Show HN: Automated license plate reader coverage in the USA

The fact that these cameras are already pervasive and the problem of bad drivers hasn't been solved anywhere doesn't give me a lot of hope that these cameras are the solution to that particular problem.

It seems like police can do a lot to increase enforcement without the need of these devices. We have evidence that they've been doing less traffic enforcement so maybe start there. Increasing our standards for driving tests (some of which were eliminated entirely over the first few years of the pandemic) would probably help. Automatically shutting off/disabling or limiting the use of cell phones (all of which come with sensors that can detect when you are going at speeds you'd expect while in cars) might help. Bringing physical buttons and dials back to cars instead of burying common functions in touchscreen menus might help.

There's a whole lot of places to look for solutions to safer roads before we have to resort to tracking everyone's movements at all times.

Across the US we have roads and infrastructure that encourage speed right next to decaying pedestrian infrastructure. It's very difficult to get state DOTs to roll back or do traffic calming. They often prohibit the use of bollards or barriers near these roadways.

In a lot, not all, physical changes to the environment could drastically reduce traffic fatalities without surveillance.

  > but it's also bad when you see people speeding around schools, rolling through stop signs, and running red lights.

My city spent a few million dollars installing Flock cameras to all its municipal parking garages in a matter of months, but has been hemming and hawing over adding a few speed cameras for years, despite petitioning the state for an allowance do so back in 2023.

Traffic enforcement cameras don't even have to become the networked surveillance system that Flock offers. Most are still cameras triggered by radar rather than perpetually recording all drivers.

How about we build better infrastructure and regulate vehicles since those do actually stop this behavior. Most of those red lights and stoplights in the US should be roundabouts. Narrower lanes and other traffic calming measures should be much more pervasive. Vehicle size, specifically bumper height is out of control.

Compare US traffic and pedestrian deaths to the rest of the world, or at least a lot of EU countries. Its embarrassing.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/74/wr/mm7408a2.htm#F1_down

The solution, as always, is better infrastructure and support at multiple levels, not beating everybody with a stick.

It usually takes about 5 minutes of driving to observe someone doing something that I would pull them over for. I don't think cops need all this automated surveillance, they just need to drive around and be proactive.

War is peace.

Surveillance is safety.

Your opinions are directly counterproductive on these petty issues. You ask for the state to use the jackboot. The jackboot just makes people hate the state and think in terms of "will I get caught". If not for you people trying to force compliance on this, that and the next thing the state would be in higher standing in people's minds and voluntary "when it matters" or "because it's the right thing to do" compliance would be higher. Sure, we could add more jackboot, but that costs money and no democratic-ish system is gonna allocate a bunch of money to do stuff everyone hates.

My observation has been that the danger increase is a combination of three things:

1. Lack of situational awareness/awareness of surroundings. This manifests in various ways like improper merging, improper turns into traffic, turning across multiple lanes, and left-lane hogs.

2. Frustration becomes aggression. This also manifests in multiple ways, but primarily is seen through tail-gating (in response to left-lane hogs) and swimming through traffic (in response to left-lane hogs), as well as road-rage (mostly in response to the other misbehavior).

3. Constant distraction. I have seen SO MANY drivers literally watching videos on a tablet, playing games, or otherwise driving at high rates of speed (70mph+) while fully engaged in something other than driving. It's at epidemic proportions.

The issue is, by and large, not people doing rolling stops (which by the way have never been proven to cause an increase in accidents when performed properly) or speeding (generally, some exceptions like school zones do matter). Running red lights is definitely a problem that is more common place, and is likely a part of all 3 of these these.

I feel like to a large degree all of this is a symptom of a wider societial issue where everyone acts in selfish and self-centered ways, completely ignoring their impacts on others, and moving from moments to moments where they can engage with their phone/social-media, to the exclusion of all else. I don't think phones/social-media /caused/ the problem, I think it exacerbates it though. Every aspect of our society is worsening because the revealed behavior of our population is one of lack of care or outright disdain for everyone else around them and an absolute obsession with serving their own interests above all else. That this manifests in driving is unsurprising.

Speeding and running red lights can be combated without affecting the privacy of innocents on the road. A debate can and should be had about the placement of radar traps though, many are straight off highway robberies trapping people who don't notice a speed-limit sign that is visually hard to notice.

Not over the long term, no. There may have been a recent uptick in the post-pandemic US but it's mostly just noise. Fatalities per mile driven have been going down markedly in recent decades. Driving was twice as dangerous in the 80's as it is now.

If we wanted to solve this problem while retaining the benefits, what we'd do is have stiff penalties for warrantless retention and required yearly independent audits of systems.

https://deflock.me/

Also, another answer to this is that there is no overarching goal; I just wanted to build a large scale data analysis pipeline for fun :) I am no stranger to side projects to distract me from finals unfortunately.

(This is not a negative comment about this post btw, more just commentary on how the fire hose of "look at how bad this is in excruciating detail" can be overwhelming.)

I'll add a link to the OSM relation for the county to each county page, so you can see the source data on OSM to verify/edit.

It really doesn't have to be though. The rights of individuals to record in public doesn't have to translate to the right of corporations (flock, amazon, etc.) to do it without restriction. Time, place, and manner restrictions on our rights already exist, it just needs to be found that this manner is unacceptable as an imposition on our freedom which should be protected under the fourth amendment.

As with everything, there's much nuance to this "right".

https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Common_Questions,_Arguments,_%...

If you check deflock.me, would you say that 0.0% aligns with what you expect?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_TPMS