Quote:
Originally Posted by tasdrouille
Again, the problem is not the cameras, it's the people running them.
If the ticket is the same price as if given by an officer, if the yellow light duration is standard, and if the ticket is emitted only when the light turns red before your front wheel pass the stop line, where's the problem?
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That's a nice hypothetical, but in reality, that's not what happens. Very often the yellow is legally too short, and the cameras set to take the picture before the light turns fully red. Here's an example:
This picture is from a red-light camera in Cerritos, about 20 miles from me. The LED light at the top is red, and the incandescent one on the right is still yellow. That's too short an elapsed time.
An officer uses judgment to decide whether to give a ticket. He won't ticket somebody for entering the intersection so close to the red that the light hasn't even fully lit yet. If a car goes through a red because the truck behind him has locked up his tires and is about to hit him, the officer will ticket the truck. If the straight-through lane is blocked by a wreck, and the only way through (on a straight-through green light) is to use the left-turn lane and continue straight-through, the officer won't ticket the people (and probably will be waving them through.) The camera will ticket all of these, and the drivers (if they even noticed they were flashed--another benefit of being ticketed by an officer is you can note the circumstances for later use in court) will have to fight in a courtroom where, if they are given a chance to even speak to their defense, will have no defensive eyewitness (in the case of being tailed by a truck with locked-up wheels), and will not be able to face their accuser.
If a guy is driving a stolen car and runs ten lights, an officer will arrest him after running the first one and recover the stolen car. The red light cameras will just send the car's owner $4,250 worth of red light tickets.
Again, if the camera operators were required by law to have reasonable yellow times and not ticket drivers who run the light by < 0.5 seconds, I would have less of a problem with them. But these requirements would make the cameras unprofitable.