Edmonton has 24 red light cameras and Calgary has 36 installed at major intersections (December 18, 2008)
Posted on 01/25/2011 2:30:05 PM PST by JoeProBono
EDMONTON, Alberta, The city of Edmonton, Alberta, is writing off nearly $13 million worth of speeding tickets because the reliability of cameras came into question.
Crown Prosecutor Steven Bilodeau said he petitioned the provincial justice ministry to nullify the tickets as people were receiving tickets for impossible infractions, the Edmonton Journal reported.
In one case on Jan. 12, a camera snapshot alleged a driver was traveling at 89 mph on a city street, but the video showed all the other vehicles around it moving at the same speed, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reported.
Bilodeau said all 141,729 tickets issued by the automated system between November 2009 and Jan. 14 will be overturned and refunds will be mailed to those who already paid fines.
"It just has to be done," he said. "This is about public confidence."
A spokesman for American Traffic Solutions, which supplies the system to the city, said the company was working with the city to rectify the process to ensure the cameras were "properly maintained and calibrated," the Journal said.
Edmonton has 24 red light cameras and Calgary has 36 installed at major intersections (December 18, 2008)
Flash mob Street Racers 1
Edmonton Traffic Cameras 0
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Crash site as seen on City of Edmonton traffic camera.
In Germany...the cameras were winning in court almost 99 percent of the time if you go back ten years ago. I’d say now...in the past three years in Germany...it’s like a 40-50 percent win for the cops with the camera. You can take them into court on a variety of reasons, with certified experts as witnesses...and win (thus triggering the cops to pay for your attorney and the experts). I think the longer that we try to make the cameras work...the more we will discover that they aren’t that reliable.
Just paint over the lens or place plastic bags over them.
In many (perhaps the majority of instances), the picture would have been very misleading. Often, the car photographed was caught in the intersection, because somebody else had violated the law, forcing them to stop and get caught by the red light camera.
The actual violators were sometimes other motorists, often pedestrians, and rarely bicyclists.
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