I don't know. I haven't lived there in a while. But when I did, bike messengers were considered to have come from the Tenth Circle of Hell -- the one even Dante couldn't bring himself to write about. Bicycle-versus-pedestrian accidents are way under-reported because most victims just want to get on with their days. Also, cyclists aren't required to have insurance, and most of them don't have enough money to be worth suing. So most people who are hit by cyclists brush themselves off and move on.
Not really kidding here, Denver doesn’t have as much of that sort of thing but in certain parts of town, where mmmm “undocumented” folks live, you know nobody’s insured. And that’s with vehicles. Our vehicle insurance rates have skyrocketed here and uninsured and underinsured runs me almost the same dollar amount annually as the rest of the insurance.
All sorts of vehicles running around with actual license plates from Mexico on them.
I’m not any sort of big anti-immigration buff, but we do need a way to nail car insurance ignorers.
I have heard from Australian friends that they fixed that problem long ago. Their cops have automatic plate readers (debatably more surveillance State but... better than a cop typing on a laptop and driving which is the utterly stupid norm here, when plate reading tech exists and works well) and they tie the insurance database into the PD database.
If the cop car reader scans a plate that comes back as not having auto insurance, instant lights and a pull-over.
Of course also works for stolen cars, plate expirations, and the other plate running related stuff.
Pretty efficient if you ask me.
There’s not a huge amount of malicious ways to have that turn into evil government and such, OTHER than a few guaranteed clerical errors in the databases and such, but you still have your paper or your app showing you have insurance in that case.
That’s one “Big Brother” tech that I’d be okay with. The threat of getting nailed the very minute your insurance expires, is fine by me. Same with the plates. Same with stolen vehicle hits. Pretty much everything a cop runs a plate manually for, is reasonable to just nail them if the database says “nope”.
That said, I got pulled over late last year or early this year because my plates on my truck were properly renewed but the State barfed the processing from the County. I had stickers, paperwork, the whole nine yards to show the officer, but his computer said the truck wasn’t licensed for half a year and therefore in his head, probably stolen.
He had the hand on the pistol when he walked up. Always fun.
Not two weeks later Karen’s truck came back the same way and we got another two cop car, single cop per car, felony stop. LOL.
I think the funniest part was her looking in the mirror and saying, “What the f***!” She doesn’t cuss much. Hahaha.
I knew it had to be the same crap I had just fixed on my truck happening to her, and I just doubled over laughing in the passenger seat and reached for the documentation from her glove box before we even got fully pulled over. Hahahaha.
Hands in view, still laughing when the officer walked up. She’s all serious over there at her window and through laughter I tell the cop “We just had this happen last week in MY truck! The state computer says this truck isn’t licensed, doesn’t it?”
Nice cops, all of them. Computers make everything better, right?