for over a century, arguably for millennia, across every border and language and nearly every religion. It is in fact the foundation of modern safety, infields as diverse as architecture and medicine, where procedures and design conventions are optimized to reduce room for error without reducing the agency of practitioners. Things like hoses for different parts of general anesthesia being different sizes and the switches being linked in an appropriate gear ratio, doctors signing areas to be operated on before a surgery, or railings being built over long falls anywhere a person the system cares about might ever stand.
If people –especially kids– getting where they’re going –especially school– safely and quickly were the priority, we would be building trains and getting cars off the use, with constant robust well maintained professional busses as a bridge to get us there. We don’t do that. We build more highways and more cars to the exclusion of all that.
The idea that anyone thinks laws are a good tool for avoiding bad outcomes is endlessly frustrating. They’re not in the top ten in use today, and that’s not even what they’re fucking for. That’s like arguing I should use a floppy silicone dildo to put a screw into a hole while we’re standing in the middle of a fully stocked hardware lending library. It was funny the first few times; now I just want to scream.
I do agree with your core idea and yeah we should work towards it, but in the meanwhile we cant ignore current reality either. It will take generations to unroot car centric worldview towards public transport and more people centric worldview and building said infrastructure takes time as well.
In the meanwhile there are people who ignore rules for their own benefit or just not caring and threat of an imminent punishment does reduce the amount of rule breaking until we can get to the society where the punishment is no longer necessary. Yes it’s not perfect, it’s just a patchwork solution and the efficacy of it can be questionable.
Like the current subject of full on surveillance camera is probably one of the worst and most exploitative ways to get the desired results, but at the same time. It can be rapidly implemented and will scare some people into more careful driving even if just around the bus. Though i assume there probably are some less invasive methods that can be rapidly implemented and will have a similar results, if even necessary at all as i don’t have the data regarding how regular this occurance is.
If your goal is avoiding bad outcomes, you change the environment to avoid bad outcomes.
Even outside eliminating cars, things like sharp curbs and physically protected bike lanes save lives, especially children’s lives. If the goal were saving the lives of children, you do that first. Instead, over my lifetime, I have seen these things disappearing. Literally becoming more dangerous.
I know you think you’re arguing in good faith, but you are a puppet of some seriously malevolent mother fuckers who will endanger children for profit and an excuse to fuck my privacy. Yours too, if you care. Don’t tolerate a hand up your ass without at least a little foreplay.
Edit: change the environment or train people
I completely agree with you and yes it’s a constant struggle against drivers and politicians catering to them to get anything that’s even remotely pedestrian friendly.
The other person out of curiosity did ask the reasoning behind it and i can give one, even though it’s from a positive perspective which isn’t that accurate for the reason why those cameras have been implement. That doesn’t mean that i support it, in every response iv said how those cameras have become the worst ways to control traffic, but i can’t deny the beneficial effect of traffic cameras. Those do work, with a huge cost to privacy.
I’ve just seen too many drivers slowing down to speed limit when a map says a traffic camera is coming up. Same on intersections, it reduces how many drivers try to slip over when it’s “orange”(just turned red). Similar around police (excluding the corruption argument), people start to behave better. So imminent threat of a punishment does have a positive, even if limited, effect.
And I can get the screw at least partway in if the dildo has a simulated dick hole I can squeeze it with and screw it in with, but relying on individual non-experts who are given no resources or expertise and just punishing them for not spontaneously coordinating while discouraging communication and putting a little Hobbesian wedge in there isn’t a good or sane system, you don’t get good results, you spend lots of resources.
Even philosophically; do we think people are hitting kids on their way out of school busses on purpose? Do we teach and refine best practices for avoiding accidental child murder? Or do we just threaten people who don’t do the thing and punish them when they don’t live up to our standards?
And crucially, it gives you a lot of latitude to abuse and violate people. Which is the actual goal of every single one of these systems. The dead kids are just an acceptable cost.
deleted by creator