Agree on all counts with this comment on Citysearch and bar codes.
Additional thought: astroturf is already endemic in Citysearch. Most people browsing on a phone while waiting outside a restaurant will likely not look at more than the first few posts, encouraging restaurants to plant favorable reviews. What's more, if reviews are negative, restaurants will just take down their sign. At most, this has exactly the same function as a magazine article in the window - I won't read it, if they have it up there it must be favorable, and I'll judge the restaurant based on the credibility of the source.
And Citysearch is exactly as credible as you'd expect an anonymous sponsorship-driven site to be.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Pandora's Box Problems
I'm a little mystified at the decision to turn off traffic cameras because of decreased revenues. I'm mystified because it seems like a kind of Pandora's Box situation, where municipalities "suffering" from decreased ticket violations can't cause behavior to be unlearned.
The article says that Dallas forecasted revenues of $15 million from its cameras. That estimate must have been based on an analysis of number of citations expected and revenue per citation in the places cameras were to be installed. The actual revenue forecast is $4 million, attributable to a decrease in the number of citations given out. Dallas' solution is to turn off the cameras.
In order for that to re-raise revenue, two things have to happen: first, people have to forget which intersections have cameras and start running red lights again. Second, Dallas has to put patrolmen in places where they'll catch those violators in the act.
I'm skeptical that the first will ever happen. At a bare minimum, the city would have to physically take down the cameras and any signs that advertise the presence of those cameras. But the deeper issue is one of ingrained habit. When I had a one-hour-plus one-way commute, every traffic violation I ever received was in one of two 3-mile stretches of road. Even today, years since I drove it on a daily basis, I scrupulously track the speed limit on those two stretches.
I'm also skeptical of the second part. I can't fathom that the cost to monitor traffic intersections with patrolmen is any less than the cost of operating the cameras. Since the article mentioned that Dallas was going to cease operating some cameras because the revenues for those camera were insufficient to even cover costs, it seems hard to justify re-placing police to monitor traffic there.
Bruce Schneier suggests raising the other side of equation, revenues per ticket, to cover the shortfall. The problem I see with that is that it will drive the disparity even further towards zero - the municipalities already have the goose that lays the golden eggs by the neck, and that would just be squeezing harder.
The nice part about moderate fines is that it has a fine granularity. Tickets are affordable enough that when they happen, they can be paid. Risk-prone individuals have tickets spread out over time so that their income can more readily absorb the cost, and risk-averse individuals that are occasionally caught in a lapse of judgment or attention won't be over-deterred.
The consequence of drastically increasing the fine is that after one violation, many people on both sides of the risk line would be forced to cease driving entirely. The revenue stream is not distributed across risk-prone and risk-averse, over a long period of time, the cost is more difficult to absorb. If the cost of a red-light violation in California were quadrupled, which appears to be the order of increase to cover it, you'd be looking at a $1,300 ticket for running a red light. This sudden, high-cost shock would force many individuals to stop driving entirely. Those individuals would be the ones that were paying fines in the first place, leaving only the good drivers.
This is the general problem I have with sin taxes, in which I also include loose driving. With all this rush to push tobacco taxes to schools, what happens when smoking education catches on and the addicts all die? By then schools and governments will be addicted to funding schools using these revenues, and will have to make up the shortfall from elsewhere in the fisc.
The article says that Dallas forecasted revenues of $15 million from its cameras. That estimate must have been based on an analysis of number of citations expected and revenue per citation in the places cameras were to be installed. The actual revenue forecast is $4 million, attributable to a decrease in the number of citations given out. Dallas' solution is to turn off the cameras.
In order for that to re-raise revenue, two things have to happen: first, people have to forget which intersections have cameras and start running red lights again. Second, Dallas has to put patrolmen in places where they'll catch those violators in the act.
I'm skeptical that the first will ever happen. At a bare minimum, the city would have to physically take down the cameras and any signs that advertise the presence of those cameras. But the deeper issue is one of ingrained habit. When I had a one-hour-plus one-way commute, every traffic violation I ever received was in one of two 3-mile stretches of road. Even today, years since I drove it on a daily basis, I scrupulously track the speed limit on those two stretches.
I'm also skeptical of the second part. I can't fathom that the cost to monitor traffic intersections with patrolmen is any less than the cost of operating the cameras. Since the article mentioned that Dallas was going to cease operating some cameras because the revenues for those camera were insufficient to even cover costs, it seems hard to justify re-placing police to monitor traffic there.
Bruce Schneier suggests raising the other side of equation, revenues per ticket, to cover the shortfall. The problem I see with that is that it will drive the disparity even further towards zero - the municipalities already have the goose that lays the golden eggs by the neck, and that would just be squeezing harder.
The nice part about moderate fines is that it has a fine granularity. Tickets are affordable enough that when they happen, they can be paid. Risk-prone individuals have tickets spread out over time so that their income can more readily absorb the cost, and risk-averse individuals that are occasionally caught in a lapse of judgment or attention won't be over-deterred.
The consequence of drastically increasing the fine is that after one violation, many people on both sides of the risk line would be forced to cease driving entirely. The revenue stream is not distributed across risk-prone and risk-averse, over a long period of time, the cost is more difficult to absorb. If the cost of a red-light violation in California were quadrupled, which appears to be the order of increase to cover it, you'd be looking at a $1,300 ticket for running a red light. This sudden, high-cost shock would force many individuals to stop driving entirely. Those individuals would be the ones that were paying fines in the first place, leaving only the good drivers.
This is the general problem I have with sin taxes, in which I also include loose driving. With all this rush to push tobacco taxes to schools, what happens when smoking education catches on and the addicts all die? By then schools and governments will be addicted to funding schools using these revenues, and will have to make up the shortfall from elsewhere in the fisc.
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