Maybe it exists but I wish there was more heavy hitting articles/research on this. I feel like an absolute grumpy old man but it feels drastically different compared to my younger years driving and I am only 40. These days I rarely see police on the side of the road ticketing and when I do it’s usually on a highway. Never do I see people getting pulled over in city streets.

My thesis has been an uptick on BS calls. Said differently the bad neighborhoods have gotten worse and funding for police is mismanaged.

Absolutely. They shut down for COVID and never came back.

A big part of traffic stops was to find weed and trade up for an arrest. With legalization, they’ve shifted to camera work, which has gotten even bigger with Flock.

Does this NYT article satisfy? https://archive.is/6BzFc

I have noticed a severe uptick in bad semi-truck drivers on the interstate since COVID, I'll agree at least with that part.

The local cops here have always just run plates for stolen vehicles. Getting a ticket is almost unheard of. I don't know what their deal is, but you can speed right past them in the other lane, or if they're just parked on the corner.

I'm guessing you still can't pass them on a two-lane road without poking their ego.

That has more to do with CDL mills out there cranking out minimally qualified drivers.

I am constantly amazed at how many people blatantly run red lights now. It used to be that people would sometimes press their luck on a yellow a little bit, but now it'll be red for several seconds and people will still just drive right on through.

I'd love if the police enforced this insanely dangerous behavior instead of trying to catch people going 10 over on the highway.

I see this a lot too here in Australia now, and yes it used to be pretty unusual but now I see it every day. I've sometimes wondered if it's just a frequency illusion but I'm sure it has got much worse, maybe since the COVID times?

It depends. Traffic lights are just mutexes. They are there to stop traffic so that other traffic may pass safely. There's no point if there aren't any other cars. Obviously anyone running a light on a busy intersection deserves to get fined but if you know the terrain, have good visibility into the road where the other traffic comes from and can clearly see there are no vehicles present, running the red light is utterly harmless.

In my city, certain traffic lights literally turn off at night. There's not enough traffic flowing to justify them.

I can’t tell if you’re joking or seriously trying to justify running red lights.

Use your eyes, your situational awareness and your best judgement. The traffic light is not god's word.

In my neighborhood there used to be a traffic light that would be red for a long time despite not usefully regulating any traffic whatsoever. It stopped traffic despite the fact no other traffic could possibly conflict with it. People realized this and routinely ran that light with zero consequences. At some point the city realized it too and redesigned the traffic controls so that the light would be green in this situation.

Stop training yourself to run red lights before you kill some body.

The correct action is to constantly bug your local representative to fix the problem, not break a law written in blood.

The correct action is to understand why certain barriers were erected in your way before attempting to demolish them. If you don't understand, just respect the barrier. If you understand, you know if it can be safely bypassed, when and under which conditions. Use your judgement.

Jaywalking laws were also written in blood. People break them every single day regardless because they have eyes and can look both ways to determine if it is safe to cross the street before actually doing it.

And yet, jaywalking pedestrians get killed daily, despite their best attempts at determining whether it's safe to cross. The problem with allowing drivers to use their best judgment as to whether it's safe to continue through a red light (after stopping) is that a non-zero percent of those drivers will fail to judge the situation correctly, especially during an edge case they rarely encounter.

It's impossible to get hit by cars if there are no cars around you. Vehicles are not going to materialize out of nowhere and crash into you. They are going to be funneled into your path by the roads. If you look at the road and see zero traffic, then you cannot be hit by traffic. Even if you run a red light.

Obviously, if you can't see the road where the cars will come from, then you cannot know if there are any cars coming towards you in a potentially intersecting trajectory.

> Vehicles are not going to materialize out of nowhere and crash into you.

At 60kmh a vehicle travels 16 meters per second. In freedom units: at 37mph a vehicle travels 54 feet per second.

A vehicle will materialize out of nowhere and crash into you.

>A vehicle will materialize out of nowhere and crash into you.

God I hate these sort of responsibility shirking opinions and their peddlers.

I do this several times a day in a major US city for close to a decade now and I've never had a close call closer than the "two people trying to pass each other in the hallway" routine with a driver trying to take a right on red.

Vehicles and everything else on this rock flying through space obey the same laws of physics.

If the traffic on a road goes X miles per hour, then simply don't cross it where you don't have a sufficiently long line of sight. If crossing where the lines of sight are sufficient is not tractable due to traffic volumes or road construction then cross at a marked crossing, intersection that interrupts traffic flow or use proper body language and someone will stop for you.

Sure, you might get exceptionally unlucky and choose to cross at the exact minute some car that's a few standard deviations above the norm but you might also get hit by lightening.

> I do this several times a day in a major US city for close to a decade now and I

I, I, I

> Vehicles and everything else on this rock flying through space obey the same laws of physics.

Yes. Yes they do.

That's why some countries (e.g. Sweden) actually have this in drivers ed: how fast a vehicle travels, how long it takes for the driver to react, what the stopping distance is for a vehicle etc.

They even teach things like "parked cars are a double problem because you can have people especially kids suddenly appear from behind them".

Or things like "at night you only see this far, and judging distance to things becomes harder".

But all that, including laws of physics, is invalidated by a litany of "I, I, mine, my, me".

The presence of some few number of people who can't manage to jaywalk decently and not run reds when it matters doesn't justify saddling the literal entire rest of society with some automotive flavor of 1984 anymore than some small number people robbing convenience stores to pay for their drug addiction justifies subjecting all of society to pervasive surveillance and the war on drugs fueled police state.

I couldn't parse your demagoguery, bad analogies and non-sequiturs, and I don't want to.

Adieu.

Obviously. Don't take risks near pedestrians, near schools, near parked cars. Don't make assumptions in low visibility conditions where you can't actually see what's ahead of you. Use your judgement.

In my city there are segments where I can see several kilometers ahead, including the traffic lights and their associated roads and traffic.

If you can't understand the fact it's safe to run a red light when you can see the roads are clear for several kilometers ahead of you, then I simply don't know what else to say.

Even police does this while roaming about on patrol.

Honestly, these arguments sound like cartoon logic. Guy looks both ways and sees the roads are clear but on the exact second he starts to cross the street 10 cars materialize out of nowhere at 200 km/h and nearly run him over just to teach him a lesson. This isn't how the world works.

I understand the desire to act holier than thou and pretend that going through a red light with no traffic is murder in the making, but the situation they advocate for (running when clear) is even written into law in some states (at least for motorcycles/bicycles). Some vehicles don't trigger the sensors and the lights never change, so you are allowed to go after a full stop. I would not be surprised in the least if there were some states where the wording of the law applied to cars as well.

I’m not sure if it was COVID or the social movements around the same time like defund the police. Here in Seattle when defunding the police was suggested the police department threatened to close the precinct in a large residential area. Basically they attempted to extort the voters. I think the police have realized that crime is good for them because the more of it voters see the more they think police are needed.

Which leads to the extreme—maximal crime leads to maximum police budgets!

[delayed]

I don't disagree. When the state runs out of enemies it manufactures more.

Vilify them, defund them, restrict them, reduce the number of officers to the lowest level in 30 years, and then when crime increases in the next few years .. was it maybe because of everything that was just done? No, that's not it, it's a grand conspiracy across every police officer in Seattle who coordinated/decided to be evil together and intentionally let crime spread. Yup, that all checks out.

Ok so now that crime is lower can we blame them?

I wasn't inviting another tired relitigation of the defund movement, only observing the apparent origin of police caring even less about crime.

Cameras aren't going to solve that.

The "problem" being solved with cameras is "cops aren't generating enough traffic ticket revenue"

Would it not? I actually don’t think I would mind speeding cameras and the like. Put a camera on every street and auto ticket every car.

My city does it. It sucks ass. It’s a 70% vendor / 30% city revenue share and people avoid the city and use side streets to avoid the main avenues.

Are the speed limits set unreasonably low? Otherwise one could always try abiding to the speed limit.

Most US cities have lower posted speeds than average drivers’ perception of safe speeds.

Oftentimes comically lower. I remember in Chicago the interstates having posted speed limits of 45mph... the average flow of traffic outside of rush hour was easily north of 70mph.

Looking even at normal arterial streets, many streets in Seattle are marked 25, but you'd be hard-pressed to find even a cop going under 30 most of the time.

I truly don't understand US road design. The construction of the road and the posted speed limit almost never are even gently correlated other than on a few select residential side streets in a few select cities who have rebuilt streets based on safety studies.

    > I remember in Chicago the interstates having posted speed limits of 45mph... the average flow of traffic outside of rush hour was easily north of 70mph.

This comment seems a bit odd to me. I Google about it and learned (from various sources):

    > 45 mph (72 km/h) in downtown Chicago, where all the major interstates merge

This excludes construction or work zones.

That seems pretty reasonable. I've seen a few places in the US where several major interstates merge and the post speed limit is quite low -- 45-55 mph.

20 mph.

Pre, post and during COVID, you rarely see someone pulled over for running a red because you rarely see it happen. When you do, a cop it is even more rare to be present. These rare events stick out, yes.

Depending on the situation, it might be dangerous for a cop to also run a red to give chase, so consider it might be their job to let it go.