
Estonia has a new way to stop speeding motorists - pionerkotik
https://www.economist.com/europe/2019/11/07/estonia-has-a-new-way-to-stop-speeding-motorists
======
Bilters
I can totally stand behind this idea. It’s way more equal than money. Every
single person get 24 hours a day, but not everybody has €200 (or however high
the fee may be) free at hand. Although I think there should be still an upper
limit. Saying if you speed more than X there’s more consequences involved
rather than time and/ or money.

~~~
loeg
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.

~~~
fyfy18
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.

~~~
wjnc
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).

~~~
mattlondon
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.

~~~
dzhiurgis
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.

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

~~~
afiori
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.

------
goodmachine
In Japan, sober passengers get penalised if a driver is over the alcohol
limit.

The limit is not high (BrAC 0.15 mg/L -equivalent to 0.03%) to start with. The
good thing about this policy (as a disincentive to drunk-driving) is it is
designed to socialise responsibility and blame: while a passenger can
reasonably claim not to know how drunk the driver was, it makes no difference
to the fine.

One could extend this idea to speed limits, perhaps. Or maybe: multiply the
driver's fine relative to the number of passengers aboard, so as to diminish
the guy-showing-off-to-his-mates/ girlfriend effect. If you're risking lives
other than your own, pay more.

~~~
andrei_says_
And multiply by a wealth coefficient like they do in Finland. Because if a
fine is the equivalent $0.00000450 then it’s not much of a motivation.

~~~
belltaco
How is wealth calculated? It's kind of hard in many countries including USA,
since there is no wealth tax.

~~~
sandworm101
Dead simple. Bluebook or insured value of the vehicle being driven. Speed in a
semi-truck, or lambo, expect to pay more than the guy delivering pizzas in a
civic.

~~~
nexuist
...So the rich people all buy cheap cars instead and keep their lambos at
home. How does this solve the problem?

------
siliconunit
I find it quite disturbing that in the US you have this insurance/tickets
connection, it has been said clearly by many city halls and police forces that
most ticketing and regulations are rigged to be just another city income
stream, nothing much to do with safety or concern (just cap car speed from
manufacturers you really care about safety). Glad here in Europe it's
completely separated afaik.

~~~
t34543
It has very little to do with safety and it’s mostly a cash grab. Check out a
company called Redflex, they operate many red might camera systems and are
corrupt.

[https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/arizona-based-
redflex-p...](https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/arizona-based-redflex-
photo-radar-firm-to-pay-20-million-to-chicago-for-bribery-scheme-9059028)
[https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/redflex-traffic-systems-
enter...](https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/redflex-traffic-systems-enters-non-
prosecution-agreement-united-states)

------
steverb
Heh. We used to use this technique in the Military Police. Speeding tickets on
base (at that time in Germany) did not result in a fine. They resulted in what
amounts to the person's commander getting a notification and then deciding
what to do with it.

It usually resulted in a butt chewing for the service member. The military
spouses tended to be less impressed by this. So for spouses we always took a
lot of time filling out the paperwork.

For the spouses who proclaimed how "important" their husband was, I liked to
be especially obsequious and insist that they talk to my supervisor, and make
them wait by the side of the road until said supervisor could make it to the
scene (or have better things to do and tell me to quit screwing around).

Young me was a jerk sometimes.

------
xhedley
UK police forces have an option to offer drivers who speed a speed awareness
training course. This costs money but less than the fine and insurance rise
from the points. A friend of mine did one after being caught at 33mph in a
30mph zone. (The police never used to pull you over for that sort of error but
with automated speed cameras it is cheap to detect.) The impact assessment
indicates that it reduced repeat offending compared to fines.
[https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-speed-
aw...](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-speed-awareness-
course-impact-evaluation)

~~~
baloki
Don’t you have to report that you’ve attended the course nowadays and Insurers
generally increase the premium by the same amount as if you had points?

~~~
viseztrance
I've taken the course. I mentioned it to my insurer, and they didn't care.

------
sandworm101
>>Making drivers wait requires manpower. The team acknowledges that the
experiment is not currently scalable, but hopes that technology could make it
so in the future.

Every motorcyclist who gets pulled over by a cop is morally obligated to keep
that traffic cop occupied in conversation for as long as possible. My record
was over an hour. Every second they spend 'supervising" you beside the road is
a second they aren't handing a ticket to someone else. So I am all for this
plan. Make all the cops stand beside the road for an hour every time they
ticket a speeding motorcyclist. That will certainly stop all the inane tickets
being handed to sportbikes doing 55 in a 50 as schoolbusses rush by at 70.

~~~
wool_gather
There's clearly some context behind this comment that I think is completely
missing for those of us who don't ride motorcycles, because this is just
antisocial. I'd be interested to read some expansion on that very last little
phrase that seems to be your justification.

~~~
soledades
I'm pretty sure the context here is particular to the intricacies of this
individual's mind. As a motorcyclist myself, the only thing I've been pulled
over for is going the wrong way down a four lane one-way street, and even for
that I didn't get a ticket.

------
rightbyte
For some reason I like the idea. You don't speed to save money but to save
time, so paying the fine in time seems ... appropiate?

~~~
jaytaylor
I like the idea, too. One exception where it might not be very effective is in
cases where the speeder doesn't consider their time as valuable vs. paying
money, e.g. teenagers.

~~~
rightbyte
Maybe, but it might be embaressing unless it is on purpuse. You could still
withdraw the license etc.

In practice the cops probably need to be able to handle teens "playing" and on
purpose getting wait fines some way. It wouldn't be unmanageble.

------
bb123
The article quickly mentions that speeding tickets don’t have a cumulative
effect like they do in other countries, but doesn’t explain why. Surely this
would also make the system more egalitarian - if you’re caught 3 times you
lose your licence. Doesn’t matter who you are.

~~~
loeg
Basic speeding at epsilon over the legal set point is hardly worth taking a
license for. Especially when such values are often set arbitrarily.

Consider also that any three strike system will impact people who drive more
miles more often. So a population of more reckless but lower mileage drivers
will be impacted similarly to high mileage drivers going speed limit +/\-
noise.

~~~
Tade0
That sounds about right. The danger one poses on the road is a function of,
among other things, speed and time behind the wheel.

~~~
loeg
There are a _lot_ of other factors that are stronger signals than the first
order approximation of time behind the wheel. E.g., professional drivers get
more practice and probably have fewer accidents per time or mile than casual
drivers; some people look at their phone or in-car computer while driving and
others don't; driving around pedestrians and bicycles is more dangerous to
society than driving in times and places when the roads are empty or only have
other cars (interstates); etc, etc.

Anyway, I suggest looking at three-strike drug possession laws as a good
example of how dysfunctional this kind of hard-on-crime legislation is in
practice.

------
hourislate
This wouldn't work in the USA since police are revenue driven. Safety is not
the primary focus of traffic police. Their only concern is generating enough
revenue to ensure their jobs and help support the coffers of the city they
work for. Giving people an option to sit out a fine would cost them and the
city too much.

------
neiman
This is literally micro-imprisoning, and I can so easily see how this can be
abused. We should be careful who give the power to imprison others.

~~~
close04
There are many countries that apply such a “punishment by delay” system ad-
hoc. Police know a fine might not hit the sweet spot so when they see
aggressive or speeding drivers they don’t just apply the fine but also an
arbitrary delay: you’ll hand around by the police while they do checks, re-
checks, verifications, more checks. This is far more frustrating than the
fines and a good deterrent for those who consider any fine chump change.

~~~
neiman
There's a difference between being delayed for procedural reasons, and between
being delayed as a punishment.

~~~
kd5bjo
Any procedural delay can be readily changed to a punitive delay on the whim of
the official implementing the procedure.

------
darchws
I think there is another perspective of the speeding needs. Not everybody
drives in high speeds just because they want to be at somewhere sooner. Most
of time it can be just the desire to feel of the speed.

For example in the some highways in the some countries, the speed average is
calculated between two tolls and people resets their odometer in the first
toll and if they above the limit, they pull over and wait until the average
goes below the limit. So I am in doubt if it decreases or increases driving in
high speeds in the long term.

~~~
IshKebab
I've never seen anyone do that in the UK. It would be illegal anyway but
people don't even speed up and slow down. Which countries are you talking
about?

~~~
JoelTheSuperior
To be fair the UK absolutely does have average speed checks on many of its
motorways.

~~~
noir_lord
Not just motorways they are all over the place, I use Waze on my motorcycle
with a blue tooth headset and it announces them as you enter leave and shows a
moving average (which I'm always way under, I don't speed but I like to know
where they are because they can make cars erratic, same with speed cameras, if
I get the alert there is one ahead you can predict all the cars will start
braking earlier).

Honestly I'm completely in favour of both speed cameras and moving average
zones, the stuff I see on a week to week basis is shocking, same with red
light cameras, I wish every major to minor junction had them.

------
Waterluvian
Any time I watch a fool weave through traffic on the highway I think about how
after all that risk of murdering other people's children, they get maybe one
extra YouTube video in the day.

And often not even that. I find a sick amount of satisfaction when I get to
coast up to one of these maniacs who sped into traffic and just sit right on
their bumper.

------
perlpimp
Pragmatic nordic countries drive practical solutions, however often other
counties take fear driven approach, signaling that person might be endangering
public safety and who know what that is worth. In Canada you can get slapped
with dangerous driving fine and have your license be suspended for a year, at
a discretion of a police officer.

~~~
xxs
The approach has significant downsides in the winter, esp. if there are any
passengers.

Although it makes for top of hackernews, there is very little pragmatic,
especially since the amount of road police is extremely limited.

------
m_herrlich
I've always assumed speeding tickets are more about income than safety, since
speed is a very rough measure of safe driving when you ignore the vehicle and
driver skill.

This approach costs more (cops babysit speeders) and the state doesn't get
paid. Doesn't seem practical from a policy standpoint.

~~~
goodmachine
Your assumption might be wrong, though.

It costs a lot of money to scrape people off the road and put them back
together. And more if the person cannot be reassembled. Whether the state pays
or insurers do (or both), it all makes for cost that gets spread across
society to some degree. I don't know the exact amount a life is worth, but

[https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-value-of-
life/](https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-value-of-life/)

Secondly, a rough metric like speed is exactly how one should interpret
safety. Given a wide distribution of skills (mutually interacting driver
competencies), and a wide distribution of vehicle capabilities and parameters
(stopping distances, tyre pressures, safety features) and an even wider
distribution of actual road-types & weather conditions it makes 'obey the damn
speed limit: everybody, always' the simplest possible thing for drivers to
understand, and for the cops to enforce.

This approach seems pretty cool. I assume the Estonians will publish the
results either way.

------
dullgiulio
Very fond of the idea. Italy does something related in the "Tutor" system that
fines based on a long average speed (average measured in a long segment using
licence plate recognition).

This avoids the trick drivers use to avoid a single speeding camera. The fines
system is more traditional, however.

The system works because the toll roads in Italy have exclusively guarded
entrances and exits.

------
mendelmaleh
This is awesome! 1 hour lunch break, I will pack a sandwich and a laptop, plan
my trips accordingly xD

edit: someone suggested a nap too

------
randomb_1979
Given how far computer vision has advanced nowadays, I would be interested to
know if anyone has done an analysis of the frequency and delta of over-
speeding vs the make of the car as a (not so great) proxy for how rich a
person is. That might be an additional data point to consider when formulating
these laws.

------
robocat
It is a shame we measure a symptom (speeding) rather than a cause (dangerous
driving) to measure safety.

I regularly see dangerous driving: near misses; aggressive tactics that work
because other drivers compensate to make safe; too close to cyclists;
etcetera.

It would also be nice if we could have a way to carrot or stick "discourteous"
driving.

(Yes: without speed limits I think we would all choose to drive faster all the
time and be dangerous. Also driving in Australia on open road is comfortable
because the speed limit is strictly enforced so there is no overtaking).

------
nkjoep
That is an alternative way to see it, I appreciate the effort. However, we
shouldn't forget the reasons why we have speed limits: safety.

It is just not safe to drive 80mph in the city center, for instance. And
should be just avoided.

A different story is 190mph on the highway. It can be ok under certain
circumstances: low traffic, good weather, good car, your age, new tires, just
an odd example.

So no, some speed limits should be enforced at all costs.

------
mcv
Appropriate, but it requires more active enforcement than the automated radar
speed detectors with cameras and automatically mailing you the fine.

~~~
dannyw
Manual speed traps are nice. Often, you don’t get pulled over for going a
little over the limit, especially if everyone around you is going the same
speed.

------
exegete
I like the idea but I think it would have a legal problem in the US. My
understanding is that when you get a speeding ticket it is actually a court
summons where most people just plead guilty and pay the fine. If the
punishment is instead immediate without an opportunity to go to court I can
see it as a violation of due process. I’m not a lawyer though.

~~~
akdor1154
I'm sure a choice could be given of "physically present yourself at court" or
"wait for 45 minutes now".

~~~
belltaco
Punishments are given only when convicted and after you have an opportunity to
defend yourself before a judge, with your lawyer if desired.

------
hmexx
This is like being put in the "naughty corner", for adults.

... and since most adults experienced this form of punishment during their
formative years, it's bound to be super effective.

Brilliant!

------
newnewpdro
Interesting approach, but those struggling to make ends meet have
substantially less time than the wealthy. It isn't a class normalizing
panacea.

------
kleton
But how does the county collect revenue from this?

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/jJgwH](http://archive.is/jJgwH)

------
kurtisc
Cool idea but they'd never do it here (UK) because they couldn't spare the
police time.

~~~
mellosouls
Yeah that's the problem with the overuse of speed cameras.

No decent policing of the roads - as there are hardly any police doing it -
focusing entirely on speeding instead of unsafe or poor driving.

~~~
kurtisc
Exactly. Sometimes there's someone else on the road driving so badly that the
safest thing to do is get away from them. It's much more difficult if you're
on a road with lots of speed cameras and no cruise-control because then you
have to stare at your speedometer.

------
el_don_almighty
please, oh please... pull me over and make me take a nap on the side of the
road for an hour.

------
Scapeghost
I only keep hearing good things about Estonia. What is it actually like to
live there?

~~~
dullgiulio
Cold and dark in winter. But it also has disadvantages...

------
ReptileMan
Can we just go away with speeding in non residentials areas and make driving
licence harder to obtain skill wise? There is no point in speed limits and
modern cars have much better handling characteristics when such speed limits
were introduced. 140 km/h is like standing still in modern executive car.

------
Jemm
I like the idea but fear that it will be abused by people who need an excuse
to be 45 minutes late, such us exsm takers who feel unprepared and could use
an extra day (or 45 minutes0 to study.

~~~
WD-42
That doesn’t make a lot of sense. You could go steal a bag of chips from a gas
station now and get detained by the police for an hour. Would that excuse
work?

------
mikece
"Slow is steady, steady is fast"...

------
wolrah
I like the concept, especially if as discussed by others in the thread it were
to be combined with the progressive fine system used in some countries.

The thing is, before any discussion of stricter enforcement of speed laws, we
need to fix the speed limits to match the roads (or vice versa, as may be
desirable in some scenarios).

Anywhere that has a "speeding problem" doesn't actually have a problem with
people violating the law, it has a problem with the law being wrong. Most
major traffic engineering guidebooks suggest that limits be set based on the
85th percentile speed or something similar to that.

In free-flowing traffic conditions and without strict speed enforcement, every
combination of road, driver, and vehicle has a natural speed they'll settle in
to. The general principle is that the speed limit should be high enough that
the vast majority of drivers are not speeding, If the 85th percentile natural
speed of a road is higher than desired for whatever reason, the correct answer
is to redesign the road to reduce its natural speed, not to strictly enforce
an artificially low limit.

Unfortunately at least in the US while these principles are in our traffic
engineering guidelines they are overridden by statutory limits. Certain
classes of road are never allowed to have a speed limit above a certain level.
When combined with the fact that we tend to build roads to be as wide, flat,
and straight as we can get away with, the natural speeds on a huge number of
roads exceed the statutory limits.

I've driven a significant portion of the American Interstate system as well as
a small part of Canada's highway network. I still have yet to see a single
controlled-access highway where the majority of free flowing traffic wasn't
traveling above the posted speed limit. Seriously, get on the highway anywhere
in the US outside of rush hour, get in the right lane, and set your cruise
control to the posted limit. Roughly everyone will pass you. There are a few
outliers, but on the average free-flowing highway I'd be willing to bet the
85th percentile rule actually applies backwards, over 85% of traffic is
ignoring the limit because it's stupidly low.

\---

Eliminate all statutory limits, require all limits be set by the 85th
percentile rule, and maybe learn from the Germans' demonstration that flat,
straight, highly visible stretches of high quality highway don't really need
limits at all. Then and only then should we talk about stricter enforcement.

\---

What we really need is stricter driver training and stricter enforcement
against those who are actually bad at driving. We basically hand out licenses
in a Cracker Jack box and have no meaningful classifications for personal use.
The license I got on my 16th birthday by driving a compact sedan through a
half-ass not even parallel parking thing and then going around the block in a
small town also allows me to pilot a literal semi truck pulling a 53' trailer
around most of North America as long as it's not for commercial purposes. In
most states those retirees driving massive RVs have no additional training or
testing.

Unfortunately given that outside of a few major cities it's pretty much
impossible to live a fully functional life without being able to drive or be
driven it's really hard to change that. Taking away someone's ability to drive
is literally taking away their freedom in a large part of the US.

