TheAgitator.com
I Told You So
Friday, June 13th, 2003Fifteen months ago, I wrote:
Now, picture yourself a city councilman. You have two options to better road safety, increase yellow times at intersections in your town, which will bring in no new revenue, or install camera-cops that have in some cases issued 500 citations per hour (as the camera at New York Avenue and 4th St. in Northwest D.C. has) and could generate millions for city coffers (Sydney, Australia raked in over $20 million AU from camera citations in 2000).In fact, for city officials facing tight budgets, it might be tempting to shorten yellows. After all, wouldn’t shaving a few fractions off of city yellows seem preferable to raising taxes or cutting city services?
From CBS News:
John Irving knew he had been caught. He knew a traffic camera had seen him run a red light, but he also thought the yellow light had turned red too fast. So he returned to the busy intersection and timed it.His findings: 2.7 seconds.
“Not even three seconds,” he says.
Three seconds, when every other yellow light on the stretch of road was four seconds long. In other words, as he drove the street, the yellow lights in order lasted four, four, four and out of nowhere three seconds….
….Why this light in Bethesda was three seconds might have a million dollar answer. Literally. This one traffic camera earned the county $1 million in fines over 14 months.
Studies show that lengthening yellows actually prevents more accidents than traffic cameras. But lengthening yellows doesn’t generate millions for city coffers.
Politicians and cops sold us on traffic cameras under the guise of safety. Well, they sold you. The rest of us knew it was about revenue. Now you have neither safety nor freedom. They’re making intersections more dangerous, and they’re ticketing you every chance they get.
They’ve been shoving it down our throats for the past few years in the Indiana legislature, and I’m afraid it’s only a matter of time before our cities & towns are able to install these Orwellian devices. The whole thing is sickening.
One must simply become the media-
Make photo-copies of this story and distribute them. Put it on your website. Paste it in the shitter at city hall, lamp-posts, anywhere!! Monkeywrench if you have to- so long as we GET THE MESSAGES OUT. We have to work this way for we have to reverse-engineer all of the brainwashing served to us by the corporate media engines.
I used to live in SF at an intersection with NO traffic light. People used to run the stop signs constantly. We erected one of those traffic camera warning signs at the intersection. The traffic at the intersection improved dramatically, and to this day is more negotiable. It matters little that there is no camera, and no signal for it to even track….
But shortening the yellow- man that is just perverted.
Radley:
How do you know that is was intentionally changed? It doesn’t say that in the article.
I’m familiar with signal controllers. Yellow time is set at each individual intersection. “2.7″ seconds is typically the default setting for yellow time – which means the installer probably forgot to program the correct time. Looking at the engineering report for that intersection should resolve the question.
the problem with you conspiracy guys is that you assume the government is competent enough to pull these conspiracies off – which, if you think about, is a pretty stupid assumption.
Actually, government is terribly efficient when it comes to collecting revenue.
If I remember right from the broadcast, they “fixed” the problem by resetting all the lights to has 3.5 second yellows.
Score one for public safety
Ugh… Sorry about the bad grammar.
Don’t leave the insurance industry out of this, they have been pushing this too because the tickets give them a reason to raise your rates. You should put up a link for where to write our state representatives.
Folks, I got news for ya. It’s going to happen.
In the city of Taipei, where I live, my wife told me she was listening to a radio program about this very topic late last year on her way home from work.
As reported, one traffic light/monitor combo collected some 900,000,000 NT dollars. One U.S. dollar equals about 35 New Taiwanese dollars at present exchange rates.
Or,… 25,714,285.70 U.S. dollars and cents!
Sorry, I can’t confirm the figures but can attest to the volume of accidents. All you have to do is walk outside and wait.
Still, the movable units and speed limit signs are the most challenging.
Some folks watch planes and trains. Here, we watch for other things.
Best of luck,
JMH
I would take this report with a grain of salt. A lot of people don’t like the idea of the traffic cameras and some will look for a reason to say “ain’t fair” without actually going into the issue that running red lights is dangerous and people who do it should be punished.
The fact is most lights currently installed in cities can’t be controlled or even monitored from a central computer screen, and are at the mercy of the guy who comes out to service it. And most cities don’t have the time or money to hire a staff to maintain the lights. The rule is to react when somebody calls in with a problem, not to look for them.
One guy says that this yellow is faster than others on the road. I don’t really know about this, and neither do most other people. Remember that it is being reported by a guy that is pissed that he was caught breaking the law after he thought he got away. However if it is faster I can think of several reasons that are much less conspiratorial than the conclusion that many have jumped to:
– This light was serviced recently (possibly when the camera was installed) and the timing was not reset to the area default.
– They may be changing the area default timing, doing them on a light-by-light basis as they are serviced.
– The decision was made by a city maintenance guy to set this one faster because he thought it would be cool to do it, even though not approved by superiors.
I’m sure there are other possibilities. But taking a report at face value is dangerous when it’s coming from a single person with an obvious grudge.
Traffic Lights are a public safety issue. People who ignore them cost society lots of money by crashing into other cars at a higher rate than those who observe the lights. While purposely setting lights to catch more lawbreakers is not right, that’s not what this discussion has been about since the first automatic cameras came out. That’s just the most recent way to obscure the issue.
I invite any of your California readers that are concerned about this issue to e-mail me. I am considering an inititive drive for 2004 to require a minimum 4 second yellow light duration on all intersections in the State patrolled by automatic devices.
SO why doesn’t anyone take a mini-movie(!) as evidence, and post the results on the web?????
Your readers might also be interested in the National Motorist’s Association‘s $10,000 Red Light Camera Challenge.
Some of these comments have missed an important point. Longer yellows reduce accidents. First, they give people more time to clear intersections, particularly those in the “gray zone,” that length of road just before the intersection where one must decide to floor it to beat the red or decelerate very quickly to avoid running the red. Two to three second yellows cause people to floor it to make it through under the yellow. Second, those who are savvy to the camera and the short yellow know to stop hard and fast to avoid the ticket and sometimes get slammed from behind by people hoping you were going to floor it. Four second yellows give everyone plenty of notice, allow those in the gray zone to make it through without having to floor it, and give those approaching the gray zone enough time to decelerate and come to the kind of stop that won’t have your Starbucks sloshing out of the sip hole (what’s with those damn lids, anyway?).
In San Diego a couple of years ago, it was proven that the contractor responsible for the light cams, and who got a percentage of the ticket take, was fudging the timing on the cameras at about 20 intersections. When that came out the city shut down ALL the traffic cameras and refunded the fines generated by the tampered cameras.
Now they’re looking to start them up again, but on a flat fee basis and with close monitoring.
traffic camera catches speeding duck
There must be a lot of really bad drivers on the road. I cannot recall ever unintentionally running a red light (20+ years of driving). Just pay attention to the light you are approaching, how difficult is that? Apparently too hard for some people.
I find it an interesting agrument to lengthen the yellows in order to reduce red light runners. Of course it will. The end of a long line of cars going thru the light will probably no longer be running a red. But will it reduce the number of red light runners that cause the accidents? That guy that guns it at the red in order to make it thru the intersection. This is the guy that kills people. I doubt it will have an impact on those numbers at all.
Also, it would not be a revenue generator if people did not run red lights. How difficult is that to understand? You break the law, you pay the price. Seems pretty simple to me.
I have a deep concern about traffic cams.
They deny the accussed a chance to prepare a defense. If you don’t know you’ve been accused of a crime, you have no chance to make notes of the event. Perhaps the system malfunctioned and triggered early. Perhaps there was a medical emergency. Perhaps you were being tail-gated by a big-rig. Perhaps there was an emergency vehicle behind you. All of these are legitimate defenses for a ‘red-light violation’.
In California, ‘excessive speed’ is even more complex. Under California law, for speeds under 65 mph, the posted speed limit only determines burden of proof. I’ve been ticketed for 55 in a 40. I argued that it was safe under the conditions and therefore legal. The judge agreed and found me not guilty. Preparation of my defense would have been more difficult, if not impossible, if I had not been able to make careful notes about the situation.
Lee:
The point of this article is not that the traffic laws are unjust; the point is that some people are “gaming” the system to increase revenue at the expense of traffic safety.
Yellow lights exist for a reason: to warn drivers that the light’s about to turn red. That’s important for preventing accidents, which is, after all, the whole point of traffic laws. It is counterproductive to the purpose of traffic laws to “game” the warning into fooling some people so you can assess fines. Thus, there’s a legitimate complaint here.
We’re all happy for your perfect driving record. As an anecdote, all it proves is that your town hasn’t tried this trick yet. Also, this is made possible with the advent of red light cameras, something that wasn’t practical for most of your 20+ years of driving. As a result, 15+ of your 20+ years of experience are irrelevant as a gauge of the problem.
No one mentioned what to me is the obvious problem with this. Anyone charged with a crime has the right to face his/her accuser in a court of law. WHO (not what) is the accuser in this case?
In my one and only ‘ticket’ for running a red light in 35 years of driving, the Deputy had to admit that from the angle he was at, he could not see the light turn red. I also could state that the light remained yellow until I could no longer see it because of my car’s roof. I paid $200.00 for a Lawyer to represent me for a probably $50.00 ticket, and went to Court, because I HAD BEEN FALSELY ACCUSED.
We have to look no further than fark.com to see how easy it is to digitally alter photos now days, and no, the line of reasoning that local Governments are too incompetent to launch a conspiracy is just a straw man argument. As long as there is a reasonable doubt, the ‘criminal’ is considered innocent. I have seen far too many articles where local city councils discussed these as ‘revenue streams’ to not give the benefit of my doubt to the people being ticketed.
For those of you who want to claim the ‘infallibility’ of the digital cameras, I remember a local news article a month or two back where a VA Beach man was traffic-cammed in Northern VA while several witnesses were willing to swear that both the man and his car were in VA Beach all day.
It’s bad out here in California too: All the yellows in the city I live in are about 5 seconds, plus another two seconds before the cross traffic light goes green; the city where I work has decided instead to set up traffic cameras and shorten the yellows to 3 seconds. I think it will take a civil suit to stop this, but honestly, most of the people who get nailed are just going to pony up the money and move on.
Google “Matt Labash red light camera” for an excellent 5-part series on this topic.It is a crooked, corrupt business.The people who cannot see this are sheep,ripe for the fleecing.
A Reminder That Government Is Theft
I don’t talk politics much in real life, because invariably the conversation comes down to some version of the following
Tweaking traffic lights for more tickets
At least, if you believe
CBS
News, anyway. (Via
InstaPundit and
TheAgitator.)
How does it work? It’s simple. A city installs red light cameras at
intersections, which snap pictures of the license plates of cars that
run the light. Anyone so snap
There are 2 issues here. One is the short yellows. One is the red light cameras.
Just because there are short yellows does not make cameras wrong. It makes the short yellows wrong. You can be against the cameras for other reasons (can’t face your accused, invasion of privacy, etc) but claiming that the short yellows make the camera wrong is a specious agrument.
But it still comes down to if you can’t pay the fine, do not do the crime.
I did not say that I had an excellent driving record, just that I never UNintentionally ran a red light. Short yellows and all.
Just take a .22 caliber rifle and shoot the g*dd*mn things out until the city learns its lesson.
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