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Mississippi Passes Law To Ban Traffic Light Cameras
DaGoatSpanka writes with news that Mississippi Governer Haley Barbour signed a bill into law on Friday which instituted a ban on automated cameras that would snap pictures of motorists when they ran red lights. "The new law says the two cities that already have the cameras, Jackson and Columbus, must take them down by Oct. 1. Other cities and counties are banned from starting to use them." We've discussed situations in the past where cities looked at such cameras as "profit centers," and even tampered with their traffic light timing to catch more motorists. Now, in Mississippi, the contractors who installed the cameras are unhappy, since they received a cut of the ticket revenue generated by the cameras. However, lawmakers overwhelming voted to get rid of them (117-3 in the House, 42-9 in the Senate), because "the cameras were an invasion of privacy and their constituents thought they had been unfairly ticketed."
In cities like NYC this is considered a serious offense because you are creating gridlock. But no matter where you are it is a good idea (and, in some places, a legal requirement) that you enter an intersection only if/when there is sufficient room to leave it again.
Nonaggression works!
This is a timely article. The state of NH is currently considering passing a law allowing cities to put up these cameras. As usual, we're a bit behind the times.
SB 113:
http://www.gencourt.state.nh.us/legislation/2009/SB0113.html
This is more about running reds, I believe, than speeding.
And on that note, I drive a motorcycle, and quite often a motorcycle does not generate enough of an EM field to be noticed by the sensors. Pull up to an intersection that is slow in your direction and you can wait all day if you like and never get a green. The common solution here is to simply wait for traffic to slow, and then run the red when there's a break. This particular problem happens even more often when waiting for left-turn arrows.
Do you suggest I should just wait half an hour for a car to coincidentally be going my way, or just accept my ticket for running the red light, simply because a camera saw me do it? I would say that would be a pretty fair ticket. The "picture as proof" fails to consider context. The above is simply one example where context makes a world of difference. There are other situations as well.
Furthermore, I should not have to spend a day in court because an automated system is incapable of properly considering the entire situation, so don't tell me "well then you can just get it thrown out of court." That still costs me time (and therefore money.)
Additionally, on the topic of context and your (2): suppose someone took a picture of me shooting someone in the chest with a gun. Wow! You've got proof I committed murder! Maybe I should go to jail? Nevermind the fact that a similar picture from just a few seconds before would depict the other person coming at me with a knife, intent on killing me for the few dollars in my wallet. We don't have that picture, so clearly it is irrelevant.
Wtf? A picture of a moment in time is not the entire story; don't treat it as if it is.
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
unfairly ticketed ? if there's a picture as proof I'd say it's fair you get a ticket..
Read the summary. The camera's were rigged to give out bogus tickets. A common trick was to set the yellow-light time so short that it is physically impossible to safely stop in time.
Assuming a driver slams the breaks and the car decelerates at 3/4 G, it takes a car traveling at 35MPH a full 4.2 seconds to stop and that doesn't even count driver reaction time. There have been many cases where cities would set their yellow-light times as low as 3 seconds. (IIRC the legal minimum is 5 seconds.)
Any way you cut it, traffic cameras were being used by cities to abuse their citizens. Some sort of reform was needed. (Though perhaps regulation would have been better than completely banning them.)
As someone who was behind a "oh shit, yellow SLAM ON THE BREAKS BECAUSE THAT SIGN SAYS THEY'RE WATCHING ME skid to a stop" driver earlier this week, I agree with the parent. I narrowly avoided an accident and the guy in front of me panicked when the light turned yellow with plenty of time for him and me (and if anyone was behind me, them also) to go through. I've also witnessed one accident caused as a direct result of the camera (same type of driver mentioned above). Our cameras have only been up for 6 months, and that was the first accident I've ever seen at that intersection.
No, most people believe they have the "right" to block the intersection in order to get home 12 seconds earlier. By blocking the intersection, they impact dozens (or hundreds) of other drivers. Actions like this, taken by vast numbers of people, are a large part of the reason the traffic is backed up in the first place.
You appear to be under the misconception that red light cameras reduce accidents.
It simply isn't the case. http://www.motorists.org/blog/red-light-cameras-increase-accidents-5-studies-that-prove-it/
For intersections with high rates of run through, the answer is to send an engineer out and rework the light timings to make sure they work in conjunction with surrounding lights and have a sufficient yellow time, to reduce the travel speed on the road close to the intersection, or to re-engineer the intersection to better control traffic.
They are a gimmick designed to turn a profit for the state and the private contractors who operate them. They have a vested interest in making intersections LESS safe by inducing more revenue generating red light tickets.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs