Show HN: Automated license plate reader coverage in the USA
151 comments
·December 10, 2025yannyu
I've thought about this a lot as I see more and more reckless driving in the areas I live in. Surveillance is generally a net negative, but it's also bad when you see people speeding around schools, rolling through stop signs, and running red lights. We seem to have a worst of all situations where traffic is getting increasingly difficult to enforce, driving is getting more dangerous year by year, and we're terrified of government overreach if we add any automation at all to enforcement.
I don't know the solution, but I do know that in the US we've lost 10-15 years of progress when it comes to traffic fatalities.
autoexec
> Surveillance is generally a net negative, but it's also bad when you see people speeding around schools, rolling through stop signs, and running red lights.
The fact that these cameras are already pervasive and the problem of bad drivers hasn't been solved anywhere doesn't give me a lot of hope that these cameras are the solution to that particular problem.
It seems like police can do a lot to increase enforcement without the need of these devices. We have evidence that they've been doing less traffic enforcement so maybe start there. Increasing our standards for driving tests (some of which were eliminated entirely over the first few years of the pandemic) would probably help. Automatically shutting off/disabling or limiting the use of cell phones (all of which come with sensors that can detect when you are going at speeds you'd expect while in cars) might help. Bringing physical buttons and dials back to cars instead of burying common functions in touchscreen menus might help.
There's a whole lot of places to look for solutions to safer roads before we have to resort to tracking everyone's movements at all times.
ChrisMarshallNY
In the US, a traffic ticket is an indictment of a crime (says it on the ticket. I wish I didn't know that fact).
That means that you have a right to trial/appeal, and the accuser (the cop) needs to show up, if you request a trial.
Traffic cameras can't accuse you of a crime, so they are considered civil infractions (no points, but also means they are a bitch to appeal). They can issue realtime civil citations, though.
ALPRS can't do either. They are forensic tools; not enforcement tools.
I believe in the UK, a camera can convict you of a crime, so they can issue severe tickets. They wouldn't really be able to do that, in the US.
In my county (Suffolk, NY), they just stopped all the redlight cameras. I doubt they would do so for ALPRs.
Also, I think some ALPRs are private. There's a shopping center, not too far from here, that's in a relatively high-crime neighborhood. They have cameras and ALPRs, all over the parking lots.
nerdsniper
> Automatically shutting off/disabling or limiting the use of cell phones (all of which come with sensors that can detect when you are going at speeds you'd expect while in cars) might help.
I can’t think of a way to implement this that wouldn’t ban passengers from using their phone while riding in a vehicle. Which could be even a bus or limousine.
LeifCarrotson
I don't disagree, but I can totally imagine a society where this inability is perfectly acceptable because it severely reduces the #1 killer of people from 5-55yo. I don't think we live in that society, if Apple and Google flipped a switch tomorrow to do that people would freak out, but I could imagine a rational, fictional society that had different shared values.
autoexec
Not entirely. The phones can defect if there are other phones nearby, so a single phone in a car on a highway going 75mph could be assumed to be a driver, but that is still just an assumption.
mikem170
A lot of people would be fine with that. Drivers are impaired while on the phone, even hands-free. Not to mention texting while driving!
I kind of picture the cellular telcos doing this. Maybe buses and trains come with wifi hotspots allowed to connect. Otherwise auto passengers could use their devices offline, maybe read an ebook or something. Not the end of the world.
potato3732842
The standards for evidince, processes for enforcement and court side of things are not set up for cheap enforcement of "that clearly ain't right" behavior. They're set up for revenue enforcement of easy to prove but not necessarily bad in abstract offenses.
Police can't substantially increase enforcement overall because that would just cause bad political optics, say nothing of stops that needlessly escalate to being newsworthy in a bad way. They'd necessarily issue a hundred petty bullshit tickets for every deserved ticket for legitimately bad behavior. It just wouldn't work. It would be like trying to plow a field with the ripper on the back of a bulldozer. It kinda looks similar but it's wrong for the job.
And all of this is based on the assumption that we're trying to enforce things that the broad public agrees need strict enforcement, not whatever the original comment wants.
ericmcer
They have done automated enforcement a few times and it always sucks because the systems don't use discretion.
Someone going 40 in a 30 and swerving around other cars gets treated the same as someone going 40 when the road is empty. Someone slowing to 1-2mph before safely rolling through a stop sign get the same ding as someone blowing through it at 30mph.
If AIs can somehow learn how to take all this footage and enforce the spirit of the law (citing dangerous driving) instead of the letter I will fully support it.
jollyllama
This! Things keep getting worse and worse, and we keep getting more surveillance. It's clearly not the answer!
fragmede
The answer is to take the human out of the equation, and have the computer drive. Comma.ai works well enough. Tesla is mostly there. Waymo works.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF
Which is also bad for privacy
Breza
Here in Washington DC we've set up many different types of traffic cameras. One side effect is a reduction in the number of negative interactions the average person has with the police. There are communities where the cops treat people like piggy banks and spend tons of time aggressively enforcing minor traffic violations. That has negative effects on trust, not to mention the number of fatal interactions that have stemmed from traffic stops. Other jobs that can be done by the police in other places are handled by Parking Enforcement, the Department of Buildings, etc.
The recent presence of federal agents and soldiers has reversed some of the hard-fought gains in trust, but my broader point still stands: more automated enforcement of traffic laws has positive effects in how people interact with the police. This effect needs to be balanced against the harms of increased surveillance.
[1][https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/transportation/poli...]
chaps
> but it's also bad when you see people speeding around schools, rolling through stop signs, and running red lights.
genewitch
so what do they seek to curb? freedom of movement?
thatcat
It's an opportunistic solution to a budget problem.
Local governments have extra money from property price bubble increasing tax revenues.
At the same time there are great open source image analysis models for companies to put on a pole using cheap android hw and a solar panel and make bold claims about solving all crime, then they can sell that data again to 3rd parties like insurance. Also can start buying access to more video feeds from ring cameras etc and resell that. They'll hire someone to make a ux to integrate it into PDs later, for a premium of course.
aners
We have very few alternatives to driving in the US so we have very lax driver training and testing.
Across the US we have roads and infrastructure that encourage speed right next to decaying pedestrian infrastructure. It's very difficult to get state DOTs to roll back or do traffic calming. They often prohibit the use of bollards or barriers near these roadways.
In a lot, not all, physical changes to the environment could drastically reduce traffic fatalities without surveillance.
fusslo
100% agree
my local middle school has their school zone on:
1. four lane highway
2. dedicated turning lanes
3. major thru-way between shops, apartments, and the rest of the city
4. great visibility
this is a recipe for 50mph. the speed limit is 25mph. If you do the speed limit, you WILL be tailgated. If you do ~35, you're risking a ticket. There will still be people doing 45-50 and weave through the lanes.
also in my town, the main thru-way is a route dating back to the 30s. There are red lights at major intersections and they WILL turn red even if no one is there. They're designed to slow people down. HOWEVER if you speed and run a yellow light, you'll hit ALL the lights green! It shaves significant time off your trip, is easier on your car, is more enjoyable, and requires less attention. It's a system designed to make people speed and run reds.
Where I used to live, I could get from one side of the city to the other in a maximum of 30 minutes. the lights were designed to keep traffic flowing at 30-35mph. It ENCOURAGED you to go no faster, or you'll have to slow down and come to a stop. This also kept traffic flowing so you felt like you HAD to focus on driving. They also did things to encourage bicycles and make things safer for pedestrians.
shiroiuma
Yep, the US has built itself a car-centric society over the last century, and there's essentially no way to change that now without burning everything down and starting over from scratch. They can't make driver training too strict because too many people would fail, and then have no way to get to work, and then who knows what those people would do. They can't turn cities pedestrian-friendly without tearing down everything there now and just the legal hurdles there are immense. I just don't see a way for this to change meaningfully in a lifetime, outside of a few little pockets here and there (like some towns or cities creating extremely limited pedestrian-only zones, which would then need a lot of parking to be useful for people, basically like an outdoor shopping mall).
hamdingers
I agree. It's frustrating that we have ended up in a reality where vehicle movement is heavily tracked, but we're not using that technology to do the most obvious and productive thing.
My city spent a few million dollars installing Flock cameras to all its municipal parking garages in a matter of months, but has been hemming and hawing over adding a few speed cameras for years, despite petitioning the state for an allowance do so back in 2023.
Traffic enforcement cameras don't even have to become the networked surveillance system that Flock offers. Most are still cameras triggered by radar rather than perpetually recording all drivers.
MisterTea
I live in NYC. People used to be afraid of double parking. Like you I regularly see the same bat-shit driving and no one seems to care to say or do anything. It's bonkers.
cons0le
NYC should have been the model to follow. Instead of flock cameras, cities should have bounty systems: record a video of a speed violation with a plate, and get 10% of the ticket revenue. Enforcement would explode.
We could of had a system where we used the technology we already had in our hands to democratize speed enforcement, instead of corporatizing it
barnas2
NYC already tried Snitching as a Service during COVID, and it went terribly. I grew up with a neighbor who would constantly record people and call the cops over every little perceived infraction. Everyone in the neighborhood hated her, including the cops. I do not want to live in a society that encourages those people.
potato3732842
Pitting people against each other in the service of the state is likely to cause problems at scale and in the long run.
Frankly, I think it's a miracle that nobody has been beaten into a coma or killed over NYC's bounty program yet.
Fnoord
Interesting. 'But your honor, it is AI enhanced. I wasn't speeding.'
'Weird, I got this footage here from another angle and it shows you did. We also got the data from your car. You were speeding son.'
jldugger
On my way home, I noticed at a stoplight across the street from Apple Park that the driver in the lane next to me had his phone mounted up high in landscape mode and was watching the Simpsons. Just absolutely unhinged behavior lately.
runtimepanic
One thing this surfaces nicely is how scale changes the privacy model. Individually these look like “mere observation,” but once you can reconstruct routine movement patterns across counties, the data starts behaving more like long-term tracking than casual surveillance.
wwweston
Retention is one good line between enforcement and tracking.
If we wanted to solve this problem while retaining the benefits, what we'd do is have stiff penalties for warrantless retention and required yearly independent audits of systems.
s1mon
I understand why these statistics may be interesting, but all I really want to see is a map of the locations of the ALPR cameras. I would add an easy link to that data on this site.
sodality2
DeFlock is the first link in the "Related ALPR & Flock Projects" section, it contains a map.
Barathkanna
This is great work. Once ALPR coverage is dense enough that you can’t go anywhere without generating a permanent record, the “mere observation” argument falls apart. Mapping this openly is one of the few ways communities can actually understand what they’ve signed up for.
jollyllama
I don't see how this provides actionable info for the individual. Unfortunately, this is just going to be a dashboard for pro-surveillance elements to see "how are we doing in our neck of the woods?", or a sales tool for Flock to find untapped markets.
sodality2
My goal is to provide actionable statistics for any 'deflock' movements in a certain county, by being able to point to specific statistics on surveillance. If even one motivated person uses my data to petition, I'll be happy; it doesn't have to be for the average person. There's tons of these movements, too. Deflock Olympia just succeeded: https://www.yelmonline.com/stories/commentary-olympia-joins-...
Also, another answer to this is that there is no overarching goal; I just wanted to build a large scale data analysis pipeline for fun :) I am no stranger to side projects to distract me from finals unfortunately.
jollyllama
Fair enough. I am sorry if my original post was too harsh or overly critical; my original thinking was simply that those would organize against surveillance are probably already aware of it, but perhaps this would be useful in the cases you mention, if the metrics could be used as "ammo", as you suggest.
sodality2
Not too harsh at all! I just wanted to fill the gap between "man, those cameras seem to be everywhere" and "XX% of people are surveilled on the average commute". It's true that this is not a particularly ambitious project, just a small niche I wanted to fill.
RankingMember
I think we have a surplus of "awareness" tools/websites that are great at what they do, but not much "rubber meets the road" tools to guide the user in actually taking action based on the information presented. I, for one, feel a huge sense of fatigue at the amount of awareness I have of problems I don't have the tools/strategies/knowledge/time to solve.
(This is not a negative comment about this post btw, more just commentary on how the fire hose of "look at how bad this is in excruciating detail" can be overwhelming.)
joecool1029
The county lists are wrong, at least they are for my state of New Jersey. We have 21 counties, not 27. Is it picking up the bordering counties that might have overlapping contracts or something?
sodality2
It pulls counties from OSM administrative boundaries of level 6, which according to the OSM wiki, is "State counties and county equivalents, Territorial municipalities" (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag%3aboundary=administr...). It does lead to some weird oddities, like counties with under 10 homes... I'd rather not manually correct it, since I want to rely on pure OSM data. (Unless you mean there is an actual bug in the processing and there's counties listed that aren't in the right states...)
I'll add a link to the OSM relation for the county to each county page, so you can see the source data on OSM to verify/edit.
eesmith
There are also not 53 states.
pavel_lishin
One of those counties is Rockland, which is in NY. I wonder if it's counting bordering counties for states, since the assumption may be that the closest essential services for some Rockland residents may be in New Jersey.
sodality2
Ah! This looks like a bug with cross-border calculations. Ideally it would not show a Rockland County, NJ - it might cross state borders to perform calculations but they should all have a 'home state' that matches to the right county. Thanks for the example case, I'll work on a fix
joecool1029
I know at least in Rockland's case, their power utility extends slightly into NJ. Can see it on statewide power outage trackers like this one: https://projects.nj.com/data/outagetracker/
cjensen
California includes a number of counties which are actually in Baja California and Baja California del Sur.
hamdingers
100% coverage seems like an inevitability in a country where filming in public is a constitutionally protected right and networked ALPR capability is possible (if not regularly offered yet) in commodity doorbell cameras.
autoexec
> 100% coverage seems like an inevitability in a country where filming in public is a constitutionally protected right a
It really doesn't have to be though. The rights of individuals to record in public doesn't have to translate to the right of corporations (flock, amazon, etc.) to do it without restriction. Time, place, and manner restrictions on our rights already exist, it just needs to be found that this manner is unacceptable as an imposition on our freedom which should be protected under the fourth amendment.
hamdingers
If a home or business owner sets up Ring cameras, is it fair to say Amazon is recording in public? That feels like blaming Canon for the behavior of a paparazzi, but perhaps there are reasons those aren't equivalent I'm not aware of.
autoexec
> hat feels like blaming Canon for the behavior of a paparazzi, but perhaps there are reasons those aren't equivalent I'm not aware of.
The difference between ring cameras and paparazzi using a canon camera is that the photos recorded to film/local storage can't be automatically compiled with the footage captured from everyone else's canon camera to create databases of people and track their movements, activities, attributes, etc.
It really depends on where the data goes and who can access it. I'd even go so far as to say that keeping that data on the cloud is fine as long as the data is encrypted, amazon doesn't access it beyond storage and deliver to the customer (meaning that they can no longer mine it for personal data) and amazon cannot give access to anyone else (including police who should have to request footage directly from the camera owners).
stronglikedan
> filming in public is a constitutionally protected right
As with everything, there's much nuance to this "right".
https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Common_Questions,_Arguments,_%...
hamdingers
Only the government is bound by the fourth amendment, as long as the people setting up the cameras and running the network are private citizens it's fair game (correct me if I'm wrong).
Imagining a universe where companies are also bound by that is an interesting thought exercise. Many products (cloud photo backup, foursquare style "check-ins," location sharing with friends, etc) would be simply impossible because the aggregated data amounts to comprehensive surveillance.
fortran77
I'm a private citizen. On my house we have an ALPR Axis camera pointing down the street (in addition to Axis cameras around the whole perimiter.) And when the police ask, we almost always provide them with data. I feel perfectly justified doing this, and we've helped solved several crimes.
ruthie_cohen
Most people would do the same in your situation, we should expect citizens to want to help victims of crime, especially crimes against the person.
However I think there’s a significant difference between a single household and a centralised network of cameras across dozens of states.
For me the core issue of this is private enterprise holding gigantic amounts of PII, and the forms that is taking.
crims0n
Sounds like a rough neighborhood, stay safe.
Computer0
Hi enemy! :)
tptacek
It is an inevitability, because a critical mass of municipalities are going to roll these out such that there isn't a practical route to take through any major metro without being recorded.
ruthie_cohen
If I was American I would certainly be using this tool as a consideration when moving / buying a new house.
I’ve watched a lot of the coverage by Benn Jordan on Flock cameras and their inherent vulnerabilities, and it’s deeply concerning.
The applications of these technologies far outpaces appropriate checks and balances, and the increasing fusion between law enforcement, intelligence and private industry is largely ignored by the larger population.
Thanks for developing this, it’s important to visualise the virus-like spread of these technologies and see where it is concentrated.
tptacek
From just a few days ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46170302
(Repeating: in a few months sites like this will be replaceable with a static HTML page that says "yes, you've been tagged by an ALPR".)
genewitch
How come any area that has enough homes in the data set and ALPR have Veterinarians as the most surveilled, then Hospitals, then Libraries, usually over everything else, including food and church?
The strange implication is that they're watching the vet office traffic to find people who are getting treated by vets instead of doctors?
also my parish reports 0.0% across the board, and all the parishes near me. you have to get on the coast to get above 25%.
sodality2
Vets/hospitals are far less common (and the former probably suffers from less tags as hospitals are more important) so the distance one must travel increases, so higher likelihood of crossing one. Especially compared to how common everything else is.
If you check deflock.me, would you say that 0.0% aligns with what you expect?
genewitch
i suppose that makes sense.
There's 6 cameras in the metro area per deflock.me, 3 at each Lowe's, and that's it. It's very easy to not get in range of those, at least on "my side" of the metro. How do we know that is all the ALPR in an area? Or rather, what's the confidence? I'd assume Home Depot would also have them, for example.
note: maybe i need to restart firefox, but deflock.me is the slowest "map" based site i've seen since keyhole in the late 90s
sodality2
The best thing you can do is keep an eye out and tag them manually. The second best is a FOIA to your county government - there's some good examples on deflock.me and templates on muckrack. But private ones are not going to be FOIA-able.
The quality of ALPR tagging does probably lag behind true counts - for example, Williamsburg, VA has 28 tagged on OSM, but 32 are listed in the transparency log (https://transparency.flocksafety.com/williamsburg-va-pd). Unfortunately not much can be done except spotting them out and about (or wardriving with a BLE beacon scanner: https://www.ryanohoro.com/post/spotting-flock-safety-s-falco...)
rootusrootus
The ones nearest me are at Home Depot, FWIW.
renewiltord
Perhaps there's some large chain of vets run by a PE firm where the PE firm did a blanket deal.
genewitch
I didn't mean to allude to this, but i heard that a lot of vet clinics are being bought by PE firms. The same way that a certain internet company is buying all the legal offices (and web medicine sites)
jcims
I had a thought a while back about companies like Tesla, with cameras on the road and driving models that could classify bad drivers, being in a position to at least a) avoid those drivers if they are encountered on the road and b) record/report them to the police.
Then I had an intrusive thought of a small squad of cybertruck 'enforcers' running around autonomously, tracking these drivers down via the live network of incoming video and doling out punishment to the chief offenders.
ericmcer
My dream is huge drones that get dispatched and harpoon dangerous drivers cars and fly away with them. "Oh a lifted truck with a modified exhaust just swerved onto the shoulder to pass me at 85mph, and there it goes"
snypher
Yeah, and then you get harpooned for reading an article about Kamela Harris five years ago.
rjsw
Or the Tesla could just record where it is at all times.
jcims
I’m thinking more the Tesla could identify bad drivers around it and fire off a notification.
gosub100
As an aside, there are currently companies that do this but for delinquent auto loans to expedite the repo process.
flyinghamster
Data accuracy can be a problem. It lists 115 counties for Illinois, which is news to me since Illinois has 102 counties.
For example, Kenosha County is in Wisconsin, not Illinois.
Built this over the last few days, based on a Rust codebase that parses the latest ALPR reports from OpenStreetMaps, calculates navigation statistics from every tagged residential building to nearby amenities, and tests each route for intersection with those ALPR cameras (Flock being the most widespread).
These have gotten more controversial in recent months, due to their indiscriminate large scale data collection, with 404 Media publishing many original pieces (https://www.404media.co/tag/flock/) about their adoption and (ab)use across the country. I wanted to use open source datasets to track the rapid expansion, especially per-county, as this data can be crucial for 'deflock' movements to petition counties and city governments to ban and remove them.
In some counties, the tracking becomes so widespread that most people can't go anywhere without being photographed. This includes possibly sensitive areas, like places of worship and medical facilities.
The argument for their legality rests upon the notion that these cameras are equivalent to 'mere observation', but the enormous scope and data sharing agreements in place to share and access millions of records without warrants blurs the lines of the fourth amendment.