Chicago Red Light Cameras Issue Thousands of Bogus Tickets

mpicpp points out a report in the Chicago Tribune saying that thousands of the city's drivers have been wrongfully ticketed for red light violations because of "faulty equipment, human tinkering, or both." The Tribune's investigation uncovered the bogus tickets by analyzing the data from over 4 million tickets issued in the past seven years. Cameras that for years generated just a few tickets daily suddenly caught dozens of drivers a day. One camera near the United Center rocketed from generating one ticket per day to 56 per day for a two-week period last summer before mysteriously dropping back to normal. Tickets for so-called rolling right turns on red shot up during some of the most dramatic spikes, suggesting an unannounced change in enforcement. One North Side camera generated only a dozen tickets for rolling rights out of 100 total tickets in the entire second half of 2011. Then, over a 12-day spike, it spewed 563 tickets — 560 of them for rolling rights. Many of the spikes were marked by periods immediately before or after when no tickets were issued — downtimes suggesting human intervention that should have been documented. City officials said they cannot explain the absence of such records.

Comments

Re:just follow the rules people

[Anonymous Coward]

English language has rules, such as capitalization of the first letter in a sentence. FOLLOW THE RULES, BOOTLICK!

Re:Looks ok to me

[Anonymous Coward]

thousandsssssssss.

Impressive reading skills.

That places a maximum error rate of 999,999 out of 4,000,000 at 25%. That's still a perfectly acceptable margin of error.

Re:All branches of the government are corrupt

[Anonymous Coward]

What do they call what they're doing?

"Business as usual."

Re:just follow the rules people

[Quirkz]

I know "the city" is pretty big, but I don't believe it's made it all the way to Chicago, yet.