Thank you. Please keep it up, and lean on your legal brethren to do the same. The biggest problem, though, is that so often there’s no cop around when it happens.
Nope. Never was.
The problem is that, in effect, the car gets the ticket, not the driver. Unless they get a real good image, it’'s hard to prove who the driver is. So the $75 fine (in Houston) did not go against anyone’s driving record. People wouldn’t pay the fines, so the city started impounding cars. The rest is history.
Perhaps you misunderstand what “cash grab” means.
Well, I once had the pleasure of seeing a red-light runner, who ran right across my path, get nailed. It was many years ago.
I was stopped at a red light, first in line. The road to my left was a multi-lane high-speed freeway off-ramp. Stopped immediately behind me was a cop.
My light turned green. I began moving forward into the intersection. Before I gained much speed, and before I was fully into the intersection, I noticed the car barreling down the off-ramp from my left, at high speed, not even slowing down. I stopped where I was. That car barreled through the intersection and turned left onto the street I was on, against his red light, without ever slowing down. The cop behind me noticed, of course (since I had started moving and then stopped).
I’m frequently astounded and angered when I elect to slide through a yellow light or maybe even a pink one (mostly by accident) and I see three more cars behind me come through. Often the last one was a hundred feet back. As a pedestrian, I once watched a car got through a light as it turned red and I counted SEVEN cars following him through the light. Some people seem to think that if the light was green at any point as they approached, they are entitled to go through.
Works differently in Australia, or at least in the state of New South Wales, where i used to live
If your car gets a red light ticket, the infraction notice, including points on your drivers license, is sent to the registered owner of the car.
If the owner was the driver, he or she pays the fine, and gets the points. If they were not driving, they are required by law to provide a statutory declaration (basically, an affidavit) saying who was behind the wheel. Once that document has been received by the authorities, they will send the infringement notice out to the person nominated by the owner.
If the car is registered to a company or an organization, a similar system applies. The notice is sent to the company or organization, and the owner or other person in charge is required to inform the authorities who was driving the car at the time of the infraction. In order to encourage companies and organizations to give up the guilty party, the amount of the fine for a company car is “five times the amount applicable to an individual,” but once the driver is identified, his or her fine reverts to the regular amount.
The rules are outlined in this PDF document.
The statutory declaration that the owner submits nominating the actual driver is a legal document, and there are pretty sever penalties for submitting a false stat dec. Nonetheless, if this news story is any indication, a significant number of Aussies try to dodge the penalty by nominating people who have overseas drivers licenses, whom it is very difficult for the Australian police to pursue.
Ran out of editing time.
The fines for failing to nominate the driver are pretty big, including
Same here, especially at intersections with protected left turns. It’s gotten so bad I have waited a second after the light goes green for my way, then lay on the horn, pointing at the driver last car in the intersection so they know, It’s you I’m honking at, putz. Most of them look startled.
I think some people think they have a statutory right to wait through no more than one light. If they waited through a red they get to go on the next green, even if it doesn’t stay green by the time they get to it.
Mostly I see this sort of thing around Christmas time, when people are distracted, angry and impatient.
Of course, yesterday I almost killed a kid on a bike because I was slowing to turn right on the green when the ‘walk’ sign came on for him and he just darted out in front of me without looking in any direction. :smack: Lucky for him I was paying attention.
A common driving manoeuvre here in Lethbridge is to wait and wait and wait to make a right turn on a red (even when they have opportunities to go) then they go as soon as the walk light for pedestrians come on (and get quite irate when us pedestrians try to start walking with the walk light we waited for). It makes no damned sense - all I can figure is that they are incompetent, untrained drivers who have no idea what they’re doing.
Another strange thing I see daily is people veering into the parking lane and back while driving on a middling busy residential street. They’re not parking; they just seem to want to drive closer to the curb every chance they get. Again, I think it can be ascribed to incompetent, untrained drivers, who don’t realize that veering back and forth from lane to lane is a terrible, dangerous idea.
Sorry not checked back in here. So you’re going for the “I’m going to lie about what I said earlier in the thread” gambit, combined with the “extreme special pleading” tactic combined with the “unverifiable personal anecdote” technique.
Phew, I haven’t seen bullshit piled that thick since I visited a cattle feedlot.
Firstly, this is what you said at the outset:
I’ve read this upwards, backwards, sideways and frontwards, several times. You’re right. I’m missing the bit where you say “around here”. Because it’s not there, you disingenuous toad. Never mind how you tried to qualify later.
Secondly, you don’t seriously expect me to believe you live in some weird little locale where cyclists kill and maim more often than cars, do you? It’s a transparent attempt back away from your idiotic first “contribution” to this thread. If “splattering this thread with IQ reducing garbage” can be described as a “contribution”.
Where do you live, anyway?
Thirdly, what can I say? Your unverifiable, highly implausible anecdote floors me. How can one hope to convince this man that it’s not raining?
I saw red lights run at three separate intersections on my commute just this morning. Yeesh.
Yesterday morning, I came up to this same intersection, and this time, I needed to make a right turn.
The light was green. And there was someone just sitting in the right turn lane, going nowhere. I had to swing into the straight-ahead lane to go around this person and make my turn. It looked like they were stopped to figure out where they were going. Maybe they thought they were pulled off onto a shoulder rather than in a turn lane? It’s a mystery.
What if you don’t know who exactly was driving at that point in time? For example: Suppose four of my friends want to borrow my car for a road trip out of town. All four of them have drivers’ licenses. If I can’t make out the driver from the photo, the best I could truthfully say is that “It wasn’t me, I lent the car to the following people: … I’m not sure which one of them was doing the driving.”
Granted, so far it’s not an issue where I live, as ticket cameras are illegal by state law, as mentioned upthread. Also, since my car is a manual, nobody ever asks me to borrow it. 
Not that I’d let them anyway.
You would probably just write what you know on the declaration. The fundamental requirement is that you tell the truth. The government person who reads your declaration would, i assume, then decide how to proceed.
AND ride on the wrong side of the street. But heaven forbid you impinge on their three foot buffer zone, because then you’re in the wrong.
Because those guys are going to be the same cyclist. :rolleyes:
Yes, they are.
I had a situation a couple of weeks ago where I was driving on a freeway that comes to an end at a stop light on a surface street. Normally, the speed there is 65 slowing down to 55 then 45 then stoplight, but there was construction going on and the speed limit was 45 where it’s normally 65. A guy behind me (I was in the right lane) honked at me, sped around me, and his passenger, shirtless and tattooed, unbuckled his seat belt, came halfway out of the window, and swore at me and flipped me off.
No, really they are not. The wrong way cyclist probably won’t care about where your car is because he’s poorly educated about cycling and thinks he’'s being safe by dodging your car.
The cyclist who complains about you intruding into the safety zone is upset because you are disobeying the law in most states and risking his safety either through selfish malice or incredible incompetence when you overtake them. That cyclist very rarely rides the wrong way down streets, if at all.
What does this story have to do with cyclists riding the wrong way?