You own a half-ton of metal, which attracts a whole host of legal requirements. You choose to allow another person to drive that lump of metal - if it subsequently shown that your lump of metal was driven in a way that contradicted those requirements, why *shouldn’ti] you as owner either take responsibility or identify the responsible party?
I dislike them for a good reason. They are more about revenue generation than traffic safety. My proof? Several times, I’ve read about these cities shortening the amount of time that a yellow light lasts. This actually makes the intersections more dangerous, because it’s been proven that longer yellow lights cut accident rates at intersections. Plus rear end accidents go up. Cite.
Fine. So you’re problem isn’t the cameras, but the lack of a legal requirement for traffic-light timings. And that site hardly proves this to be a widespread problem, anyway.
In an ideal world freed of historical baggage, red-light cameras and competency testing for voting (at least at the "you do know how to cleanly punch a chad, right?) both make sense.
In the real world where we live, both notions are irredemably tainted with another agenda (literal highway robbery and racism, respectively), and might as well be forgotten about.
Is it any different than parking tickets? The owner of the car is held responsible rather than the driver. I was involved with a case back in the day when I was enforcing parking and the lawyer tried to argue that we could not identify the person who parked the car. We won the case on that level, but I do not know if it went to higher court.
Oh please, don’t be silly. How is punishment for breaking a very obvious and clear rule ‘robbery’?
Obviousness and clarity are irrelevant – a mugger’s demand for your wallet is as obvious and clear as it gets, but is nevertheless robbery.
Again, the fact that red-light cameras have been irredemably tainted as a means of revenue enhancement rather than law enforcement has pretty much taken them off the table.
Parking meters are a charge for a service, and don’t pretend to be anything else.
You’re still being silly. Traffic cameras = punishment for doing something wrong. I’m wanting to put about six rolleyes here as my reply, instead.
If so, can we have some solid evidence? Or do you just meen tainted by rumour? And why is it irredemable, anyway?
So, in the example of the speeding camera in my neighborhood (see my earlier post), it is actually the money-grubbing-ness of the camera, rather than the law enforcement aspect of it, that has made my street safer? What difference does it make?
Here in DC, the red light cameras have reduced the number of lights run by an average of 68 percent. Cite. The speeding cameras have reduced “aggressive” speeding from roughly 10 percent of traffic to about 3 percent. Cite. (The earlest days of the program in 2001 I would bet would be unreliable data: there were so few speeding cameras in 2001, I’m certain that they were concentrated in the worst locations, hence a 30 percent “aggressive driving” statistic. Once the program was expanded in 2002, the numbers settled down around 10 or 11 percent.)
You can call cities self-interested bastards because they like the revenue that comes in, but that data cited illustrates well, IMHO, that this technology has made driving quite a bit safer here in DC. There could well be more fender-benders as a result of the cameras, but I’d take a couple of those compared to one of these any day.
Puh-leeze. There’s been at least one link citing some of the many cases of cities and/or contractors shortening the yellow light to enhance revenue at the expense of safety. :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
DC probably isn’t the example you want to use after Mayor Williams admitted that the cameras were all about revenue enhancement rather than public safety.
Not that this is news to anyone who’s studied the matter.
Matt Labash has written a pretty thorough piece on traffic cameras. While he is clearly biased against them, his arguments are worth investigating. He contends that a strong refutation of the “safety-not-revenue” assertion can be found by studying the practices of the city when installing the cameras. Most risk management approaches assume that if you want to reduce accidents in 100 intersections but you only have 5 cameras, you place them where they will do the most good: in the five intersections with the most accidents. However, “In Charlotte, North Carolina, WBTV found their safety conscious officials failed to install cameras at 23 of the highest-crash intersections,” and “Lockheed Martin IMS–our old friends from D.C.–had sought out intersections with high traffic volume, short yellow cycles, and downhill approaches–the kinds of intersections that citation-happy police officers used to call cherry ponds or duck patches. […] Not a single one of the city’s 19 cameras was operating at one of its highest-accident sites.”
Now, his language is not the sort of rigorous argument I like to hear in Great Debates. I would have preferred a statement like “Of the 19 cameras, none was posted at any of the twenty highest-accident intersections.” Likewise “23 of the highest-crash intersections” seems like it could refer to ANY 23 – even a non-contiguous 23 from the top 30. That loose phrasing could mean that they did put cameras at the seven worst intersections, and this guy is really twisting their intent.
Assuming he’s not, however, it should be easy to prove that revenue is at least a secondary goal if not the primary goal, and I think we can all agree that using surveillance equipment to generate revenue is unethical.
Again, why should anyone care about the motivations of installing these contraptions if, in the end, they make our streets safer?
Calling for an end to photo enforcement because it is just about dollars and sense makes about as much sense to me as arguing against stoplights because they are a giveaway to the the powerful stoplight lobby. Why should I care about this at all, if the technology helps to compel people to stop driving like morons?
(I still maintain that all these photo enforcement things should take a picture of the driver and the car, because it is the driver, not the owner of the car, that should be punished for bad driving.)
In that case I’d want to see data, both on numbers of accidents, and severity.
An accident “caused” by a red light camera (in fact attributable to tailgating or inattention) is most likely a rear-ender between two vehicles travelling in the same direction, at a few MPH difference in speed. If the front vehicle is not a motorcycle, then the bulk of injuries will be limited to whiplash and airbag trauma. The impact will be focused at the ends of the vehicles which are intended to absorb such impacts.
An accident caused by running the light, on the other hand, is most likely a broadside accident, with at least one car travelling at fairly high speed, likely resulting in more serious injurys, and vehicle damage.
I am reminded of a Tammany Hall politician’s definition of “honest graft” (skimming off some bux from a public-works project) as opposed to “dishonest graft” (simply stealing the money out of the treasury).
One blog isn’t solid evidence. If you know of more than ‘some of the many’, please tell.
And if you’re still worried about the cameras & lights being misused, why not simply argue for separation between the operators of the camera and the destination of the money generated?
What is this, some kind of dodge the question contest?
For the third time, if these cameras are successful in making streets safer, what difference does it make whether governments install them for revenue generation or for traffic safety?
Because the ends don’t justify the means. Sorry for the trite response, but that’s what it boils down to. If the gov’t wants to increase revune by automating speeding tickets and the like via survalence, it very well may increase safety to a degree, but for some it feels like ambush. I for one would be willing to live with the slightly higher risk at intersections to avoid the implementation of video survalence of traffic.
If our streets are made safer by video-traffic-ticketing of anyone going more than two miles per hour over the speed limit for the purpose of revenue generation, why should anyone care?