So they picked on a law professor did they?!?
So they picked on a law professor did they?!?
Great read.
Saw that a few days ago.
Very good read.
Peeved me off when my wife got a ticket at a red light camera. They had video too. She rolled the stop turning right at a red light. With absolutely NO ONE around. At 11PM. And no, she didn't come to a complete stop, but she did roll at less than 2MPH for at least 10 feet. The risk was removed.
I still don't ever remember voting for cameras and microphones on every street corner and red light.
Going to have to save this article, it's full of useful information, not to mention an admission that Alabama (and god knows what other states)law is controlled by out of state based corporations.
RevRico wrote: Going to have to save this article, it's full of useful information, not to mention an admission that Alabama (and god knows what other states)law is controlled by out of state based corporations.
That's been a point of contention for quite a while. The revenue split from tickets in Victorville and Apple Valley CA were something like 96% went to the company, RedFlex I think, and 4% went to the city.
I had an out of state drivers license for a while and both the cars were registered to me. Occasionally I'd get a "snitch ticket" (It was super official looking...minus a court date) from the company that controlled the camera with a picture of either my wife or myself making a right on red. They asked me to ID the driver and send it back to them. I always laughed and threw them in the shredder. I think was up to 10 or so when I moved out of state.
Victorville was actually talking about taking them out but the way the contract read with the managing company it would have cost them more to remove them than to run out the contract. So they stopped giving a berkeley.
It always comes down to money. Bureaucracy always seems willing to trade away our rights to collect more revenue to feed itself.
We took a family vacation to LA when I was in college. Mom got a redlight ticket on Rodeo Drive. Because it was a rental, it took the rental company an extra week or 2 to get the drivers name and license number back to the camera company. Then, it took an extra amount of time to get the ticket to my Mom because it was an out of state issue. So, 6 weeks after we returned to Cincinnati from our LA trip, mom got a ticket for $350 for rolling thru a red light. She was given 5 days to appear in LA court to contest the ticket if she wished.
Payment = easy button. Fighting the $350 ticket wouldve meant a $400 plane ride, a $200 night at a hotel, and a $100 bond (as mentioned in the article). Twice the value of the ticket.
This is why we cant have nice things
I don't like how much private companies profit from these, but I would vote for red light cameras here in a heartbeat.
I got one a couple years back for a vehicle that had with us while being out the country at the time. So obviously something (the date at minimum) was off. I was told there was no appeal process since they could not be wrong. 
Sadly I ain't a lawyer so paid it like a chump.
Dave wrote: Sadly I ain't a lawyer so paid it like a chump.
That is exactly what they are depending on.
ProDarwin wrote: I don't like how much private companies profit from these, but I would vote for red light cameras here in a heartbeat.
Would you also like some speed cameras installed near your house?
If the government "really" cared about public safety have the police get out of their cars and hand out tickets that can heard in a court of law.
Bunch of berkeleying vajajays.
Not being a lawyer, I don't really understand his distinction between redlight camera tickets vs. parking tickets. In either case you're not ticketing the driver directly, unless the driver happens to walk up while the parking ticket is being issued.
nderwater wrote:ProDarwin wrote: I don't like how much private companies profit from these, but I would vote for red light cameras here in a heartbeat.Would you also like some speed cameras installed near your house?
berkeley yes. Right in front of my house actually. Hell, I'd pay for one myself.
In reply to ProDarwin:
Can't tell if serious, but it's pretty hard for me to want to trade the Constitutional freedoms my forefathers died for for a device designed to produce revenues for a select few.
i've heard (here is your grain of salt) that red light camera's actually cause more accidents due to people slamming on there brakes trying to not get caught in an intersection during a red light resulting in someone(s) in line getting rear ended.
edizzle89 wrote: i've heard (here is your grain of salt) that red light camera's actually cause more accidents due to people slamming on there brakes trying to not get caught in an intersection during a red light resulting in someone(s) in line getting rear ended.
There have been studies that support this, yes. OTOH, one could argue that relatively low-speed front-rear impacts are less dangerous than high-speed, running-a-red-light, front-into-driver's-door impacts.
The killer for red light cameras in my book, though, is that you can have the same effect without the rear-enders simply by lengthening the yellow, and that very timing is forbidden by the contracts the camera companies have with the cities that use them.
And yeah, the vast majority of the tickets written are for rolling through a right-turn-on-red without coming to a complete stop. Treating that the same as blowing through a red light at 50 mph is ludicrous.
SVreX wrote: In reply to ProDarwin: Can't tell if serious, but it's pretty hard for me to want to trade the Constitutional freedoms my forefathers died for for a device designed to produce revenues for a select few.
Absolutely serious.
If it keeps dumbE36 M3s from blasting through my neighborhood at 60mph, I am 100% for it. If it keeps people from running red-lights... like the driver who hit my wife when she was 8 months pregnant, I'm all for it.
What constitutional freedom would you be trading?
In reply to ProDarwin:
Didn't read the article, huh?
In reply to ProDarwin:
Those devices will not stop speeding, or running lights.
They just give someone the ability to profit when violations are (allegedly) committed.
Ok, I see your point.
Let me rephrase:
I would absolutely support a police officer stationed at all traffic lights to bear witness to these events, and a police officer running radar/witnessing the tickets of a speed camera on my street. 24/7.
That would get pretty expensive though :(
I do have a question though... could you fight an unpaid toll using the same exact procedure?
SVreX wrote: In reply to ProDarwin: Those devices will not stop speeding, or running lights. They just give someone the ability to profit when violations are (allegedly) committed.
I'm sure sometimes they are less effective. But a permanent speed camera on my street would definitely stop speeding. How many times are you going to be issued a ticket by a camera before you stop speeding in the area you know it is located?
I have limited experience with speed cameras, but the areas I know with them, people know where they are and follow the speed limit strictly there. They are all pissed off doing so.
Reminds me of the tint ticket that eden Prairie mn tried really hard to give me. Took a few court sessions, but I didn't has a ticket.
ProDarwin wrote: ...But a permanent speed camera on my street would definitely have a bullet hole in it by the end of the week.
FTFY. 
Lucky for me, SC has outlawed all camera ticketing as unconstitutional.
The main issue I have with traffic cameras is that wherever I've seen them proliferate (mainly the UK, but they're pretty popular in Germany and other European countries as well), they were used to a) remove police officer's discretion when it came to writing tickets, b) revenue generation and c) "saving money". The latter then usually resulting in a reduced number of traffic police.
Especially in the UK, traffic enforcement has turned into "speed = bad, m'kay" with cameras everywhere, but nobody around to pull someone who drives massively erractically but below the speed limit. And as people got wise where the cameras where (especially on the motorways), they install average speed cameras that track your car over a distance and trigger a ticket based on your average speed vs the speed limit.
As a nice side effect, those camera systems track all traffic, so they end up tracking your vehicle movements in the areas where they're installed.
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