
Dash-cams: Russia’s Last Hope For Civility And Survival On The Road (2012) - georgecmu
http://www.animalnewyork.com/2012/russian-dashcam/
======
sakopov
Here is a quick story about Russian police from a few years ago. This should
give you an idea why a dashboard camera is not an option, but a necessity. My
mother was in Russia visiting my uncle (her brother) in Krasnodar 3 years ago.
He picked her up at the airport and they started their drive back -- about 2
hours away from the city. As soon as they got on the highway, they noticed a
civilian sedan on the side of the road. The car started moving as they were
approaching it and when they were within a few yards it veered right in front
of them, causing them to chaotically cut into the adjacent lane. A few moments
later a police car comes out of some corner and pulls them over. By this time
the other car that cut into their lane is obviously gone. They cops out of the
car and tell them that they've stopped them for reckless driving. My uncle
explains the situation and tells them that he's meeting his sister for first
time in years and would like to just safely get her home. The cops tell him
that he can pay them an X amount of rubles now without worrying about making
the drive back to the city to pay the ticket. When he agrees, they give him an
outrageous bribe amount. He quickly gives them a number significantly lower.
The cops tell him, literally - "let's flip a coin." Both picked a side of a
coin and they ended up paying the smaller part of the bribe. This whole
situation sounds more humorous than anything. They used pull better stunts
back in early 90s. Now the situation with police is slightly more regulated,
but it's still just as corrupt as it's been since the collapse of Soviet
Union.

~~~
dlokshin
> but it's still just as corrupt as it's been since the collapse of Soviet
> Union

In the Soviet Union you not only bribed police, but the grocer, the mail man,
your child's principal, and the list goes on.

~~~
gdy
Why on earth would anyone bribe a mailman?

~~~
jacquesm
So you get your mail and your packages in one piece, unopened and on time?

~~~
shn
-:) (Not to knock twice ?)

~~~
huhtenberg
Psst, younglings. He's referring to this -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Postman_Always_Rings_Twice_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Postman_Always_Rings_Twice_%281981_film%29)

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ryusage
Russia sounds like a pretty scary place, to be honest. Is it really as bad as
this makes it sound? How does a whole country get to be so sociopathic?

~~~
xentronium
This is a complex question.

1\. Article is mostly based on CHP community posts and comments. Their data is
strongly skewed toward scary stuff (which is the only type of content that is
posted there)

2\. There are several categories of horrible things that can happen to you,
but mostly you can avoid them. However, sometimes you can't, and sometimes
it's batshit crazy. For example, couple of months ago, some road crash with
some heated argument happened in St. Petersburg. One of the participants of
that argument died from five knife wounds to the chest. Investigative
Committee alleged that (sic!) _the man committed suicide_ (google Grigory
Kochnev). You can't make this shit up.

3\. Russians themselves are mostly fine, but corruption is on super-high
levels and these people are not sent as alien agents from space. Saltykov-
Shchedrin, great Russian satirist, wrote more than a hundred years ago: "If I
were to doze off and re-awake in a hundred years and someone asked me what is
happening in Russia, my answer would be unhesitating: people are drinking and
stealing".

4\. If you are to visit Russia as a tourist, you are reasonably safe. But I'd
never advice anyone to open business in or relocate to Russia. Unless you want
to deal with truly kafkaesque things every single day.

~~~
ryusage
So is the article just picking out a few isolated incidents and painting a
completely unrealistic picture of driving in Russia?

~~~
pavel_lishin
I realize that I'm just throwing more anecdotes into the "NOT DATA" bucket
here, but the last time I visited Russia I was driven around by my grandfather
and uncle. It was probably one of the most terrifying things I've ever
experienced on the road, and I've had a tire blow-out in a Ford king-
everything truck, as well as losing power-everything in the same truck, both
times going 70+ mph on a highway.

~~~
ryusage
What specifically made the driving in Russia so terrifying? Was it the kind of
things the article was talking about, or something else?

~~~
pavel_lishin
I never saw anyone trying to pull a scam, but my impressions - and this was
about a decade ago - were of a Road Warrior type environment. The distinction
between road and sidewalk was a mere suggestion, traffic signals were the
equivalent of someone shushing you in a library, and lanes - what lanes?

------
jostmey
I was wondering why there was so much video footage of people riding in their
vehicles' when the meteorite smacked Russia. Everyone had dash-cams in their
cars because they were afraid of falling victim to a street brawl.

It makes so much sense now!

~~~
Zimahl
They've shown a few of these videos on Tosh.0. Guys pulling over hopping out
of their vehicles, each sizing up the others weapons, and then backing
down[1]. Amusing, but frightening at the same time.

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-s0XH5YA2mo>

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mesofile
Seems like a necessity in Russia but a useful thing to have elsewhere. I know
I've been in situations in the USA where I've wished I'd had one.

Can anyone here recommend a brand/model?

~~~
Domenic_S
A coworker uses a gopro. Seems like overkill to me, but they're small...

~~~
freehunter
I've been eyeballing a GoPro for a dash cam since it also overlaps with my
other hobbies (cycling and ATV riding). The big drawbacks seem to be the low-
light filming and the fact that it doesn't automatically turn on or
automatically rewrite when the disk gets full.

~~~
modoc
The GoPro 3 Black low light performance is quite good (much better than
earlier versions).

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drewda
On a related note, The New York Times just posted synced videos from a number
of dash-cams showing the Siberian meteorite:
[http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/02/15/world/europe/1...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/02/15/world/europe/16meteorite_videogrid.html)

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nivertech
Google should use all these dash-cam clips to train their self-driving cars
how not to drive;)

One thing that escapes my understanding: people do not affraid to beat
somebody to death, but they can't figure out how to break a dash-cam and
destroy the evidence?

~~~
gcb0
yeah. i totally get several uses for the cameras. but the opening argument on
the article made it hard to keep reading... if someone can drag you out of the
car to "smash your face" i hardly doubt the camera will help you there.

If anything, will leave you with a broken face and a $600 camera missing.

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rcina
Dash-cams are seemingly becoming a more essential piece of equipment for cars
nowdays. For anyone looking into learning more about dash cams I've found lots
of great information and resources about dash cams here:
<http://dashcamtalk.com/>

~~~
smackfu
Despite seeming a bit spammy, this site is actually really useful.

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pjob
The article briefly mentions a scam where a driver intentionally causes an
accident to extort money. It's strangely satisfying to see this unfold:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWvG4KAYJfY>

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ww520
Do they have the video upload to an offsite server in realtime?

What are some of the feature people looking for in a dash-cam and/or a dash-
cam service?

~~~
justincormack
You have a free data upload link from your car?

~~~
stcredzero
Using cellular broadband, but only in case of an emergency, would still be
useful.

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narrator
I think this might be a preview of what life will be like once google googles
and other augmented reality headset cams get broadly distributed. I don't mean
people will become as savage as they are on the Russian roads, just there'll
be far more eyewitness videos of things and entertainment will arise via
aggregation of these videos.

~~~
martinced
_"I don't mean people will become as savage as they are on the Russian
roads..."_

The premise of TFA is not that "because of dashcams people on russian roads
did become savage".

The premise of the article is that thanks to dashcams there's some hope that
people become more civilized.

Your sentence make it sound like dashcams are the issue that turned russians
sociopathic. It's not the case: now we have visual proofs but it has nearly
always been like that...

~~~
freehunter
I took his post to imply that the purpose of dash cams in Russia is in
response to the savagery of the roads, not that cams turned people into
savages. I'm not sure that anyone in their right mind would argue that in any
situation.

~~~
narrator
You are correct. I never meant to imply that dashcams and savagery were
correlated in any way. We have become separated from reality by the confined
view into reality that mainstream media has provided. With google googles
everywhere maybe we'll immerse back into reality through billions of hours of
google glasses video passed through the hands of legions of expert editors.

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ImprovedSilence
Um... I read this exact article on Jalopnik earlier today:
[http://jalopnik.com/why-russians-are-obsessed-with-dash-
cams...](http://jalopnik.com/why-russians-are-obsessed-with-dash-cams-5918159)

DO Jalopnik and anminal NY share the same owernship, and thus just recycle
articles?

EDIT: Jalopnik has republished with permission at the bottom..

~~~
georgecmu
As far as I can tell, HN considers jalopnik links spam and auto-kills those
submissions.

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yellowbkpk
For those of you interested in purchasing one, DealExtreme has ~500 of them
here:

<http://dx.com/c/735>

Features include GPS, SD card recording, auto loop recording, auto-record when
powered, stop when unpowered, accelerometers, or compass. They tend to be
about $100 shipped anywhere in the US.

~~~
sah2ed
Has the stuff you've bought off of them proven to be of good build quality?

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saevarom
I thought they got that meteorite footage from taxis or police cars or
something. This explains everything!

------
dhughes
I've wanted a dash cam for years but the technology just wasn't there.

In the late 90s I drove around with my JVC GR-DVM70U miniDV camcorder on a
tripod lashed into my back seat.

No I can have 1080p video from my cellphone mounted on a windshield mount. I
have lots of video but it's pretty limited due to storage limitations I choose
the highest quality because my reasoning is if something goes wrong there's no
point in have video that's so bad that everything is blurry. A video overlay
of speed, brakes, compass, GPS would be nice too.

I'd love to have a small camera always on with the option to dump the video to
a safe storage area such as Dropbox or several places.

~~~
honestcoyote
A better option might using a service like UStream. Download their app, set
your channel to private, and when you drive places, start your broadcast. I
believe they automatically archive anything you livestream, so if something
happens and the phone is destroyed, there's still a record of what happened.
And it wouldn't fill up local storage.

With an Android phone, this might even be scriptable using something like
Tasker. Set it up to automatically start the streaming application as soon as
the GPS records you travelling a speed over a certain limit, say 10 mph/20
kph.

~~~
dhughes
I did use an app called iOnRoad they even sent me a free windshield mount for
my phone. It doesn't record video but will take a picture when it's senses
some danger such as a sudden stop i.e. trying to avoid the car in front of you
stopping.

I thought about UStream but I am lucky to get a signal even here in the
capital city; GPS or cell.

Maybe a RaspberryPi, a small webcam and solar panel.

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euroclydon
Wow, sounds like a foolproof idea! Wait, maybe the bad guy who's broke my
window and is repeatedly punching me in the face will just grab the dash cam.

~~~
ChrisClark
Yeah, you're right. Because it can fail in one type of situation, it must be
useless. ;)

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davidradcliffe
Interesting timing with the release of "A Good Day to Die Hard" yesterday.

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LatvjuAvs
Russia will be first country where Bigfoot will be caught on dashboard camera,
regularly.

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todorcom
Which shows how usefull is the dash-cam. I will mount one for sure.

