[thayne]

I've worked on implementing captcha in a few situations. In every case it was with great reluctance, and we tried to limit it to places that were absolutely necessary.

But the alternative was to go down, or spend an order of magnitude more on abusive requests than legitimate ones, or allow spammers to use our commenting system to send emails.

I don't like the situation any more than you do, but that transit site might have captcha to protect it from getting DDoSed and becoming unavailable. That county records site might have captcha to protect personal information from getting scraped for usage in phishing attacks and other unsavory activities.

Sometimes there might be other ways to provide protection from bots, but those can have their own inconveniences for users. Or they could be prohibitively expensive.

I'm not saying we shouldn't try to find better solutions, or that captchas are always necessary. But in many cases, they are there for a reason.