Jeez, you can’t worry about a little collateral damage while in the process of collecting money from the public.
More junk science.
Pick a number and make it fit.
Time for a blizzard of FOIA requests and the emapanelment of a Grand Jury to investigage this 'mayor'.
L
Typical bureaucratic-political fraud.
Starts as a scientific study, ends as a political statement.
I’m confident that if these studies indicate that the cameras make intersections more dangerous, the cameras will be promptly taken down.
After all, the cameras are there for safety - the politicians said so.
Has nothing to do with revenue generation. Nothing at all...
(above is sarcasm for those who haven’t already figured it out)
They sent these data to the Abu Ghraib for statistics to be tortured into submission.
The Houston pols publishing this report submitted it to the IPCC to see if they might get a crack at drafting the next big global warming report.
For those of you who haven't seen these things yet, there is a bright flash when the camera goes off. It's enough to distract everyone traveling through the intersection, not just the subject being photographed. Imagine yourself driving along minding your own business when suddenly a strobe goes off in your eyes. You start looking around wondering what the heck it was and end up colliding with someone else doing the same thing.
This has been pretty well known for a while now. After installing the cameras some cities have also cut in half the time the yellow light stays on. The only purpose of the cameras is to increase revenue, safety is just smokescreen.
1Simply put, permissive yellow means you can enter the intersection under the yellow light but do not have to be clear of the intersection before the red comes on. (that's how I learned in Massachusetts but that's hardly the model state for safe drivers!). In a non-permissive state, you must clear the intersection before the signal changes to red - even if you entered the intersection under green! A non-permissive photo intersection gorges on a diet of permissive yellow trained drivers. Note that the shortening of a yellow to allow a second or so of all red exacerbates the trap nature of the intersection.
I daresay that these technical violations of a red light are not accident inducing for the most part, assuming the cross traffic is starting from a start and not barreling up to a red light in anticipation of an imminent green. Those are not your t-bone generators. OTHO, panic stops the instant the light turns yellow to avoid a ticket will cause the spike in rear-enders that the study seemed to find.
Solve the permissive / non-permissive mix and the revenue plan for most red light camera schemes falls apart.
IMHO
Screw the accidents. Let insurance pay for them. The city makes more money with the cameras. Let insurance pay for them.
Income vs. safety? Income wins.
Texas red-light cameras have another problem to deal with...
A couple years back, the PI lobby convinced the Private Security Bureau—the PSB is the state agency that regulates private investigators, security guards, etc.—to push through a law declaring that all digital forensic practitioners had to be licensed as PIs. They did this via language that required anyone collecting any kind of evidence to be a PI.
A few weeks ago, a Dallas-area judge threw out a camera ticket based on the fact that the operators of the camera system were collecting evidence without holding a PI license. Now camera tickets are being challenged all over the state. Stoopid laws giveth, and stoopid laws taketh away. (Yes, SIC on purpose.)
MM
Global warming and second hand smoke.
“Houston Mayor Bill White was furious when he saw the report’s draft text in August. He banned the document from publication and ordered a re-writing of the text that would reflect a more positive result. To accomplish this task, White was able to turn to the study’s primary author, Rice University Urban Politics Professor Robert Stein. Stein’s wife, Marty, is employed by the city of Houston as a top aide to the mayor. Stein’s newly revised report now concludes that “red light cameras are mitigating a general, more severe increase in collisions.””
This guy must write for the AGW crowd.
White, Houston’s mayor, is just your typical big city rat politican. He is all about expanding government, expanding taxes, creating more dependency. Oh, he is arrogant as all can be - imagine that.
I made the bold prediction when the study was first announced, that the end result would be supportive of red light cameras. Afterall, White has plans to expand their use for revenue generation, I mean, safety reasons.
Unfortunately, Texas suffers the standard problem that most states have - big cities are rat controlled, the rest of state republican. Fortunately, the rest of Texas is big enough to counter the cities, so far.
what to do...
more tax money? more deaths?
I am betting they figure out a ‘solution’ that keeps the tax money, and fails to address the deaths... THAT’s how the govt works!
What do you expect, Texas next US senator told us the critics just need to shut up. Like he did about so much else under his reign.
Houston Revenue scheme PING