DANG! Why didn't WE think of that?!!??!?!?!?...........
Posted on 02/08/2017 12:47:05 PM PST by nickcarraway
Outside the Hall of Justice in Fremont, they line up before dawn, waiting to get into traffic court, many hoping to get a break on an expensive red-light camera ticket.
“I am definitely not looking forward to paying the $500,” said Rohan Kapuria, who got a ticket last October. “The yellows turned so fast to red that I didn’t have a chance to react,” he said.
That happened at Mowry and Farwell, a Fremont intersection that caught the attention of red-light activist Jim Lissner. “Sometimes you see something going on,” he said.
Lissner has made it a hobby to monitor red light cameras across the state. Recently he noticed a pattern of citations at Mowry and Farwell that he considered suspicious. It all started when a new state law required cities to lengthen their yellow lights for safety reasons, based on the actual speed of traffic rather than the posted speed.
On August 1, 2015 when the new law took effect, ticketing at the intersection dropped dramatically, to an average of 54 red light runners a month. Then, suddenly, the camera started churning out an average of 280 tickets per month from February through October 2016. Just as suddenly, the ticket count took a nose dive back down in November.
Lissner noticed a similar pattern up the street at Mowry and Blacow, where an average of 17 tickets per month spiked to an average of 177, then also dropped back down. “That raised alarm bells. Why did that happen?” Lissner wondered.
Sifting through documents he routinely requests from cities, Lissner discovered two sets of timing charts for the two intersections which he considers suspicious.
One shows the yellow lights timed at 4.7 seconds. There’s a line across the chart and the words “superceded.” The second set of charts shows the yellows timed at 4.0, with a handwritten note that the change was made on February 1, 2016. That happens to be the very same date the cameras started cranking out red light citations in record numbers. “They shortened the yellows. That is the smoking gun,” said Lissner.
Shorter yellows can lead to more red light tickets and potentially more revenue for the city. But, if they did shorten them here, there’s no sign of it now. We came here with a stop watch: both yellows are 4.7 seconds long.
So what happened?
“We had student interns that were helping us update the records,” said Hans Larsen, Fremont’s public works director. “Unfortunately, in a few cases, some of the information that was on those pieces of paper wasn’t accurate and doesn’t represent what was actually done out in the field at the traffic signals,” said Larsen.
He says even though it may look that way, the yellow lights were never actually shortened. People will hear that and say ‘oh really? Blame it on the intern?’ But Larsen insists: “What we are talking about is what is written on a piece of paper. I mean the issue here is, is the yellow timing out at the intersection in compliance with state laws? The answer is yes.”
As for the spike in tickets over nine months last year Larsen says it’s partly more traffic but also what he describes as the “rebound effect.”
“People will get used to ‘OK, well there’s more yellow time now, I will use as much of it as I can,'” he said.
Back at the courthouse, Rohan Kapuria wasn’t too hopeful the judge would give him a break when we checked in with him.
“If worse comes to worse I can do community service,” he said.
But who knows? After this report things could change.
Liberals who vote for Big Government are getting SCROOOOOD by Liberal Big Government.
And I’m supposed to care WHY, exactly?
They are NOT safety cameras. They are revenue generators.
those red light cameras are sugar daddies. They make that bread. Millions of it. They aren’t malfunctioning. They shorten the time on yellow lights to trap people. There are numerous studies that show that they actually cause accidents instead of prevent them. People slam on their brakes and get rear ended most commonly. A horrid scam.
Why...Union people and "poor people" were getting the tickets. In other words, the usual law breakers. I'd love to see the demographics.
It appears that any Union Workers that got a ticket got their tickets thrown in the basket....no fine and they kept no records.
It's one little dirty Dem city these days.
It’s pretty easy to notice a yellow light short. They had a couple in Rochester NY.
Yeah, mind of their own...and all the problems just happen to make more money.
The accuser in these situations are robots.
Subpoena the source code and threaten to publish it on the Internet.
The Toledo Blade did some research and discovered that the #1 recipient of tickets from speed cameras was.....
.....the City of Toledo.
Irony: The Mark of Quality Literature
DANG! Why didn't WE think of that?!!??!?!?!?...........
All it would take would be a couple of cell phone videos of the light cycles to confirm or deny the quick changes.
It actually worked for me once. I filed to have the source code released to mecso that it could be examined and give its “testimony”. The company dropped the case like a hot rock.
I don't know if that's true. My state used red-light cameras for a while under a pilot test program, then ditched it for a number of reasons. Every complaint had to be signed by an actual person who would effectively be the "plaintiff" in the case.
The best way to put an end to a red-light program is to convince everyone who gets a ticket to contest it in court. This forces the company that runs the program (and maybe even a police officer for that municipality) to send someone to court for the hearing. If enough people fought these tickets, the company would lose money just from paying the cost of having their employees working all the time.
Several states have established the minimum length of time that the yellow lights were on. It was done in the name of safety.
Camera companies and cities were cutting the length that the yellow lights were displayed to write more tickets.
It is very common for this to happen in states that don't set standards.
In Colorado, the legislature wanted to outlaw them, but our not-esteemed Gov Hickenlooper blackmailed the Dems to withdraw from the bipartisan partnership to do this, so the legislation was withdrawn.
In the mean time, these citations are merely civil issues here and are mooted in 90 days with zero consequence if you ignore their letters and dodge any attempted civil service, which I’ve done successfully in the past.
Also, if the photo of the driver doesn’t match the gender of the car’s owner, they won’t even send out the letters. I’ve often contemplated always wearing a gorilla mask the few times I’m forced to drive in the City of Boulder as a means of thwarting their photo ticket BS.
You are correct about the standards and that the lack was disgraceful.
It will be 39 years ago next month, while cruising the streets of Moline, IL, one night night with my future wife, that I rolled through a red on one of their busier streets. I immediately said to her, “wow that was a quick yellow!” , and at the same time made a quick scan of the intersection, hoping I would at least clear it before it turned green for the cross traffic (which is usually about a second after the red). Then I saw it. Sitting in a closed gas station was a squad car....
I was not happy. So, armed with a stopwatch and clipboard, I did some research, and found that the yellows on that street, where the posted speed limit was 35, were almost a full second shorter than other cities in the area with the same speed limit.
I fought it at court but the judge said he wasn’t responsible for the city engineering dept, and made me pay the fine, but didn’t have it put on my record, because I had a clean one at the time. I paid up, and moved on.
Short yellow lights cause deadly accidents.
Traffic court is as close to a kangaroo court you will find. Contest and prepare to spend a long time there. Attempt to show a tape and be challenged unless you have one taken when you got the ticket.
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