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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."
It appears that the cameras for this system are already in place, they just need a software update to judge speeds in addition to the red light function they already have. This should be cheap to do, so how much is the city of Chicago paying this politically connected man to do this? Is it a fair price, or payback for campaign contributions?
This will probably continue for the same reason DUI laws keep getting more draconian - everyone is scared that if they speak against it they will be lambasted as uncaring assholes - which doesn't make for good campaigning. And good luck fighting any tickets you receive in a school zone, you insensitive bastard. You''re putting all of our kids at risk!
... or, really, anywhere with a ballot initiative process.
Citizens should push for ballot initiatives that require that all money collected for traffic and parking offenses goes back to the citizens as a tax credit. This should have broad popular support in most places.
Yeah, the police/DoT would have to raise taxes to replace the lost revenue... but it would create a system where they have no fiscal incentive to engage in highway robbery, which is what traffic enforcement these days amounts to.
Political patronage in Chicago?
I'm shocked!
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.
One of the things I would do is hire a statistician/economist to study speed/traffic enforcement and find out if law enforcement is even remotely performing enforcement relative to areas of high accidents. If its totally unrelated statistically, I'd hire a lobbyist (or maybe even a politician!) to publicly shame them for wasting money and just harassing people and possibly push for a law that would require the police to enforce traffic safety where there were actual problems with traffic safety. Maybe even make "speed traps" not in a state reported risk zone flat out illegal.
My guess is that 90% of police traffic/speed enforcement has literally nothing to do with traffic safety but instead is focused on where people are speeding (underutilized highways, in good condition, etc) and how easy it is to catch them (good hiding places, good weather, etc).
I've never heard of a police department doing an analysis on accidents, traffic volume, pedestrian volume and then choosing to focus enforcement efforts on areas where people actually have a lot of accidents related to traffic infractions.
I'm told by someone in law enforcement that in at least one upscale suburban community their speed enforcement on local streets has literally nothing to do with traffic safety -- they pick spots where people naturally speed by small margins (eg, 35 in a 30 zone) due to hills or lack of intersections for the express purpose of pulling them over, checking identification, and trying to get "easy" arrests for other offenses unrelated to traffic safety. Basically one step above a police state checkpoint.
I like how you propose "don't speed" as a solution, while simultaneously saying you got a speeding ticket you didn't deserve.
So apparently "don't speed" isn't actually a valid defense.
I wonder if it has already been tried in the US of A, but there's a solution to this speed camera problem, which is widespread here in Italy:
1. the community must actually buy the equipment in an open bidding contest;
2. payment for the equipment is upfront, and any variable fee, maintenance fee etc. is prohibited, to avoid the "tax farming" problem;
3.[this is the neat one] when writing the budget, the community is absolutely forbidden to write in a single penny of expected revenue from speed camera, and any revenue must be written in at the year end as general proportional tax credit for the citizens, and by citizens I mean the ones who paid the taxes to build the road in question; in the case of an Interstate, all the money goes to the federal government.
4. penalty for noncompliance is loss of eligibility for election or work in any goverment owned or controlled entity. If the decision was taken by a committee, all the members willbe subject to said penalty.
If you implement all these resolutions, the political morons will not put speed camera in place, because, to all intent and purposes, they cannot spend the money; to actually spend the speed tickets income as they like, they must first pass a rise in other taxes to accomodate that income, receive it, spend it , and then use the ticket fund to lower the taxation again without being able to move that money about at will. Moreover, they'll have to fight to own the roads, meaning being responsible for the upkeep, and liable for any defect.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
A friend of mine discovered that it is trivially easy to blind one of these cameras.
From his local grocery store, he bought an empty sprayer bottle and some white glue (like Elmer's); this cost like three bucks. He mixed up a 1:1 solution of glue and water, then screwed his sprayer bottle's nozzle to the "stream" mode.
My friend started carrying one of those reusable grocery bags to the store. He'd just leave the sprayer bottle in it. Every time he went to the store, he'd walk up behind the red-light camera, stand just underneath it but still outside its field of vision, and then spray glue all over the lens.
Note that the red light camera systems usually have two cameras: one is a video camera, mounted higher up, which does detection; the lower camera is a high-res still camera, designed to capture the image of the license plate. You don't need to bother with the video camera; just blind the still camera. The system will still keep running, but the photos will be all blurred out and unusable.
My friend said that he'd walk by the camera two or three times a week, and the lens was usually cleaned off by the time he came back. That means that the red-light camera company was sending someone out to clean it, over and over, every week, costing the company lots of money.
My friend told me that someone once approached him in the grocery store and asked what he had been doing; they'd seen him spraying the camera and were curious what he was up to. When he explained how easy it was to disable a red-light camera, the person was delighted and decided to go start doing it herself, too.
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
Yes. Breaking the law is always reckless. Well said, comrade.
I once sat at a red light that refused to change for five hours before finally a police officer came and granted me permission to go across the otherwise empty intersection. And rather than go a perfectly safe 5MPH over the speed limit, I always drive 5MPH under the speed limit to make sure I don't ever, ever cross over. And I have my speedometer calibrated weekly. I also check to make sure my signals are working every time I get in the car. Sometimes, on trips lasting more than 5 minutes, I'll pull over into a parking lot and check my signals again.
Can you believe there are maniacs out there who don't do these things?!
something that's supposed to be an informed estimation of the maximum safe rate of travel under ideal conditions (high visibility, dry pavement, etc.).
This is the part where you're several decades out of touch. As has been demonstrated in numerous jurisdictions with shortened yellow lights, arbitrarily reduced speed limits in areas with heavy enforcement are a well-known cash cow as well. Ever driven through a "safety corridor" with a 10mph lower limit than the surrounding freeways, even though it has the exact same road conditions and traffic levels? It's not about safety, it's about money. If it were about safety, ALL the highways would be lowered by 10mph. But then they wouldn't know where to put the speed traps. Incidentally, I do slow down for those corridors, despite all the cars whizzing past me. And despite your herp UR A SPEEDUR derp, I haven't been pulled over for speeding since 1991. Being against speed cameras doesn't make one a speeder, any more than being against the Patriot Act makes one a terrorist.