This kind of automation gets that relationship exactly backwards, and is not the basis of a healthy balance between freedom and order.

It's not about "maintaining order". These laws serve as a legitimate cover story for police to harass indiscriminately, as they are widely disregarded, giving a blank check to police to stop and harass anyone based on their own hunches, biases, or prejudice.

It's a bad system, and it has nothing to do with maintaining order, and everything to do with legitimizing police misconduct.

It is not, however -- by any stretch of the imagination -- the goal of civil statutes to enable indiscriminate harassment.

Your anti-cop ideology is leaking. It's unoriginal, uninsightful, and unhelpful.

Do you have any evidence to support this claim? There's plenty to support the idea that these non-crimes exist on the books specifically to enable police to target so-called "undesirables" who would otherwise be breaking no law:

https://lbpost.com/longbeachize/opinion/the-classist-racist-...

Yes, we can certainly agree that this "anti-pattern" occurs, and that it's a perversion of the system. I've been on the receiving end of some technically-correct-but-not-helping-anyone tickets myself. On the whole, however, it is my feeling that police operate as described above.

More to the point, it is not the purpose of these laws to fully suppress the behavior they punish. When applied in a manner to do so, it is a perversion.

As an aside, this has always been funny to me—you called them American stops; in America they’re called California stops; in California, we called them L.A. stops. The buck stops there, though: in Los Angeles, nobody stops.

In this case, change the ticketing model to have a graduated scale so e.g. going 1mph through a stop sign is $1, going 2 is $3, going 10mph is $100. Ideally, enforce it through technology at all stops. And then anyone who accrues more than say $10 in fines in a month has to pay it, and everyone can see where they are towards that.

And then to make it properly "fair" make it equitable, e.g. ticket costs indexed against your personal income rather than a flat rate.

I think moving the goalposts and changing the rules from "any speeding gets you a fine" to "excessive speeding always gets you a fine and lesser speeding can be grounds for an ad-hoc fine by a present officer (who would explain how speeding was dangerous in that particular situation)". It would hopefully get rid of the feeling that unaccountable machines are preying on our missteps while allowing reasonable police officers to discipline unsafe drivers. You could still of course have police who are just out to annoy others, but I'm not sure that something new ticketing laws can fix.

Might amuse you to know that in the US, they're often called "California" stops, and in California, they're often called "Hollywood" stops ;)

1) Red light cameras tend to displace the accidents from the intersection to just before the intersection, but they don't reduce accidents or injuries.

2) Regression to the mean--put a camera in a spot with a high accident rate and see the accident rate drop. But blips tend to average out anyway, unless it's a fundamental problem with the spot you would expect the accident rate to drop back to normal.

Also, we don't have cameras here but I have observed a pattern to traffic enforcement: I have *never* seen traffic enforcement other than DUI checkpoints at a location where there wasn't a mismatch between the law and the reality on the road. Examples:

1) There used to be a *big* speed trap on the highway northeast of town. One day they finally raised the speed limit there--and I haven't seen a cop there since.

2) One mile is full of houses, narrow, legitimately 35 mph. Then there's a mile built to 45 mph standards, but it has *one* house (which I believe is not occupied) and is 35 mph, even on the southbound side which in the area near the house is isolated from it by a barrier no little kid could cross. The next mile is built to the same standards and is correctly 45 mph. One guess as to where the cop sits.

3) We used to have a stupid law prohibiting turning on red when there were multiple turn lanes. I'm thinking of a T intersection where the road widened to 4 lanes just before the T. Just after the right turn there's good shelter for the cops to hide--and they really rack up a score on people making perfectly safe turns from the rightmost lane. I believe the legislature finally fixed that. Life has changed, I haven't been though that intersection since to see if the trap went away.

4) One that used to apply right near our house. The half-main street is built to 35 mph standards, but when we moved in there was a spot 1/2 mile along it that was undeveloped and thus narrower--25 mph. That resulted in the whole mile being 25 mph. The cop sat 1/4 mile along, where it still looked like a 35 mph road even though it was 25 mph. When the narrow spot was fixed the limit was raised to 35 mph and I haven't seen a cop there since.

And the purely abusive: Crosswalk enforcement, I got nailed in a situation where continuing on was completely safe but I'm not sure I could even have made a panic stop before the line, certainly not without asking for being rear-ended. Not only that but the only place served by that crosswalk was closed.

Edit: The only legitimate traffic stops I have ever seen involve a cop driving along and witnessing a problem.

- Stretch of freeway by my old house that looks and feels like any freeway you've ever been on, except they limit the speed to 45mph. Try to go 45 at your own peril as car and semi alike go 65 past you. Then the cop camps there. I avoid that freeway now.

- Shopping center exit onto a small side street had a "no left turn" sign, but trying to obey this meant a massive detour around if you needed to go left. The side street was empty most of the time (and low speed!), so people tended to just go for it. Cop camped out there. They removed the sign a year later.

All the speeds you quoted are a 5mph offset. Which is weird.