French policemen along a street in Paris. Check out the funky tricycle motorcycle, with the single wheel in the BACK!
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Red light cameras present several constitutional issues (due process, privacy statutes and possibly the 14th Amendment/equal protection clause) and they are ineffective.
Mayor Bill White defended the use of the cameras, which he has favored, saying they prevented even more wrecks. Critics, however, said that the city-financed study supports their contention that the cameras are more about generating revenue than making streets safer.
Violators photographed running red lights at the 50 intersections monitored by cameras get $75 tickets in the mail. Since September 2006, the cameras have led to at least 387,000 citations and generated more than $20 million in revenue.
“There is no scientific, documented proof that collisions are reduced with the red-light camera program,” said Mike Sullivan, a Houston city councilman who opposes the cameras. “I’ve maintained all along that the program was flawed.”
White said a 40 percent reduction in citations in October compared with the same month a year ago is “proof in the pudding” that drivers are heeding the cameras.
“Our goal is to reduce the number of people who are running red lights,” he said in Tuesday’s online edition of the Houston Chronicle.
“Collisions are going up all over the city,” Bob Stein, a Rice University political science professor and one of the report’s authors, said Monday. “But red-light cameras have held back that increase at approaches where they have been installed.”
The mayor and the study’s authors are recommending more cameras at some intersections for additional research but acknowledged that comprehensive citywide vehicle crash data are not available.
Stein also acknowledged that Houston police figures show that the accident rate is down since 2004 but said those data are unreliable because police don’t file reports on every crash.
Researchers plan to look at insurance industry data to bolster their findings. Those results are expected sometime next summer.
Austin has seven red-light cameras. Police statistics on four of the cameras show that accidents increased at two locations and remained the same at two. Accident information was not available for the other three cameras.
Source: Austin American Statesman
Cresting a small hill and urged along by a four-lane road with no stop lights for a mile, the 40 mph speed limit can come quick.
Vehicles on that road travel at speeds that easily average 50 mph, said one woman who works on South Memorial Drive. “I see excessive speed. I see drag racing,” said the worker, who asked not to be identified. “They are coming down the hill and they just aren’t watching their speed.”
But someone is.
A six-block stretch of South Memorial Drive between 51st and 61st streets ranks as the No. 2 spot for Tulsa police to write speeding tickets during a four-year period ending in May. The 2,321 speed-related tickets written in that area are among the 100,000-plus speeding citations written by Tulsa police in the last four years.
The No. 2 ranking for South Memorial Drive is among the findings in a Tulsa World analysis of traffic citation data made available to the public by Tulsa police as part of a federal racial discrimination lawsuit involving the Black Officers Coalition.
The data, which dates to 2004, is maintained on the TPD Web site and includes information about thousands of citations issued by police, including the race and date of birth of those cited, as well as where the violation occurred. The analysis excludes speeding citations that resulted in an arrest.
But while that portion of Memorial Drive keeps police busy, anyone who has driven the Broken Arrow Expressway near downtown enough times has probably seen where police are the busiest. Nestled in the median between the 1300 and 1700 blocks of the expressway, police stake out the area and snare motorists exceeding the 55 mph speed limit. Over the past four years, the near-downtown stretch of the Broken Arrow Expressway ranks as the No. 1 area in the city for TPD speeding tickets, with 3,739 citations issued during the past four years.
“Every traffic shift has anywhere from 20 to 30 officers on it,” said Sgt. Gabe Trevino, with the San Antonio Police Department. There are three shifts each day.
According to the study, the No. 1 spot to get a ticket was on Interstate 10 and West Avenue. The third most likely spot to be ticketed is also on Interstate 10 at Fresno Street. The second most likely spot to receive a ticket is on Interstate 35 and Malone Avenue.
Most tickets are issued between 2:30 p.m. and 4 p.m.
According to Trevino, Officer Jason Aicher is the king of ticket-writers. “First of all, he’s a motorcycle officer,” said Trevino. Aicher wrote more than 1,300 tickets in six months. (That’s about 10 per work day!) He often watches school zones, and gave out 13 percents of the tickets he issued in those areas.
More tickets are issued at the end of each month, leading some drivers like John Rodriguez to believe there may be a quota. “It was toward the end of the month, meet the quota,” Rodriguez said.
Despite the study showing the greatest number of tickets being written during the last week of the month, police said there is no quota. “We don’t tell them, ‘You need to go write a certain amount of tickets every single day,’ [or] ‘At the end of the month we want to see a certain number of tickets,’” Trevino said. “That’s not the case.” Police say ticket quotas are illegal.
Still, police generate a significant amount of revenue from fines — including speeding tickets. In the year ending Sept. 30, the San Antonio Municipal Courts reported receiving more than $26 million from fines. Police, however, say money is not the motive. There have been more than 100 traffic deaths this year, and police said catching speeders saves lives.
Source: KSAT.com
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