Decius wrote:
] ] This is concrete evidence of the direct financial
] ] incentive that so-called "safety advocates" have to
] ] promote red light and speed camera technologies. The
] ] Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), the
] ] leading U.S. proponent of the technology, is directly
] ] funded by the top 66 insurance companies.

Well, speeding is against the law, after all ...

Seriously, the right answer here is to make it safer to drive fast -- I'm thinking various driver assist technologies. High-end Mercedes have had (for a few years now) a doppler radar coupled to the cruise control -- you practically tell the thing "stay 200 feet from the car in front of me" ...

bucy wrote:
] Well, speeding is against the law, after all ...

It is not appropriate to think of laws as a binary.

This is one of those cases where there is a difference between what is legal and what is wrong, and the method of enforcement even follows that model. People don't get tickets for speeding, they get tickets for not paying attention. In advocating these systems, the insurance companies hope to raise premiums on people who are no more at risk then they were before. We go from a situation where certain kinds of activity are illegal but not aggressively prohibited, to a situation where the activity is aggressively prohibited, and this is a significant change.

For example, there is a big difference between the level of pot use in Singapore, where it is punishable by death, vs the US, where minor possession is punishable by fines, vs Canada, where minor possession is technically illegal but the laws are not actually enforced.