Posted on 05/13/2013 5:51:35 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
What do speed traps, parking tickets, toll roads, speed cameras and red light cameras all have in common? They are all major revenue sources for state and local governments.
All over America today there are state and local governments that are drowning in debt. Many have chosen to use "traffic enforcement" as a way to raise desperately needed revenue. According to the National Motorist Association, issuing speeding tickets raises somewhere between 4.5 billion and 6 billion dollars in the United States each year. And the average price of a speeding ticket just keeps going up. Today, the national average is about $150, but in many jurisdictions it is far higher.
For example, more than 16 million traffic tickets are issued in the state of California each year, and the average fine is approximately $250. If you are wealthy that may not be much of a problem, but if you are a family that is barely scraping by every month that can be a major financial setback. Meanwhile, America's roads are also being systematically transformed into a surveillance grid.
The number of cameras watching our roads is absolutely exploding, and automated license plate readers are capturing hundreds of millions of data points on all of us. As you drive down the highway, a police vehicle coming up behind you can instantly read your license plate and pull up a whole host of information about you. This happened to me a few years ago. I had pulled on to a very crowded highway in Virginia and within less than a minute a cop car had scanned me and was pulling me over because one of my stickers had expired. But these automated license plate readers are being used for far more than just traffic enforcement now. For example, officials in Washington D.C. are now using automated license plate readers to track the movements of every single vehicle that enters the city. They know when you enter Washington, and they know when you leave. So where is all of this headed? Do we really want to live in a "Big Brother" society where the government constantly tracks all of our movements?
Back in the old days, the highways of America were great examples to the rest of the world of the tremendous liberties and freedoms that we enjoyed. Americans loved to hop into their vehicles and take a drive. But now government is sucking all of the fun out of driving. The control freak bureaucrats that dominate our political system have figured out that giant piles of money can be raised by turning our roads into revenue raising tools.
At this point things have gotten so bad that even some police officers are admitting what is going on. Just check out what a few of them told Car and Driver...
The president of a state police union isn’t pretending it doesn’t happen. James Tignanelli, president of the Police Officers Association of Michigan union, says, “When elected officials say, ‘We need more money,’ they can’t look to the department of public works to raise revenues, so where do they find it? Police departments.
“A lot of police chiefs will tell you the goal is to have nobody speeding through their community, but heaven forbid if it should actually happen—they’d be out of money,” Tignanelli says.
Police Chief Michael Reaves of Utica, Michigan, says the role of law enforcement has changed over the years. “When I first started in this job 30 years ago, police work was never about revenue enhancement, but if you’re a chief now, you have to look at whether your department produces revenues,” he says. “That’s just the reality nowadays.”
And as the economy has gone downhill, many jurisdictions have massively jacked up traffic fines. According to the Los Angeles Times, various traffic fines in the Los Angeles area are far higher than they once were...
If you're caught running a red light in Los Angeles, be prepared to shell out $446, up from $271 eight years ago. Make a rolling right turn at a stoplight and the ticket comes to $381 -- more than double what it cost in 2008.
And of course the cost to the driver does not end with the ticket. Your car insurance will likely go up as well. In fact, one study found that a driver that just gets one speeding ticket will pay an additional 20 percent for car insurance for the next three to six years.
That can add up to a lot of money.
But politicians just keep wanting to find a way to issue even more tickets. One of the hottest trends all over the country is to automate the issuing of traffic tickets by installing cameras. According to USA Today, this has become a huge growth industry...
Sales of the cameras have nearly quadrupled since companies moved to digital and wireless technology in the mid-2000s. The number of local contracts for cameras was up to 689 last year, from 155 in 2005, according to industry data complied by market leader American Traffic Solutions (ATS).
And these automated traffic cameras can raise an enormous amount of cash. Just check out what has been happening in Washington D.C....
The speeding and traffic light cameras have become more lucrative as their number in the District has increased. Combined, they issued tickets valued at $24.4 million in 2007. That figure more than doubled by 2010, to $50.9 million, and it reached $84.9 million in the last fiscal year.
But as annoying as those traffic cameras are, automated license plate readers are perhaps even more insidious.
The amount of data that these automated license plate readers are capturing is astounding. The following is from a recent article by the Electronic Frontier Foundation...
Photographing a single license plate one time on a public city street may not seem problematic, but when that data is put into a database, combined with other scans of that same plate on other city streets, and stored forever, it can become very revealing. Information about your location over time can show not only where you live and work, but your political and religious beliefs, your social and sexual habits, your visits to the doctor, and your associations with others. And, according to recent research reported in Nature, it’s possible to identify 95% of individuals with as few as four randomly selected geospatial datapoints (location + time), making location data the ultimate biometric identifier.
Our license plates have essentially become "our papers" which the government can read whenever it would like without even asking for our permission.
According to L.A. Weekly, local police agencies in the L.A. area have captured more than 160 million data points on private citizens using these automated license plate readers...
L.A. Weekly has learned that more than two dozen law enforcement agencies in Los Angeles County are using hundreds of these "automatic license plate recognition" devices (LPRs) — units about the size of a paperback book, usually mounted atop police cruisers — to devour data on every car that catches their electronic eye.
The L.A. County Sheriff's Department and the Los Angeles Police Department are two of the biggest gatherers of automatic license plate recognition information. Local police agencies have logged more than 160 million data points — a massive database of the movements of millions of drivers in Southern California.
Each data point represents a car and its exact whereabouts at a given time. Police have already conducted, on average, some 22 scans for every one of the 7,014,131 vehicles registered in L.A. County.
As the use of these devices becomes more widespread and they become even more sophisticated, eventually the government will know where almost all of us are and what almost all of us are doing at all times.
The following is a brief except from a Washington Post article that detailed how automated license plate readers are now being used to create a "dragnet" that will track the movements of all vehicles from the time that they enter Washington D.C. to the time that they leave...
More than 250 cameras in the District and its suburbs scan license plates in real time, helping police pinpoint stolen cars and fleeing killers. But the program quietly has expanded beyond what anyone had imagined even a few years ago.
With virtually no public debate, police agencies have begun storing the information from the cameras, building databases that document the travels of millions of vehicles.
Nowhere is that more prevalent than in the District, which has more than one plate-reader per square mile, the highest concentration in the nation. Police in the Washington suburbs have dozens of them as well, and local agencies plan to add many more in coming months, creating a comprehensive dragnet that will include all the approaches into the District.
This is just the beginning.
For now, as long as you carefully obey all traffic laws and you don't work in a major city like Washington D.C., the changes that are happening probably do not affect you too much.
But the key is to see where all of this is going. Our roads are slowly but surely being transformed into a revenue generating control grid. And this is just yet another example of how government feels the need to constantly watch, monitor, track and regulate everything that we do.
Does anyone else feel like the life is slowly being choked out of our society, or am I alone?
I live in L.A., and let me tell you, riding the bus is beginning to feel like a subversive act of defiance. Which makes it far more palatable.
The red light cameras are a major scandal in a lot of jurisdictions. One survey in New Jersey found that most of the red light camera tickets weren't people simply blowing through red lights, but rather, turning on red where they were permitted to do so, but the issue was that they did not stop for a certain number of seconds before they made the turn. Its a complete scam and does little to actually improve safety. Its all about, as this article says, generating money for cash-hungry municipalities that can't or don't want to control their spending.
yep just got my first ticket in 28 years. ran a yellow mothers day.
158.00 ticket. did this sunday. ticket in mailbox today. how is that possible. 1 day. happened sun. delivered monday?
To bad for those cameras that see you get on and off the bus!
Buses in many cities have cameras inside and outside.
I guess that I'll have to start using a plate cover that has the Chief of Police's wife's plate info.
> ...how is that possible. 1 day. happened sun. delivered monday?
Maybe the tickets are printed directly by the camera system on a printer at the post office nearest the recipient.
Riding the bus makes you the perfect gov't subject.
You are obviously not paying your FAIR share...
When the public allowed scumbag insurance men in legislatures around the nation to tie speeding & other auto tickets to fines that stayed on you insurance bills for up to 5 years I knew my fellow citizens just did not care much about freedom any longer.
welcome to the type of extortion practices we truckers have been putting up with forever but more so for the past 20 years
maybe they should do this for tax refunds too.
And why is the revenue ‘desperately needed?’ To pay the salaries, especially juicy overtime, the benefits, and the gold plated pensions of police and firemen who retire at age 50 on full salary or near to it!
You are trying together from A to B but your benevolent government thinks you are just an ATM.
Revenue is also needed because gas taxes are used as a slush fund by states to pay for everything other than roads and bridges, including green energy boondoggles and choo choo trains.
Despite the mountains of evidence such as this article, we still have far too many hand-wringers, including many FReepers alas, who still believe that speed limits, anti-texting laws, seatbelt laws, DUI checkpoints etc. are about SAAAAFETY.
The Governor’s Highway Safety Program? Governor is a state office but the money is coming straight from DC. And of course there are strings attached. All funding for police overtime is earmarked only for DUI enforcement. Drugs, murder, rape, burglary? You’ll get a nice shrug of the shoulders when the police arrive hours later.
Sure would be nice if conservatives would STOP BITCHING about having the gas tax keep up with inflation...
RE: I live in L.A., and let me tell you, riding the bus is beginning to feel like a subversive act of defiance.
Well, that’s probably what they want... the better to lessen traffic.
Oh, there are cameras everywhere in LA... bus or car, you’re on film. But at least they aren’t generating much revenue out of me.
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