Dear City of Oakland Police Department (a rant)

[mattbell]

I know your budget is tight and that you're almost out of cash.

However, I object to your taxation plan on a number of fronts.  The area east of the bay bridge looks and feels like a normal highway.  People drive on it like it's a normal highway, going 65-70mph.  That's the speed of traffic -- a consensus arrived at by the various drivers on the road based on the conditions and appearance of the road, and the safest speed to drive.  However, by marking it with the same speed limit as the bridge itself (50), and then pulling people over when they are just going the same speed as the other cars, you're doing a number of things:

1. Preventing cops from doing real work.  I heard Oakland has a crime problem.  My girlfriend who lives there tells me that your city is in the second percentile across the state in terms of safety.  Training officers is expensive.  Police cars are expensive.  Why not put my tax dollars to real use?  

2. Collecting taxes in a horribly inefficient, economically regressive, and random sort of way.  Suppose the IRS collected its taxes this way.  Citizens wouldn't pay taxes, but undercover IRS agents would occasionally and randomly tap them on the shoulder while they're out buying groceries and tell them "It's time for you to pay", at which point they'd have to fork over thousands of dollars or face additional fines.  Some people would never get tapped, while others would get tapped every few months.  The frequency would depend on how often they shopped for groceries and if they knew which grocery stores the IRS liked to haunt.  Furthermore, the frequency would not depend on the person's income, so poor people would end up paying a disproportionate share of the taxes.

3.  Damaging your reputation.  This is a branding issue.  How do you want to be perceived by citizens of Oakland and the surrounding areas? Do you want to be seen as just and effective, or do you want to be seen as a Mafia-style organizations wanting to shake down citizens for their cash by tricking them into breaking the law?  Imagine that the City of Oakland offered a public services product that's so effective that people wanted more.  Imagine them collectively wanting to pay more taxes because they like your product so much they want to upgrade.  Sound crazy?  It happens all the time in the business world.  You may be a local monopoly but you still have competitors... people will choose to live in one city or another based on the amenities it offers.  Right now your reputation could use some work.

---

Since I'm solutions-oriented here, I'm inclined to offer some suggestions:

- Use a system of cameras for enforcement, but with humans making the final call about whether a particular action merits a violation.  This will allow for broader coverage so that the speeding tickets go to the people who are truly driving recklessly instead of having fewer points of enforcement and having cops issuing speeding tickets for more normal drivers all day to meet a quota.  Videos from these cameras (with the license plate numbers obscured) could be put online and observed by anyone, so if you are driving and some drunk nearly clips you while swerving lanes and going 95mph, you could look up the video online from when you were there and then send a petition to the police department.
 
- Speeding tickets could only be issued if the speed of an individual driver is more than 15mph over the average speed of the surrounding drivers.  If all the drivers are going a particular speed, they have reached a consensus in a rather informal fashion about what the speed of traffic should be.  It's democracy in action.  There are some issues with this, as sometimes drivers are ill-informed (think CA drivers in the rain) and they reach a solution that is not globally optimal and leads to more traffic accidents, which then makes everyone slower overall.

- Distribute for free a GPS-based warning system for all cars that indicates the current speed limit and then warns if you're going over.  Then people can't get "trapped" into speeding.  I've received four speeding tickets in my life, and only one of them was on a road where I actually knew the speed limit.  I'd probably go slower if I knew what the actual limit was.  


For now, I'm going to try out the Trapster iphone app.

Comments

[steuard.livejournal.com]

Let me play devil's advocate for a moment here. You say,

"sometimes drivers are ill-informed (think CA drivers in the rain) and they reach a solution that is not globally optimal and leads to more traffic accidents, which then makes everyone slower overall."

Reducing the number of accidents has much greater benefits than avoiding the resulting slowdowns! Even on purely economic terms, the medical costs of treating the injured and the lost productivity of the dead are a major issue for the community. The government has also sometimes put a priority on fuel efficiency.

Also, what sets this informal consensus? It's clearly not just about road conditions. Some people persistently drive much, much faster than is safe (because they're nutcases, or because they want to prove how virile they are, or whatever), and others end up driving faster than they're comfortable with because otherwise they'd feel endangered by the many faster drivers on the road. It is at least possible that these effects together serve to make the "consensus" unreasonably high. (Similar arguments could pull it down, too; I wouldn't want to argue one way or the other without a lot more data. But personally, I more often feel myself being pushed faster than I'd like than vice versa.) The point is that I'm hesitant to immediately assume that this informal consensus is in any absolute sense "right". It's certainly not a pure direct democracy, unless you normally consider "other people threatening your life based on your vote" to be part of the democratic process.

For any of those reasons, one can imagine that the government might want to create an incentive for drivers to travel at a lower speed than the natural consensus. So what tools do they have at their disposal to do that? The only tool I can think of is speeding tickets. Ticketing the fastest and most reckless drivers is good in any case, but if they want to push the average speed lower then they'll have to ticket people who are closer to average, too. And unless you can ticket everyone on the freeway, the only way to do it is a random sampling. If you can see another way to create a similar incentive, I'd love to hear it.

The GPS warning system sounds lovely, but you know as well as I do that it's a non-starter: no government is going to spend that kind of cash. Especially California! (I suppose they could pass the cost on to consumers by requiring the devices to be built into new cars, but either way it's very expensive.) More and better signs announcing the current limit (and upcoming changes) might help, though.


Having said all that, isn't there something in the law about "driving with the flow of traffic" being a valid defense in court? I'm not sure how it's supposed to work or whether it's even actually there, but as a matter of safety it's just not good for anyone to have random cars going 15mph slower than everyone else, regardless of the limit. I'm pretty sure that Kim has told me that her driver's ed teacher told them that. Now, that's probably only going to help you if you're in the slower 50% of the cars on the road (maybe even the slowest 20%? Who knows.), but it could help.

[integreillumine.livejournal.com]

Even on purely economic terms, the medical costs of treating the injured and the lost productivity of the dead are a major issue for the community.

I read a study once that showed people do drive more slowly after getting tickets for a while. People who aren't 'normally' unsafe or bad drivers are also more likely to speed without mindfulness when stressed and driving less 'safely', so it's meant as precautionary.

Having said all that, isn't there something in the law about "driving with the flow of traffic" being a valid defense in court?

I believe you can be pulled over/ticketed for unsafely *not* driving with the flow in traffic (even going too slow). But, as I know from sitting in CA traffic court (granted, in San Diego), it was also repeated multiple times (in cases before me) that for a person to be guilty of speeding, it only needs to be shown that the person is going something like ~1-2 miles over the speed limit. And that speeding up to change lanes, etc was not valid, either. It's possible you may get a slightly easier time/some portion of the amount you have to pay knocked off down to some defined in-court legal minimum, but the fact that you got a ticket means you already failed the on-site officer's situational 'discretion'.


I really dislike speedtraps, though, on principle; instead of marking the roads better departments may just take advantage of them during quota-filling periods. There are definitely areas on and off the bridges, and on some of the smaller highways, that could be better-marked.

It also stinks that cost of tickets is going up in a depression; I realize the cities are poor, too, but the cost of even minor infractions (that the average but fundamentally decent/law-abiding pop will have) going up doesn't really help the people in the community that may need (or deserve) the money most. People with more money are always more likely to have funds and resources to fight or reduce cost of a brush with the 'law'; some may merely be on salary, and can afford to take off work and argue or better present their case (or, gasp, get a real lawyer!). This disparity doesn't help the increasing numbers of 3/4-time employees (if they have kids, usually working two jobs) who are struggling to make ends meet.

And unless you can ticket everyone on the freeway, the only way to do it is a random sampling.

Hm, really not sure this is random. It's pretty clear by now that certain colors and types of cars that situationally 'pop' are more likely to be ticketed. M having a huge red 'Yes.' on the side of his car might not help, either.

The GPS warning system sounds lovely, but you know as well as I do that it's a non-starter: no government is going to spend that kind of cash. Especially California!

This is... clearly a bigger/more sweeping suggestion, at least. But governments have a long history of instituting expensive requirements and changes that supposedly help people. And even if it's not a great idea, or is a great idea but inconvenient to enforce, CA and the Bay area clearly has a precedent of spending large amounts of money badly. It would be awesome to have more transparency in the city and state budget. Or perhaps even something like a city audit committee.

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

Hmm... I suppose my post is touching on several issues. One is speed traps -- areas where the speed limits are not clearly posted or seem abnormally low as a way of tricking people into speeding. I'll ignore that part for now and focus on thoughts around lowering the average rate of speed for safety.

You're right that there are lots of other costs to accidents aside from the slowdowns.

I don't believe that the current method of enforcement actually works for slowing people down though. The enforcement is just too infrequent to substantially affect the average behavior. In the past I have driven slower after getting a speeding ticket, but only for a month or so. People are terrible at earthquake preparedness because earthquakes only come once every several years. If you wanted to substantially lower the average speed, then you'll have to have more frequent enforcement. One way of doing this would be to have more frequent, smaller fines dispensed via a network of speed cameras. Another way would be to modify the road in such a way to make people more aware of their speed. Speed bumps do a great job of slowing people down on small residential roads. I'm guessing a series of small bumps or grooves every couple of miles could do the same on a highway.