Re: Motorists vs traffic cameras

That's one thing that always pissed me off, it seems unfair that illegally issued tickets stand because so few people bother to do anything about them, and the issuers know that they can get away with this. They accept that a few tenacious people will successfully fight illegal tickets but that most won't. It's like health insurance companies that automatically deny claims, knowing that only a tiny percentage of customers will bother to fight back.

Where I live we have no police force, and they contract with the sheriff's department for police services. They aren't bad guys (except the one that killed three cyclists) but they have very little training in the law. I've beaten several improperly issued parking tickets, but in each case they were giving massive amounts of these tickets, and I know most people didn't bother to fight them, they just paid up.

What happens if you really fight your ticket and someone cottons onto the fact that you know your shit and have it together and have a real case, they will just dismiss your ticket rather than let it go to trial. thus there is no legal precedent set and people still get BS tickets. The only real fix is legislation outlawing types of enforcement prone to abuse.

Yes, we *could* have camera installations that weren't set up to artifically increase the counts of "violations" but they would only catch true violators and there's not enough of them to pay for the cameras. this has been shown time and time again in many studies. So if you see a RLC it's a fair bet that the yellow interval was either short to begin with or has been shortened.

nate

OMG, I'm sure you're wrong about that, at least in my area. Serial red light running is an epidemic.

Actually one of the better studies on that was done about 5 miles from my house, it showed that properly setting yellow times reduced RLRing by about 90%

nate

Sometimes it does not pay. My daughter got a speeding ticket and decided to fight it. On the way to traffic court, she was a little late so she went a little fast and got a second ticket. Beat the first, not the second.

True story: a few years ago, the city put a red light camera on an intersection I go through regularly. The first month, they gave out warnings--and got me. No big deal, thanks very much.

Then they started giving out tickets, and the number they gave out was large. Very large.

I was talking about this with a friend of mine who happens to be a traffic engineer with the city. He considered it all, then did a study of his own. Half a mile on either side of this light, the speed limit is 45mph (to the west) and 50mph (to the east)--but this one mile long section of road where the light is, is 35mph. The camera itself is on the west corner of the intersection, aimed at cars going from the west to the east.

He jiggered the timing of the yellow light to where it should be for

45mph traffic, which is what they would have done normally anyway given the physical layout. And whaddya know--the tickets went WAY down, down to where everyone expected.

You can't just put the cameras up and start handing out tickets without evaluating the big picture. If you do, you show yourself to be doing nothing more than a revenue grab.

(Of course, the city put its own spin on what happened, and the paper simply printed the city's press release: "look at us, our red light camera program is doing great things for safety, tickets at this intersection are down 85%!")

They could have achieved the same results without the camera, I bet...

nate

Exactly correct.