The moral hazard that comes from cities using fines for offenses to generate revenue is awful and despicable, and it causes all sorts of injustices, big and small. Red light cameras are a part of this, and they're awful.
Unsurprising given it's Chicago, but this is one of the hazards.
It is terrible that peoples' mistakes are used to fund a city. They really shouldn't. Furthermore anything that could reduce the fine aspect, say an advanced parking system that auto-charges you and warns you via text when you're close to your daily time limit, wouldn't make any money and would never get approved.
I use to be a sys admin for a debt collection firm; a company that was based entirely of making money from peoples' mistakes. I set up terminals for employees, many who were on welfare, to collect bad checks and credit card debt from other people who were also on welfare.
These types of revenue generators, whether they're run by a state or a private interest, rarely ever benefit society.
This is ridiculously conspiratorial. Traffic enforcement has a real benefit for people living in these cities who prefer not to be hit at intersections. Here's the conclusion of a study about the red light cameras (RLCs) in Chicago:
>Quantitative studies conducted in this project demonstrate significant safety benefits of the current RLC program. As a result, it is appropriate to recommend continuation of the program. Most of the intersections have experienced an improvement in safety, particularly in terms of severe angle and turn crashes, albeit with an accompanying increase in less severe rear-end crashes. The safety benefits extend beyond the immediate vicinity of the RLC intersections, evidenced by a significant spillover effect. However, some intersections appear to experience no significant safety impact. Recognizing that crashes are the result of complex interactions amongst many factors, and subject to considerable randomness, these deviations should be used as opportunities for detailed investigation and learning to design and deploy more effective automated enforcement programs
http://www.transportation.northwestern.edu/research/report-r...
Similar benefits have been demonstrated in NYC and other cities. Personally, I can't wait for speed cameras to see wider deployment, automated enforcement is our best chance to eradicate reckless driving. It also has the benefit of being unbiased (assuming they're deployed uniformly). Cameras don't make judgment calls about which motorists to pursue, so there's less room for discrimination by police officers.
>an advanced parking system that auto-charges you and warns you via text when you're close to your daily time limit, wouldn't make any money and would never get approved.
Some meters in Boston let you pay by phone, it can't be the only city, I'm sure stuff like this gets approved all the time.
Parking is an excellent example of why you need punitive fines, since it's expensive the fine has to at least be as higher than the legitimate cost of parking for it be an effective deterrent. There are already cities where people just "pay the ticket tax" and eat up on-street spaces to warehouse their cars. Being frank, if you're getting cheap (government subsidized) metered parking and not paying market rate, hundreds of dollars a month, you're getting a sweet deal and have no right to complain.
Parking enforcement benefits drivers who are looking for spaces, higher turnover on parking spots improves availability, and decreases traffic (fewer people on the street looking for spots). The incentive for city planners is to get people out of the spots, not trick them into "overstaying".
It was early Sunday morning in clear conditions, with clear visibility in all directions for about a quarter mile, not a car in sight. My trusty crapmobile had been stalling while resting at complete stops, and the destination was my mechanic's place, which was 100ft around the corner. Stopping at that light very well could have meant calling a tow truck to be towed 100ft, and I'd already made it about 25 miles with only minor issues at that point.
Well, I didn't see the red light camera that was newly-installed (let alone any notices for it), so I ended up with a $100 violation for rolling through a red at 5mph, issued via some company the local municipality contracted. You can't really argue context or circumstance with those people, since they're pretty much just call center employees ensuring that the video technically supports the violation. A stop-gap for the imperfect nature of their automation.
Ended up bitterly paying the $100. In retrospect, I wish a cop had stopped me instead, because there's about a 98% chance I would have gotten off.
The perverse aspect of the cameras is that in many states they don't count as moving violations, so that indicates it's not actually about safety but in fact revenue.
The way you tell this story, those $100 were absolutely justified.
When your car is stalled in the middle of the road, it can pose a danger to others.
You shouldn't be driving a broken car, and saying "well but the brakes work" doesn't make it okay.
As much as I enjoyed being put on trial here, I would have preferred to actually talk about red light cameras instead. Maybe next time stick to the topic, rather than derailing a large part of a thread with self-righteous moral pedantry.
He made a human decision, a judgement call, to roll through the stoplight: one that would have been supported by a police officer, who could also apply common sense to the situation. The traffic camera and bureaucracy, unable to apply any decision-making or judgement or common sense, is in the wrong here.
I'd also already blown through my tow insurance by having it towed several times to local shops who couldn't diagnose or correct the issue, so I'd have had to foot the bill for a long distance tow on something that three shops found no issue with, which was rather difficult being completely broke at the time.
The stalling was infrequent, not constant. I'm sure a lot of things are technically illegal, but it would depend on the state.
>Because your explanation sounds awfully like "Very sorry, office – I'm kinda in a hurry because I want to get rid of this body in the back before it starts smelling".
What? I'm starting to regret even sharing this story. :)
If it makes you feel any better, it was a small town, so the mechanic and local cops were friends. Seeing as I would've literally been pulled over outside of the mechanic's garage, and that common sense was in my favor anyways, I'm sticking with the 98% probability of getting off.
Even if you don't actually want to go to court, you can usually still write an answer. Then you can still propose a settlement more favorable to you by mail, if the case isn't dropped outright. Why pay $100 if you could pay $20 plus postage stamps?
The automated enforcement would completely fall apart if the contractor had to spend money on skilled human labor for every citation. So every time you get a ticket from a robot, write an answer, and request source code for the robot's software as discovery. People pay because they don't want the hassle, but when you just send in a check for automated traffic enforcement tickets, you are paying the Dane-geld, and will never be rid of the Dane.
"We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!" --R. Kipling, "Dane-geld"
(Not a lawyer. Not legal advice.)
Philadelphia has a number of red light cameras which each generate about 10,000 tickets a year. That's about 30 tickets a day for each camera, $100 per ticket. 12 cameras generate $9 million a year [1].
If 30 people are "running" the red light each day, does that say more about the drivers or about the setup of the red light?
[1] http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/traffic/transit/Red-Light-Cam...
People drive reckless, ignore speed limits, race over intersections in the last possible moment, ...
... and then it's an injustice when someone fines them?
The cameras don't care about your circumstances or safety, they only care whether you're over a line or not. Safety is just a sorta-value-added benefit that may or may not come with installation.
And that's what I mean by moral hazard. Revenue generation by these means changes the city's incentive. Rather than having traffic laws and enforcement designed to increase safety, you have laws and enforcement designed to turn the greatest part of your city's population into offenders as possible, in order to maximize your revenue generation, at the expense of public safety.
And it's an injustice because the well-off simply pay their fines and move on, while the poor end up trapped in a neverending cycle of fines and punishments, because the inability to pay the first fine leads to a cascade of involvement with a court system pressured to produce revenue, not justice or fairness.
1) https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/12/major-chicago-st...
You're misrepresenting the results of the study. The study recommended the continuation of the program. The rear-end collisions were less severe than types of collisions it reduced, it was a safety improvement overall.
From the findings section of the actual study (emphasis mine):
>Quantitative studies conducted in this project demonstrate significant safety benefits of the current RLC program. As a result, it is appropriate to recommend continuation of the program. Most of the intersections have experienced an improvement in safety, particularly in terms of severe angle and turn crashes, albeit with an accompanying increase in less severe rear-end crashes. The safety benefits extend beyond the immediate vicinity of the RLC intersections, evidenced by a significant spillover effect. However, some intersections appear to experience no significant safety impact. Recognizing that crashes are the result of complex interactions amongst many factors, and subject to considerable randomness, these deviations should be used as opportunities for detailed investigation and learning to design and deploy more effective automated enforcement programs
http://www.transportation.northwestern.edu/docs/research/RLC...
Similar benefits have been demonstrated in other cities. Doesn't mean it will work in every city, but there is evidence it works in Chicago.
I would perhaps phrase that as "citing the study released by an impartial third-party, not by the people who are engaging in the moral hazard and trying to justify their behavior" instead.
(Not that I'm convinced that these "injustices" people claim are more than anecdotes, or that there is an alternative to red light cameras that doesn't involve actual cops stopping people and the very real injustices of racial profiling and just-shooting-people we've recently seen in that practice.)