Posted on 01/05/2009 7:55:20 AM PST by george76
Denver has failed to enforce its red-light camera contract, collecting the $75 fines but not collecting the data necessary to determine whether the program actually is reducing red-light running.
More than 11,200 tickets were mailed out through November.
Denver police officials in charge of the program refused to be interviewed by the Rocky about the problems; Redflex failed to respond to several interview requests and written questions.
After stories in the Rocky last spring disclosed that Denver uses the legal minimum three seconds of yellow, despite an engineering formula calling for more, the city agreed to add time at all four camera locations.
According to police data through November, at three of the locations where the yellow was boosted to four or five seconds, a daily average of nine, 10 and 16 tickets are issued. That's significantly less than Redflex studies at those locations last year, when the yellows were three seconds. Redflex had counted up to 125 violations over a 12-hour period.
Denver pays Redflex nearly $32,000 a month to operate the four cameras. But Redflex is supposed to reimburse Denver $25 every time it fails to photograph all but 2 percent of detected violations. So far, the company hasn't provided data that would allow Denver to determine whether it's owed any money from Redflex.
"The thing the judge cared about was the picture the city provided to me was unusable," Plotkin said. "The supervisor kept claiming that on the Web site there is a higher-quality picture, but the judge did not have a high- resolution monitor on his desk."
(Excerpt) Read more at rockymountainnews.com ...
In Dallas, they were turning off cameras when not enough money was being brought in to justify them.
Don’t bother the police or its ‘contractors’ (read: unaccountable hatchet men) with the law or promises made before the cameras were installed.
As with all the other blather about ‘safety’ the story also reveals that increasing yellow-light times to 4-5 seconds results in fewer red-light violations but of course this reduces the revenue gathered. So the hell with safety!
How do you confront your accuser in a court of law if its a machine?
The whole idea of traffic enforcement cameras smacks of unconstitutionality.
It is never about safety. Neither speed cameras or even radar traps. Or drink-driver spot-checks.
It is all about revenue, and numbers.
That is because policing, done properly, is hard to measure. If the police are doing a brilliant job, no crimes are being committed and no arrests are being made and thousands of offenses are being deterred.
Nothing to measure.
When there is nothing to measure the Pointy-Headed Bean Counters get out their slide-rules and start calculating how many Police the city can do without...
Then the Police need to demonstrate that they are “needed”. That’s when they need to gather Metrics. With the predictable results that we see with speed cameras &tc.
The real answer is to fire the Pointy-Headed Bean Counter. They produce nothing of value, and only measure everybody else’s hard work.
I repectfully disagree. The problem is that *fail* to measure the value of someone else's hard work, but only measure the price. (Thank you, Oscar Wilde.)
> I repectfully disagree. The problem is that *fail* to measure the value of someone else’s hard work, but only measure the price. (Thank you, Oscar Wilde.)
Well said! And eloquently so. I stand corrected.
Sort of like Obama’s call for a civilian force for national security that will be equal in size to our military (since he is PROHIBITED from domestic deployment of the military, they are CALLED civilian).
AAA has done study after study showing that revenue-raising saftey measures (such as traffic camera, speed traps, etc...) not only don’t increase traffic safety, but reduce it, because they divert money and manpower away from techniques that do increase safety.
Apparently, there is almost an inverse relationship. The actual steps that increase traffic safety the most have very low revenue potential. While the ones that increase revenue the most, do the least for safety.
Reducing violations is not the reason for these tracking devices. The reason is increasing revenue.
Dunno about your state, but in both states I’ve resided in during my lifetime, Ohio and Pennsylvania, traffic violations are considered criminal offenses.
In Ohio, the cases used to be captioned CRIM-V-whatever the docket number.
There are three intersections I drive through nearly every day. Prior to the cameras they were grid locked. People would run the left turn red light and stop in the middle of the intersection. With the cameras, the intersections are clear. Imagine that. The three sections are Yosemite & Arapahoe, Lincoln & Park Meadows, Orchard & Quebec.
There are some countermeasures (although expensive), the cheapest being the Cheetah C100. It’s a GPS based unit that contains a database of the location of thousands of redlight cameras and photo speed cameras (the database being updatable via the internet). There are also a number of radar detectors that contain the same GPS technology (Escort 9500ix, Beltronics GX65, etc). You get a warning when approaching the location of a camera.
This is completely the WRONG question. Since when does the primary criteria for a law become "does it work?" That's a short route to a police state.
Would black boxes in cars, broadcasting to the government the location at all times of every vehicle (an actual plan in the works now for about 10 years from now), reduce accidents? Of course it would! Would it also grossly violate the principles of privacy and innocence until proven guilty, among many other basic human liberties? YES, BIG TIME!
Should the reduction of (usually minor) traffic accidents ever be used as an excuse to deny basic liberty in America? NEVER!
They should put them on the stop signs in the town I live in.
Brilliant!
I agree. Take the subject of guns for instance....
I don’t care if there’s a Columbine every day for a year.....DO NOT TAMPER with MY sacred Second Amendment and God-given rights.
Period.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.