Speed Cameras: An Appreciative Critique

• In Event: The Social Life of Algorithms - II

Abstract

Many drivers have strong feelings about speed cameras. (The “gilets jaunes” destroyed about half the speed cameras in France as a gesture of protest, for example). How have speed cameras and red light cameras altered drivers’ behavior? And what do drivers’ reactions to these cameras tell us about the “moral economy of driving” – implicit norms that may deviate from explicit codes?
Lacking the discretionary judgment exercised by humans, algorithms enforce a remorseless standardization: they promise a Weberian utopia of absolute consistency. For those subjected to them, this consistency may seem inhuman. Discretion and the navigation of ambiguity are essential to human social interaction – and antithetical to human-machine interaction. Where one might talk a human traffic cop out of a speeding ticket by pleading emergency, by performances of deference or invocations of status, a traffic camera triggers a fine regardless of the driver’s social skills or the special circumstances that might have licensed speeding in the driver’s mind. But this does not so much terminate the driver’s agency as redirect it. Now drivers learn the margin of excess speed permitted by cameras and the locations of cameras (now signaled by Google maps). They may even resort to more devious stratagems such as caking license plates with mud or obscuring them with bike racks. This redirection of agency and rule-breaking does not necessarily increase safety, but it changes driving behavior while inciting a machine-mediated contest between planners and drivers.

Author

• Hugh Gusterson, George Washington University