Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/04/08/sad-news-red-light-camera-rev.html
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I’m sure that the civil forfeiture racket is suffering, too.
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Definitely something to keep an eye on. A lot of departments and roadside towns need that money and the lack of it will have consequences for the policed.
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Relatedly, I hear a couple of big insurance companies are refunding policy premiums because people are driving so much less (less accidents to shell out for?). I wonder if that’s just a publicity ploy, or if it will spread into standard practice.
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Our little coastal town literally makes the lions share of its money off of beach parking fees, but we’re happily blocking all parking spaces off to keep idiots from flocking here to frolick and overwhelm/infect what little infrastructure we’ve got left. Stay the fuck home.
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Here apparently speeding ticket rates are flat despite far fewer automobile trips - wide open roads encourage speeding.
I went for a walk yesterday and found myself waiting to cross the road next to one of those “your speed” digital displays - on a road where people usually follow the 50 km/hr speed limit, the slowest vehicle to pass me was doing 53. Also not one driver actually stopped to let me cross - I had to wait for a gap in traffic.
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Anecdotally, every time I’ve been out since this mess began I’ve seen drivers blatantly running red lights despite (or perhaps because of) the lack of traffic. For instance, there’s a busy intersection between me and the pharmacy; last week some asshole blew through it on my way to the pharmacy well after the light turned red and another asshole blew through it well after the light turned red on my way back.
It may also just be more noticeable because there’s less traffic–Toronto drivers are pretty bad about red lights under normal traffic.
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I’m sure the “school zone” lights which continue to flash weeks after schools have closed are just an oversight. 
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I strongly doubt that they are a top priority; but, if my experiences doing IT for a suddenly offsited and generally frantic workforce are at all representative, I would not have a hard time believing that either the person who is supposed to do it has a zillion more urgent fires to fight and/or can’t currently get access to the one equipment closet where you can hook up the special serial cable to the rack of 80’s cards that nobody has ever updated because they just won’t die and run the janky vendor utility to modify the traffic light programming.
I used to have to deal with a similar system that handled centralized building clocks, bells, alarms, and some other bits and pieces for a school. Huge cage full of desperately 80s boards, old or crude enough that “daylight savings time” was not a concept it understood; and could only be talked to on local serial(it also had an oddly wired cable; and didn’t work with most USB->serial devices, I think it actually expected full +/-15v RS-232 swing, we kept an antique laptop with real serial on hand just for it); and unless you wanted all period announcement bells skewed an hour someone would have to pop in early and reprogram it twice a year to compensate for DST. To its credit; I don’t think it ever crashed, misbehaved, or had to be power cycled the entire time I had that job; but it was not something I could have readily tweaked if sent offsite and given a bunch of other priorities.
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Here in New Zealand the road toll has dropped by more (16) than the number of people who have died from Covid-19 (1)
So far we’re ahead on the deal …
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LOL “priorities” = “free money”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.fox8live.com/2019/11/01/school-zone-traffic-tickets-improperly-issued-city-void/%3foutputType=amp
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Can I move to New Zealand please! Sco Mo moving in slow mo is the red flag to any red light!
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