Photo enforcement cameras

Maybe police should go back to being visible on the street to control driver behavior

I’d rather avoid inflating police budgets if I can help it. Especially since such a system then lends itself to those same cops advocating for increased surveillance measures because it makes their job easier. They’re the people who wanted the built-in ALPR systems, after all.

city road design be built around calming traffic patterns

100% agree. Yet while I want these to be more widespread, they take money, time, and lots of urban planning. In the meantime, I see traffic cameras (specifically those NOT integrated with ALPR systems that store locations in a central database) as a good stopgap solution for areas that don’t yet/can’t build out those measures in a reasonable timeframe.

instead of using completely undercover normal looking vehicles for traffic enforcement and then raking in millions of dollars by sitting on their ass and letting the camera do all the work?

Also agreed. The pigs don’t need more money for doing less work, hence why I think the prior idea of having them be visible is still a bad idea, because they can simply sit there and… also do nothing.

And if they set quotas, then the measure becomes a goal, and it ceases to be a good measure, as cops will just pull more people over because it “seemed like they were going fast”, and everyone’s days get just a little bit worse.