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What I consistently find is that advocates for self-driving cars are enamored with the technology, not the way it will be used or the impact it will have on cities. For them, the self-driving car is the end, not the means to an end. That should scare anyone who cares about the future of cities and it should remind students of history of the early days of automobile adoption, where centuries of accumulated wisdom on city building and humanity were abandoned in pursuit of a shiny object.
If traffic laws are about public safety, police officers would not frequently and casually speed. If public safety is simply about enforcing the law, then police officers would just pull people over continuously. Our streets are designed to facilitate speeding, and they generally succeed. Police departments could do nonstop enforcement of traffic laws as drivers everywhere are continuously breaking one of a myriad of traffic-related regulations. They do not do this. The decision by a police officer to intervene is then, nearly always, completely discretionary. The officer decides when, where,
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People living in targeted areas feel under siege. Each time they are pulled over for frivolous infractions, it affirms their correct perception that they are being treated differently than others within society. Occasionally, their understandable frustration turns into belligerence. When suspects act belligerent during a traffic stop, police rightfully fear for their lives. The officers are carrying weapons, after all, and if they are not careful those weapons can be taken and used against them. The presence of a firearm creates tension and the possibility for rapid escalation, regardless of
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We should reserve traffic stops for violations that pose an immediate threat to public safety. Driving more than 10 miles per hour over the speed limit, running a stop sign or a red light, or having reasonable cause to suspect a driver is under the influence are all serious threats that require immediate action. Let us reserve our most dangerous tactic, the routine traffic stop, for these situations.
If a high percentage of people are speeding along a stretch of road, either the speed limit is wrong, or the road design is wrong. There is no viable third option. We do not live in a society of deviants, so if a design is inducing people to break the law, that design must be fixed.
Using the cameras to gather data and set design priorities is essential. In places where speeding is the norm, it is unethical to use speed cameras to entrap people with bad design.
There is no such correlation; the world is full of examples where people met extensively and repeatedly yet still made poor decisions.
See US Congress, history of.
If instead human values were prioritized over the values of the engineer, this entire line of thinking would be turned around. We want humans to be safe, ergo the crossing signal sequence must be short, therefore the traffic volume on this street must be reduced. This is perfectly acceptable reasoning, yet it is not presented as an option by the engineer to the elected officials. It is their choice, but the framing of the decision by Cignoli robs Springfield's elected leadership of their agency.
