CA City Mulls Evading the Law On Red-Light Cameras

TechDirt is running a piece on Corona, CA, where officials are considering ignoring a California law that authorizes red-light cameras — cutting the state and the county out of their portion of the take — in order to increase the city's revenue. The story was first reported a week ago. The majority of tickets are being (automatically) issued for "California stops" before a right turn on red, which studies have shown rarely contribute to an accident. TechDirt notes the apparent unconstitutionality of what Corona proposes to do: "The problem here is that Corona is shredding the Sixth Amendment of the US Constitution, the right to a trial by jury. By reclassifying a moving violation... to an administrative violation... Corona is doing something really nefarious. In order to appeal an administrative citation you have to admit guilt, pay the full fine, and then apply for a hearing in front of an administrative official, not a judge in a court. The city could simply deny all hearings for administrative violations or schedule them far out in advance knowing full well that they have your money, which you had to pay before you could appeal."

Comments

Re:direct CPU-CPU interconnects; Transputer?

[FCh]

Transputers had 4 HW links -- those are probably the easiest part to replicate in current processors.
The difficult part is the threading model: Transputers had their own thread model. Scheduler was hardwired in silicon, together with a couple of dedicated instructions. SW could not tell the difference between a local and a remote communication. Efficient, but not very flexible in terms of OS architecture.

Re:Genuine innovation

[antifoidulus]

By Genuine Innovation you mean "doing stuff Sun was doing well over a decade ago?" Sounds pretty innovative to me.

Slashcode is Farked...

[MadCow42]

How did I end up in the Windows 7 thread from the "CA City Mulls Evading the Law On Red Light Cameras" article? It even shows that in the address bar, so I'm not crazy here...

Wrong comments?

[edsousa]

What the hell is going here? I see a story about Corona CA evading the law on red-light cameras and comments (and tags) are about some MS story?

Re:"Green Arrow".

[godrik]

In the US (not all the state I think), there is turn-on-red which means you can always turn right (provided you are on the most right lane) but you must yield if the traffic light is red. Turn on red is the common thing and it is specified when it is forbidden. Whereas in France, the opposite is used : you can not turn unless the right green arrow is lit.

I believe the rule is turn on red in the US because the roads are new and built with good visibility. When there is no visibility turn on red is forbidden. Whereas in France at most intersections turn on red would be dangerous due to the lack of visibility. Therefore turn on red is the exception.

Other states do it as well

[guruevi]

(Red light story) - PA already does it in many cities/villages. You are required to pay a $50 non-refundable 'administrative' fee in order to be able to present your case to a judge and the judge will usually give you a reduction on the fine even if you have a good case (cop always wins). Given that the fines are somewhere between $75 and $150, it's not even worth going in.

NY does it also in large cities. You don't even go to a judge anymore, you go to an administrator at the Traffic Violations Bureau who decides how much you have to pay, no plea bargaining, no judges.