Spain has had them for a while, but they have disadvantages.
The main reason we want to wait for red lights isn't that it'll illegal: It's because it's indicating that not stopping is quite dangerous. Keep going, and you can get sideswiped, or you'll go over a pedestrian. Ignoring red lights in those situations, which are 90% of situations, is going to make you find out pretty soon.
But then there's red lights that aren't really telling you there's a clear and present danger. Red lights in one way streets, to one way streets, with great visibility. Crossings in streets designed for rush hour traffic that don't have very different timings for the middle of the night. Or maybe the time where a theater finishes their night production, and the traffic patterns have nothing to do with the lights. In those cases, people are often rewarded by ignoring the red light, because yes, it's not indicating risks accurately. And the more you train people that yes, there are red lights that are safe to ignore, the more they'll consider ignoring others that are unsafe.
So those red lights that just change when you are speeding, but don't indicate that a different direction is passing through are doing nothing but telling the speeding driver that if they are caught, they'll get a much bigger fine, because other than for the fine, speeding past that light is not really any more dangerous than the speeding they were doing already. So it works for some people, but it also makes others more dangerous drivers.
I love this idea. Traffic cameras are so sketchy in the US. It’s always contracted out on extremely favorable terms for the contractor. It’s often a very kick back bribery feeling.
That's horribly wrong to do because it's collective punishment. If I'm going the speed limit but the car in front of me is speeding, the red light will punish me too.
I learned to do this 5 years ago as part of a wilderness survival program. I was highly skeptical at first, but it was much easier in reality.
I believe the practice is banned in most states because it is so effective at catching fish.
How bizarre that such a primitive technique could be banned. You’d think elaborate fishing lures and rods would also be illegal if using your hands is wrong.
Assets are things that give you money. Liabilities are things that cost you money. Therefore your house is a liability until it is sold, at which point it MIGHT be a net asset. Try to maximize your assets and minimize your liabilities.
It sounds simple, and it is, but that's the primary lesson in the book IMO. It's eye-opening the first time you see things that way.
Thanks for the link to that. I'd seen parts of it, but hadn't known they'd come from a larger documentary.
All the talk about breeding is a bit hard for me to listen to. I know it's different in the US, but here in the UK rescues are full of ferrets that have been found wandering or have been given over.
Or sometimes your vet knows you have ferrets and calls you up asking if you want to adopt one that was found wandering and hasn't been claimed (our youngest came to us that way)
After pondering self-described conservatives and liberals for decades now, I've recently concluded that they're more or less the same. Both groups seem to highly value their families and seek to promote their interests and protect them from threats.
The only thing that seems to differ is the definition of 'family'. At one end, the definition is more strict and exclusive (with a family of one being the most extreme), and on the other end, the definition is less strict and inclusive (with a family of everyone being the most extreme).
I'm just going to quickly jump in here. I'm David, one of the co-founders of Fixed.
Every single contest is custom written, and has an extremely thorough review which includes:
1) automated check (check for missing/incorrect information)
2) low level review (primarily done by a team in India that uses Google Street view to measure the distance to closest signs)
3) high level review (performed by an Advocate in SF who double check the previous steps, and also reviews all notes and input from the user).
The advocate in SF then finalizes the contest letter and submits.
In general, about 2/3 of the tickets issued by the SFMTA and other parking ticket authorities have some issue with them.
I'd also like to point out, that it is not in our interest to submit frivolous contests. Each submitted contest requires time and resources on our end to submit the contest AND monitor the contest and process the return letter.
Finally... if your wife had two similar contest submitted, I might suggest that the SFMTA has become fat and lazy from lack of oversight, and continues to make the same trivial mistakes in each ticket.
> I might suggest that the SFMTA has become fat and lazy from lack of oversight, and continues to make the same trivial mistakes in each ticket.
I'm having a hard time understanding how this isn't confirmation of exactly what I experienced and described. I'm sure there are lots of minor trivialities that might get filled out slightly wrong a decent percentage of the time, none of which have anything to do with the validity of the ticket. So if you know all the tiny trivial loopholes you have a decent chance of finding something done "wrong" for otherwise perfectly appropriate tickets.
So yeah, you're able to point out the tiniest unimportant mistakes on a parking citation and then take advantage of that flaw in the system to get people out of valid tickets. It's impressive I suppose, but not something I'd personally brag about.
That's not how laws work. You can't have one set of rules for one stakeholder, and another set of rules for another. Particularly when one of those stakeholders gets to acts as enforcement, judiciary AND beneficiary.
1 inch over the curb... we're going to tow your car with $700 worth of fines.
No visible sign on the street and nothing within 100 ft (which there has to be by law)... it doesn't matter, you should have known we intended that street to have no parking between 4-6pm.
If you tried to come up with a system with more adverse and broken incentives, you'd be hard pushed to come up with a better one than the SFMTA.
1) Let's saddle this organization with $10Ms of losses each year.
2) Let's give them the authority to issue tickets and fine the citizens for breaking an arbitrary set of laws.
3) Let's allow them keep the fines and treat it as 'revenue'.
4) Let's allows them to regulate themselves and decided if the tickets they issued are fair.
The "validity of the ticket" is determined by rules set forth by the city and the MTA. It also establishes the grounds for invalidity of a ticket. That's not taking advantage of the system, that's applying the system. The right way for the MTA to put Fixed out of business is to issue valid tickets that are held to a higher degree of scrutiny, otherwise the system just rots over time, as we see here.
Why not proxy all the communications with the parking authority through the Fixed app, instead of sending them directly from your servers? It seems like this (or something similar) would make it much harder to "block" Fixed. And the parking authorities have no teason not to block you, especially when it's so easy as blocking a list of known ip addresses. (Barring an injunction in your favor or something)
If you’re going too fast, an arbitrary red light will be triggered on your route. It’s quicker not to speed, than to wait out the red light.