If you give people a choice, the super wealthy mostly will pay a relatively small fee and go about their day, and you'll end up temporarily incarcerating the very poor for the same social malfeasance. (With some distribution of behaviors in the middle.) Is that better?

The main cost of a traffic ticket today isn't the ticket; it's the (much larger) uptick in insurance costs afterwards. If you could just pay $80-120 on the off chance you occasionally got a ticket, without impacting insurance premiums, I'd speed a lot more often.

At least where I am in Europe, insurance premiums and speeding tickets are completely separate. It makes sense that people who get caught have to pay higher premiums though, as I assume they are more likely to be involved in accidents.

Tickets for all violations result in points. Speeding points depend on the amount over the limit. Total points in last 3 years are one factor that goes into insurance pricing.

It's a social anti-credit system.

It is a little dream of mine to mine videos for crazy traffic behavior and sell the license plate numbers to insurers. Should be pretty simple, the uploaders even do the tagging for you. How to do that while complying with GDPR is a little nugget to be solved. I'd need a method for take down and a method for checking the vehicle hasn't been sold (that's public at least).

Probably not going to work for the same reason that the police generally won't go around and arrest someone based purely on dashcam footage: who is to say that the video Person A has of Person B driving illegally is actually real? It is all too easy to doctor videos, and if insurers/police just blindly trusted videos people find on the internet/record on their phone/dashcam/etc then it would be pretty easy for Person A to frame Person B for crimes they did not commit.

Innocent until proven guilty, not Innocent until some grainy youtube footage that kinda maybe looks like you were speeding. Police equipment is calibrated and the evidence stored appropriately for a reason.

That said, at least the in the UK, the police do use video footage from the public to a certain degree. I believe this is often used to go and "have a quiet word" with the driver in question, i.e.: <unexpected knock knock on the front door> "Was this you sir/madam? <shows video on smartphone of sir/madam driving dangerously>" and then give them a warning if they own up to it (...and this sort of intervention is probably enough to on its own without having to go any further, i.e. having a police officer standing on your doorstep with video footage of you driving like a prick and being able to "get away with" just a warning/telling off), but I do not believe that the footage on its own is enough evidence on its own since it is so easy to fake.

I agree. Thing is, most actuarial risk factors are really bad predictors individually. Combined though, they work enough for a functioning market. This would be just another factor. Don't exclude any of those license plates straight up, just ask 5 or 10% higher premiums. Some of these people will stay and pay some more, some will leave for other insurers and stop cutting into your bottom line. No such thing as a bad risk, only wrong premiums.

You can make secure dashcams that add some hashsum/crypto signatures based on all GPS signals received at moment.

That's quite general problem around deepfakes - how to generate video that's guaranteed real. Some form of DRM or blackchain is probably needed, not to anyones liking.

Guaranteeing that the video is genuine still doesn’t solve the problem that [person] != [car] != [license plate]

In my country [person] != [car] is one of the exceptions on innocent proven guilty. You are responsible for who as access to your car and it is on you to reasonably prove that it was not you driving.

Typically happens with family members.

>who is to say that the video Person A has of Person B driving illegally is actually real?

Is this ever a real concern with CCTV footage?

But sure, a dashcam won't necessarily ID the driver, just the car.

I've suggested this to an insurance company. Unfortunately keeping a list of dangerous drivers (or dangerous license plates) is a bit illegal re: GDPR and using it for pricing mandatory traffic insurance is also not doable. Pricing is only allowed to use factors that can be demonstrated to correlate with the risk the company sees in actual claims.

But one can dream :) A good thought technology for reducing anger towards reckless drivers is to assume the crazy BMW driver just had a bad case of diarrhea and needed to get to a bathroom very fast.

At least in NL the privacy authority (under GDPR) and courts (under former law) afaik have ruled a license plate is not personal information. Filming in public is legal. Insurance contracts are two party contracts where there is basically freedom to accept or not. Also no specific rules on actuarial factor, outside of 'illegal discrimination' (all pricing is discrimination). So all those flags are still green in my book. (I work in insurance.)

Thing is, doing this will get you in a shit storm so that might be the simple reason no insurtech has tried it yet. Perhaps some smaller insurers are doing it and keeping their mouth shut. No problem if nobody knows where the license plates on the exclusion list are based upon.

And a method to verify the identity of the person actually doing the driving at the time.

In NL we (mostly) insure cars, not drivers. My wife, my kids, even my neighbor or bookkeeper can drive my car and be insured. If they crash it's my premium that gets adjusted. So if someone catches them doing crazy stuff with my car, I find it quite right morally to adapt my premium. Deep fakes are a problem though.

This is the case in my country as well, it make sense that the car owner should be responsible for whatever actions that car takes if the driver cannot be identified.

Even if it is stolen it works, as you would obviously file a police report for the theft and so that would indemnify you of any crimes committed from when it was stolen.

The only issue is what happens if your bookkeeper gets drunk, borrows your car (because they know where you keep the keys) and then commits a crime?

There are more companies doing that than you think.

What makes you think the crazy driver has insurance? Or a license plate? :)

You can test it in countries that aren't limited by the GDPR.

> If you give people a choice, the super wealthy mostly will pay a relatively small fee and go about their day, and you'll end up temporarily incarcerating the very poor for the same social malfeasance. (With some distribution of behaviors in the middle.) Is that better?

I think this pilot is giving people a choice, but any actual implementation would not.

It’s probably a choice because of restrictions upon this “innovation unit”. If deployed for real, itnprobably wouldn’t be a choice.

> If you give people a choice,

I would be curious to see how/if it brings down speeding if they don't get a choice at all but just have to wait. It's not very practical but I do think it would work in principle.

that's how I read that. this experiment specifically gave a choice to study which penalty is more popular, which is probably inversely related to its effectiveness.

that is if the study is on the speeders, I'm not sure the average person wants lighter penalties on speeding.

How do the insurers get to know about those tickets?

In the US at least, it's public information. The ticket is usually a civil infraction that results in a legal judgement against you.

For the average person, this info is probably stored in a basement near a beware of the leopard sign but insurance companies will go through the trouble to get it.

"and the poor suffer what they must"

Should we make our roads more unsafe in an absolute sense out of some misplaced idea of fairness?

This is an absurd framing that presupposes roads are closed to the poor already (they're not) and that fairness is misplaced (it isn't). Wealth should not be a factor in whether one can hold a driver's license or not. Everyone pays road taxes.

We Finns have figured out how to equalise the money part as well.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland...

The article addresses that. Apparently Estonians consider Finland's system inferior to theirs.

> Estonians have praised the idea for being more egalitarian—monetary fines are not adjusted according to income, as in neighbouring Finland, but everyone has the same number of hours in the day

I'm not sure it's actually as egalitarian as it first sounds. Low-income jobs tend to be a lot less forgiving to being an hour late for work, than higher-paying jobs.

Back when I worked in food service, being an hour late probably meant today was your last day. Now, I'm not sure anyone would actually notice. Higher up, if you're late, people will wait for you.

If a 1-hour timeout creates a split between "so I lost my job" and "so I finished an hour later", it's still punishing the poor more.

Ok, so here is the diplomatic Swede interfering in the affairs of others: why not combine the two? Pay a progressive fine or wait by the roadside.

I have a feeling that a certain class of rich person would be much more bothered by being made to wait than just paying a large fine.

They’re probably correlated with the highest incomes, so the result of them choosing to pay is a lot of extra revenue for the police (or whoever the fines go to). This could be seen as an advantage.

It's ridiculousness to me that fine revenue ends up in city / police coffers. Talk about a conflict of interest.

Does that matter? There's also a certain class of rich person that would not want to pay 50,000 euros for speeding.

So BOTH a progressive fine and an imposed wait should work for everyone then.

I like it!

That's literally what's described in the article.

Are you sure? This is a quote from the article: "monetary fines are not adjusted according to income, as in neighbouring Finland"

A progressive tax is a nice start, albeit less original. The problem is some extremely rich folk don't necessarily have a high salary.

Punishing with micro-timeouts like this is much more interesting imo.

I would like that in Germany too. Here it's fixed but if you get caught speeding beyond a threshold your driver's license gets suspended we also get points and with a certain amount of points you are not allowed to drive anymore at all.

People in the USA who are money-poor are often time-poor as well, so this may still unfairly impact the poor. I'm not sure how true that is for Estonia.

The other dimension, space. They will take away a room of your house.

I know you're joking, but removal of space already exists in the form of incarceration (limiting the space you're allowed to roam within).

Why be so classical? We could also lower your probabilities or increase your improbabilities.

But then I would get a lottery ticket

Yes perhaps but we don't all get to spend that 24 hours equally in a day so is it really fair? A poor person may have to work 2 jobs at minimum wage and still barely get by working 16 hour days. This person already has to spend most of their day working. Now for the person making millions off investments literally making making money while they sleep and only has to work 8 hours a day is it really the same for these 2 people to take a 1 hour time out? The only way I can see this system work would be ever increasing time frames each time you get pulled over and since people can't spend 8 hours on the side of the highway with no bathroom or food, they should just make people come sit in a classroom where they could also educate on the dangers of speeding. As a person who struggles with sleep, I am on a regular basis pulling over on the side of the read for a half hour to catch some sleep. This would hardly be a punishment for me and I would not be deterred from doing it again. Make it several hours long, cut the internet and then we are getting somewhere.

Ah yes, the hypothetical poor person who works 16 hour days, at 2 or 3 minimum wage jobs, can not afford public transport or a car, and depending on what's being debated, doesn't have time, money or mental faculties to register for a particular service that's being talked about (most often a picture ID).

also known as, a strawman.

The suggestion isn’t that every poor person suffers all of these, it’s that many suffer from a few. Any punishment will likely affect a subset of those people much more than everyone else.

There are millions of these people.

How is this a hypothetical person?

Agree the penalties should be compounding and increasing exponentially. Also, fine shouldn't be a fixed one, but part of your income like in rest of Scands. Then the choice is much more difficult.

Also I've recently bought new car and collected 3 fines within first 2 weeks. They weren't quick enough to arrive to change my behaviour and this would've bitten me way too hard than it should.

Except that you're not repaying the cost to society. At the very least, you owe for the time the police had to spend to catch you. At most, for the endangerment of those around you. A "time out" is just a waste.

Just make fines progressive.

I doubt that small speeding fines do more than pay for themselves. You need a bureaucracy in place for fine payment, fines can end up getting contested in court at a huge cost, etc.

Entire cities fund themselves with speeding tickets:

https://www.npr.org/2019/10/18/771371881/episode-945-the-lib...

Conversely, for some people 200€ is peanuts, money that can throw away without a second thought. For them, it's not a deterrent.