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Astroturfing For Speed Cameras
New submitter dalosla writes "Chicago's mayor is pushing to change red light cameras near schools and parks into speed cameras. Just about everybody sees it as a cash grab by the city. Today's Chicago Tribune has an article about how the expanded speed camera program would benefit Redflex, the company Greg Goldner, one of the mayor's long time political supporters, lobbies for. This is of merely local interest, but of wider interest in the article would be information about Goldner's astroturfing for Redflex around the country. Redflex is the sole financial supporter for the Traffic Safety Coalition, a 'grassroots' organization to promote more traffic camera usage and fight any attempts to restrict such cameras. Goldner has already successfully facilitated the killing of one anti-camera ballot measure in Texas."
Say no more--oh, wait, just one more thing, that "Chicago mayor" is none other than Rahm Emanuel.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
For years Albuquerque had red light/speeding cameras at a lot of intersections. The public got tired of it, and the city council voted to drop the contract. After a long legal fight, the cameras finally got taken down.
Think that's the end of it? Hah.
See, because Redflex is a private citizen (thanks citizens united!), and not a governmental institution, the company couldn't file criminal cases against alleged speeders/red light runners, so any of the charges they brought forward were always civil cases. This also means that you don't have to go to court to fight the charges, pay any settlements, or essentially give a damn because no police officers saw the crime take place.
Why does this make a difference? Because Redflex was guaranteed something like 40% of the ticket price per incident. Which they're obviously not going to get. So what did they do? They sued the city for $4.5 million.
"The Chicago way," and it's been like that since at least prohibition. Chicago is perhaps the most corrupt city in the US. Note that both previous Illinois governors are in federal prison for corruption? Both are Chicagoans.
No politician in Chicago does anything whatever that his cronies don't get a cut of. It's horible, and unfortunately affects the rest of the state as well.
If everything north of I-80 were deemed a new state, most of Illinois' problems would go away.
Free Martian Whores!
Nobody ever suggests this, but maybe just don't speed. If nobody ever exceeded the speed limit except in a genuine emergency situation, there wouldn't be a rationale for this kind of response. I understood perfectly well why people would not want to obey the 55MPH speed limit on roads and in cars that were designed for 70, but now those places _do_ have a very reasonable and realistic 75MPH limit anyway. We're talking about surface streets in a very urban area, where the speed limit *should* be very low, and where large numbers of people choose to ignore that.
The accepted method in the UK is to loop an old tire over the camera, fill it with gasoline, and set fire to it.
http://www.speedcam.co.uk/gatso2.htm