Asking police officers to enforce traffic violations is a very expensive use of their time. Police offers cost a lot of money to employ, and we have a lot of publicly accessible road space. Having officers even regularly stationed at 50% of the most common routes would probably take up a lot more manpower than they have now and that means more taxes to pay for them. Creating a dedicated traffic enforcement division is probably more doable/cheaper, but again, the amount of people needed is large. The problem is fundamentally that the US has a lot of extremely lightly regulated public space designed for high speed and that's why our pedestrian and auto safety record is so much worse than any other developed country.

> Asking police officers to enforce traffic violations is a very expensive use of their time.

Is it? Seems like heavy enforcement could pay for itself in terms of fines.

The average police officer in the Bay Area costs $200k with benefits. Can each police officer bring $200k worth of fines in per person? Moreover, what kind of a system will you create if you incentivize officers to pay their own salary through fines?

If you're saying the police is massively overfunded, yeah. Officers also already often face quotas in many places, so you already know the answer to that question.

But the better question is why would you need to have overpaid humans drive around in cars to catch speeding violations? In most of Europe you almost never get stopped by cops for traffic violations. Most speeding violations are caught by stationary radar traps, a machine can run the plates and send you the ticket by mail, including a pretty picture of the driver of the car if you want to dispute who drove it. Sometimes there are similar traps activated by passing a red light. It'll even tell you how the long the light had been red when you passed it.

The reason that doesn't happen in the US is privacy regulations and because generally speaking lower income areas are less pedestrian friendly than higher income areas, so lower income areas will probably have more speeding. Not saying I agree with these reasons but it is why the political calculus in the US exists.

> We have the regulations. What we need is enforcement of existing regulations.

In the case of headlights, I disagree. Many other countries have laws that require always on headlights, or at least daytime running lights (DRLs) in some cases.

For example, I work in the auto industry and the cars that we distribute in America have different light programming than the cars we send next door to Canada. It's stupid. We should at least require DRLs in America and then we'd be on par with countries like Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, etc. who recognize it's safer when every moving vehicle is lit up. There's no day-to-day enforcement needed, the car turns on the lights automatically every time the vehicle is started.

The problem with DLRs is that it makes cars more visible. And more vulnerable traffic participants such as bikes, pedestrians, skateboarders, etc. (that mostly don't have lights) less visible by comparison.

As someone who has spent more time participating in traffic as a pedestrian and on bike than driving cars and frequently cycles between these roles this feels like a bogus argument. DLRs make cars more visible to me even when I'm not driving a car, allowing me to better anticipate their behavior. This is especially helpful with curb-side parking.

Also bikes absolutely should have lights and are required by law to have them in my country (and to have them on at night, dusk or in reduced visibility conditions). E-bikes and e-scooters also have lights which are typically always-on regardless of lighting conditions.

Pedestrians don't normally have lights (although I've seen joggers wear hi-vis vests or head lamps, especially during early morning or late night runs) but pedestrians also don't move as rapidly and suddenly as vehicles. Plus in urban environments drivers are expected to look out for pedestrians, especially in narrower roads. "Child peeking out between parked cars" is a scenario covered several times during driver ed and the practical exam includes one emergency break without prior warning (tho in practice learners can make an educated guess about when it might be coming up, e.g. being led to a low-traffic street and instructed to "pick up speed a little").

We don't have DRL because it has been studied and shown not to not make a difference. Other countries should catch up to us in not requiring things that don't do anything useful. (depending on the time of day, sometimes DRL helps, but sometimes it makes things worse - overall the difference works out to not significant)

OP is talking about cars at night without any lights on. DRLs would definitely make cars at night safer than car without any lights at all.

Not to mention, I said "at least" DRLs because DRLs are a watered down version of what the European studies show as safer, which is headlights on all the time. In the US, the brightness of DRLs is limited, so the studies are shit to begin with because they're not even using the right variables to find the safest solution.

And most new cars have an auto setting for headlights (and have for a while) that most people just leave on auto. (At least for their own cars. I never totally trust what's going on with a rental although I assume it's pretty standardized at this point.)

I'd like to see those studies because both as a driver and on bike DRL makes a huge difference. Maybe less so with stroads and massive parking lots where you don't have a lot of curb-side parking and visibility is generally good.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daytime_running_lamp says the study was in 2008. I can't find the study itself, but you might have better luck.