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#104. The Substandard on Traffic Cameras
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Dudes Chatting — Speed camera vigilantism: A micro-episode celebrating a man in Washington, D.C., who destroyed an automated speed camera with his bare hands. Sonny nominates him as his new personal hero. JVL explains the crony capitalism underlying these systems — municipalities shorten amber light timing below federal safety standards to maximize citations, and the camera contracts are awarded to politically connected vendors — making the case that the cameras are revenue extraction devices dressed as safety measures. He also details how narrow lane widths psychologically force drivers to slow down and argues that is the legitimate approach. All three hosts land firmly on the side of the camera-destroyer, with varying levels of enthusiasm.
Full transcript
Guest00:00:00I want you to get up right now, and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell, I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take this anymore!
Vic00:00:17Hello, and welcome to another micro-episode of The Substandard, sponsored by the Black Tux. I'm Victor Matus, along with Jonathan V. Last and Sonny Bunch. Just a quick reminder that full episodes of The Substandard are available every Thursday at 11 a.m. Gentlemen, it seems we have a vigilante loose in the city, and Death Wish doesn't come out for another several months. What's going on here, Sonny Bunch? Well, Death Wish comes out in like two weeks, but... Okay.
Sonny00:00:44Not this weekend, but next weekend.
Vic00:00:45Oh my goodness, I guess that's what we're gonna be talking about. Go ahead. We're definitely gonna be talking about Death Wish.
Sonny00:00:49Well, you put something up at the Free Beacon. At freebeacon.com. Slash editors dash blog.
Vic00:00:57And what is this? No, wait, yeah.
Sonny00:01:01So, yeah, no, this is my new hero. I wrote a blog post about my new hero, who's the guy who stopped on a highway and got out of his car and destroyed a DC speed camera. He didn't just destroy it, he like knocked over the box that the camera was sitting on, and then he grabbed the camera, he kicked the camera off, and then he grabbed the camera, he threw it into traffic. He just got rid of it.
Vic00:01:24That's fantastic. It was fantastic. Did he have a weapon, like a sledgehammer or anything like that? No, he used his bare hands and feet. Wow, that was just, yeah, because it was rage. Righteous fists of fury. Because I'm sure, he was probably fined, like everybody else in the city, 36 going, 36 and a 25, here's 100 bucks.
Sonny00:01:42Yeah, 36, he was doing a 45 and a 40. Yeah, yeah. It was like, oh, here's a big ticket.
Vic00:01:47And because they rack up millions and millions and millions, how much?
Sonny00:01:51Almost 100 million dollars. Almost 100 million dollars in 2017. And that's like- That's like free money.
Vic00:01:55And a percentage goes to the company. Yeah, that's a huge percentage. Because it's not the police department that's monitoring, oh, I just hope no one's speeding because a pedestrian might get hit. Yeah, that's not happening. Most of these companies are based in Australia.
Sonny00:02:07Really? Yeah. So the money is going to Australia, it's not even going to an American company. Most of these companies are going to foreign companies.
Vic00:02:11It's free money, I mean, it's to no cost, to no cost to the police department.
Sonny00:02:15So this isn't just an anti-freedom thing, it's an anti-American thing, the speed cameras.
JVL00:02:20Well, there are some costs to the police department, depending on, I mean, do we care? Do we care about the technical, actual aspects? Let's just say, I don't want to know about it. There is no cost to the police department, no. Yeah, yeah. At the end of the day, it's all... There can be small costs in staffing and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But do you know how dishonest these things really are? Yeah, go, tell me. Because, so this is, I can't speak to the specific case of DC, but I've written about this a lot, and I've been obsessed with red light cameras and speed light cameras for a decade. Good. And there are... You may be surprised to know, all sorts of civil engineering rules regarding traffic behavior, things which impact how people drive without them knowing it. So, for instance, one of the things is lane width. Do you know this? The width of the lane is what dictates how naturally, how fast the drivers on the road will go. And so, in our... And so, if it is a 35-mile-an-hour road, the lanes will be one width. If it is a 65-mile-an-hour road, the lanes will be another width. And you don't realize this. Your eye doesn't perceive that, oh, this lane is a foot-and-a-half narrower than a... But you drive differently. And, for instance, in D.C., the George Washington Parkway, which is a noted speed trap, the reason people are always speeding there is because the lane widths are at 55-mile-an-hour standards, and the speed limit is 45 miles an hour. Wow. Another thing is Amber Times. There is an enormous amount of... There's a lot of literature on how long yellow lights, what we call amber lights in the business, should be. And it depends... No relation to amber alerts.
Sonny00:04:01Yeah, I thought we were going to get into a weird kidnapped kid.
JVL00:04:04No, no, so it depends on... So at what angle is the roadway entering the light? Is it an uphill or a downhill? What is the speed coming into the light? And all of those things influence the standard for how long it's supposed to go yellow, because maybe you notice, maybe you don't. Most people who run red lights... Don't run them because they're trying to run it. It's because they get caught in what, again, in highway engineering is called the decision zone, which is, there is... It's the worst. The amount of runway you have before you hit the intersection when the light goes, where you have to decide, do I stay or go?
Sonny00:04:41So you're like 20 feet out, and you're doing 30 miles an hour, and you've got to be like, do I slam on the brakes or just keep going?
JVL00:04:47Right, and so, again, there's been a lot of... There's like decades of research going. What is the optimum period for the decision zone? How long does the amber need to be? And what we have seen over and over and over in America is when a red light camera goes in, the municipality goes in and takes the amber time and shortens it.
Vic00:05:06Wow. By like, shaves off a couple seconds. Yeah, like just shaves off a second and a half. In order to set up the track perfectly. So that it's suboptimal. So that it's literally suboptimal.
JVL00:05:16Absolutely more dangerous. It's more dangerous. They are happy to create danger to create more accidents. And there's tons of empirical studies on this right now, which actually show that these cameras cause more accidents because people in the decision zone, knowing that there's a red light, make a decision that is not natural. It's not a rational decision. So they don't make the normal rational decision that they would make otherwise. They make a different decision, so they slam on their brakes and cause rear-ending. So all of these things are purely revenue. When I yell at you about capitalism and about the government, this is the worst of both worlds. This is a capitalist intersection. This is the...
Sonny00:05:54Oh, this is a publicly traded company. This is the... This is crony capitalism. It's the intersection, so to speak. Yeah, it's capitalism and government coming together. I've got news for you.
JVL00:06:02All capitalism is crony capitalism.
Sonny00:06:05Don't make me get Lord Bezos upon you. All capitalism is crony capitalism. I will inflict his wrath. There are no free markets. Here's what I would like to posit. If you were on the jury for this brave, heroic individual who destroyed the... the camera light in question, JBL, would you invoke jury nullification?
JVL00:06:30100%. I believe in jury nullification as an absolute moral principle, and not only would I do it, there is not a jury in America that would convict this guy.
Vic00:06:40Yeah, I'd like to see, like, a jury where everyone on the jury is convinced, oh, yes, he did wrong. If you can't even find one, I mean, come on. There's no way, because everybody's been in that. I got a ticket on Reservoir Road.
Sonny00:06:54Reservoir Road? Oh, that's a nasty camera. I hate that camera.
Vic00:06:57It is 36 and a 25, leaving the French Embassy after memorial reception for Michel Richard. So double sad. Double sad. I mean, the worst part
Sonny00:07:05is that it got him for the 36 and the 25 and not the .14 BAC. You know, these cameras have real limits.
Vic00:07:16It's a short distance from there to... It's funny, when I... Where was I going? You were using autopilot.
Sonny00:07:20When I worked at the Washington Times, the first, like, week that I was driving down 50, like, you would... Oh, they had cameras there. Oh, yeah, they got cameras there, but they have them... They have them there, and I didn't realize it for the first week. So in the first week, like, three tickets show up, like, two weeks later or whatever, you know? Totally.
JVL00:07:42And I'm just like,
Sonny00:07:42what is this? What am I... What is going on? And I was able to... I think I got out of either two or all three of them, and this is another secret with the speed cameras. Oh, yeah. Like, you can... I think you can get... I think people who go and contest them in person get out of, like, 80% of them. Yes. Basically. How? I haven't...
JVL00:08:05It depends on the law. It depends on municipality and municipality and what the rules are set up for. And it depends on, like,
Sonny00:08:10how good the photos are. Right. There's all sorts of stuff, but, like, there are so many things that are wrong with these cameras that you can get out of just about all of them if you're, like, willing to put in the effort. Yeah. But nobody is willing to put in the effort. No, no.
Vic00:08:23The big thing wrong with them, though,
JVL00:08:25if I could be serious for half a second, is that if you want to destroy a citizenry's respect for the law, all you have to do is tie the law to revenue generation. The law is supposed to be separate from revenue generation. If the state wants revenue... Raise the taxes. Raise the taxes. That's how you do it. If you start setting up criminal laws for the sole purpose of raising revenue, you are teaching people that the law doesn't matter and that it is cool to just disregard it, and that way leads to anarchy. Anarchy. Total anarchy.
Vic00:08:59Anarchy! Except for how are you supposed to generate, I don't know, what, $87 million without it being linked to the law?
JVL00:09:05Well, and the other reason they do that in D.C. is because, and this was explicitly made in the pitch when they brought speed cameras and red light cameras to D.C., they said, hey, the vast majority of the commuters in D.C.
Vic00:09:17aren't D.C. voters, so you can put these things in
JVL00:09:21and all the people getting nailed for them are going to be from Maryland and Virginia. You, as the politicians voting on this, have no worries because there will be no recourse to you at the ballot box. No, no.
Vic00:09:31It's about keeping the streets safe, such as the K Street underpass, because there's so many pedestrians that go through the tunnel, like, they actually go through, like, vision.
Sonny00:09:40They go through the wall. They put the camera, this is a pet peeve of everyone who lives in D.C., they put the camera at the bottom of a hill in a 25-mile-an-hour zone that's a four-way highway where there are no stoplights for, like, I don't know, probably 1,500 feet in either direction. For what reason? And they do this because it is the single most lucrative spot to put a camera in the entire city. I mean, I think that camera has, like, the record on... It racks a bit. It just, it is... Speeding cameras are the worst, and we should form mobs to go out and tear them down and destroy them. And anyone who comes against us, we should destroy them, too. Just pyres. Pyres burn. We should end up having bodies and speeding cameras and just end it. End it all.
JVL00:10:29I'm sure it'll be fine.
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