Speaking as someone who has actually done seatbelt enforcement, (I worked as a cop for a year after college before getting into software development,) catching people who aren't wearing their seatbelts is really, really hard. Each seatbelt ticket written probably takes ~30 minutes of time for the issuing officer.
There really aren't any good trick to it-- it's just a matter of finding a good vantage point and watching each driver go by. You're supposed to note the color of the belt (black) and the color of the driver's shirt before pulling the car over. As you'd imagine, fatigue comes quickly-- I never did more than an hour or two at a time. (I still have no idea how the highway patrollmen can it all day, every day without losing their minds.)
NHTSA provides substantial grant funding for traffic-safety enforcement, conditional on the department's enforcement statistics for a particular set of safety-oriented violations, especially seatbelts. The brass encouraged us to take a minimum number of enforcement actions to maximize the chances of having the grant expanded. (It paid a for substantial chunk of our salaries and offered regular 1 1/2 overtime.)
Aha that last point might explain the recent plea bargain I had: a ticket for crossing a double yellow line (points, substantial fine) and I was offered a small fine and no points if I took a seatbelt violation. So did everyone else in court. So I guess that helped the PD get some traffic safety funds?
It's possible, but in my experience the stats NHTSA looked at were compiled by the police department, not the court. (They cared about how many tickets we wrote, not how many convictions were obtained.)
A more likely explanation is the severe underfunding and understaffing of prosecutor's offices and state court systems. Most prosecuting attorneys are responsible for carrying hundreds of cases at a time-- they have no choice but to prioritize, aggressively.
Ok thanks, and interesting. Understood re tickets written.
(I don't think it alters your point at all because you're still talking about constrained resources and a need to prioritize, but in traffic court in my village the PD is the prosecutor; my negotiation was with a police officer and he in turn represented the results of that negotiation to the judge. Same with everyone else's tickets. Only more serious stuff involved the town prosecutor - he was handling code violations, underage drinking, and a DUI.)
I'm actually really curious about the officer handling the DUI on his own. Those cases are often simple, but are also often very complex and involve defense counsel and evidentiary disputes. Which state do you live in?
I live in NY but just to be clear this wasn't a DUI - I don't drink and drive! My ticket was for crossing a double yellow line, the offense in NY is called "Disobeying a Traffic Control Device".
The town prosecutor was handling the only DUI that day. (A town PD officer handled the lesser offenses, including mine.)
I'm surprised. At least here in Indiana, as best as I recall, drivers cannot be pulled over for seatbelt violations, only if some other offense occurs.
It varies based on state law. The federal DOT can't pass its own traffic laws or regulations for constitutional reasons, so they incentivise states to implement what they think is a good idea by offering them financial incentives. The best example of this is the 21-year-old drinking age. (They threatened to cut off all highway funding for states that didn't raise it from 18 to 21.)
Pretty much every traffic officer I know could find at least 5 reasons to pull over any car, no matter how scrupulous the driver.
The better way to make people wear their seatbelts would be to standardize a really annoying seatbelt alarm in every car. I have a Subaru Forrester, and if I unbuckle my belt for 10s in my driveway, it goes crazy.
Fun fact: At the police department, we actually had the seatbelt alarms for all of our cruisers disconnected. Being able to get quickly in and out without the seatbelts snagging on our gear was the priority at low speed. Most officers are trained to unbuckle and be ready to exit the vehicle before coming to a full stop (technically illegal.)
The truly cool application of technology to traffic enforcement is the speed camera lottery in Stockholm. I have very mixed feelings on automatic license plate readers: rules for what can and can't be done with the data they produce don't really exist, and that's a real problem.
I think it would be a very hard problem. Take a look at some pictures of cars in traffic-- the seatbelt is extremely hard to see. If it were doable, it would probably take more optics engineers than ML scientists; glare and lack of contrast look like the biggest problems.
