by admin — published on October 17th, 2008
The City of Toronto moved today to clear up a backlog of more than a quarter-million parking tickets. But if you think the move will net the cash-starved city any additional revenue, guess again.
For the past couple of years, it’s been easy to make parking tickets disappear. A while ago I got an evil yellow flapper under my windshield wiper. I schelpped down to Metro Hall, 55 John Street, and asked for a court date. The attendant said, “you may or may not hear from us.” I haven’t heard from them.
In the past two years motorists have filed 250,000 requests to contest such $30 parking tickets, but only 4,300 have received trial dates. Today I looked up Barry Randell, Toronto’s Director of Court Services, at his office on University Avenue to find out what was going on.
Toronto’s 24 courtrooms — eight at Old City Hall, nine at 1530 Markham Road, and seven at 2700 Eglinton Avenue W., simply don’t have room to process those trials, Mr. Randell said.
“When you’re in the emergency department and you have a broken arm, you will get priority over someone with a sprained ankle,” he explained.
Even those with more serious offences (the ones that actually make it to trial) are benefiting from the court backlog. Today I popped into a traffic court on the third floor at Old City Hall and watched the Justice of the Peace, his worship Angelo Cremisio, withdraw or stay case upon case. In several cases the police officer who laid the charge has since resigned; in others, the judge accepted a Charter of Rights argument of “unreasonable delay” between the charge and the court date. He deemed 13 months’ wait unreasonable.
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by admin — published on August 28th, 2008
Police in Scottsdale, Arizona arrest a man for videotaping activists protesting a photo radar van.
Police in Scottsdale, Arizona arrested a man late Wednesday claiming he “obstructed” a photo radar van. Jason Shelton, 35, had been videotaping a pair of anti-camera activists at 6800 E. Shea Boulevard before being taken into custody. (This guy wasn’t even participating in the actual protest — He was only filming the protesters!!) The protesters held signs calling the speed camera program a rip-off and advertising the group CameraFraud.com in an impromptu demonstration. Shelton intended to post his video on Freedom’s Phoenix, an Arizona-based political opinion and news website. Enraged local officials did what they could to ensure that would not happen.
“The City of Scottsdale, including the police department, respects and protects an individual’s right to stage and/or participate in a lawful demonstration,” Scottsdale Police said in a statement. “However, behavior such as the intentional obstruction of a contracted photo enforcement van’s operation is not lawful and subject to enforcement action.”
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by admin — published on August 23rd, 2008
Legends abound about police radar guns picking up mailboxes going 50 miles per hour. But does that really happen? It might, if the officer using the gun isn’t properly trained on signal interference.
“I can point a radar detector directly at my air conditioner in my car and get a reading” from the fan, said Kevin Morrison, a public-safety product specialist with Decatur Electronics, the country’s oldest maker of radar guns.
“Weather can cut down on the radar’s range because rain obscures some of the radar signal,” Morrison said. As a result, you probably won’t encounter many speed traps in a downpour.
As mentioned, seemingly inanimate objects, such as your car’s fan, can screw up the machine, too.
But police are (or should be) trained to watch out for such problems. The easiest way to check for interference is by listening to the high-pitched whistling sound the radar gun makes, Morrison said. If the sound, known as an “audio Doppler tone,” rises and falls smoothly, there’s no interference. “If it’s broken and raspy, it’s not a clear return. It’s not a good signal coming in,” he said. The officer should be able to testify in court about the clarity of the gun’s sound.
But how does he or she know that you’re the one speeding, as opposed to the car in front of you or next to you? Morrison said this is another reason why the officer must see you speeding, as the gun, even when pointed in your direction, may be registering someone else’s speed.
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by admin — published on August 20th, 2008
The lights sitting atop traffic poles on W. University Avenue, in Gainesville, FL, glow white when the stoplights below them turn red and shut off when the lights turn green.
They mystified the whole Doria family as they waited at a red light at 13th Street and W. University Avenue while driving downtown for dinner recently, and Nickie Doria wrote to Since You Asked to find out why the white lights are there.
“We were all trying to figure out their purpose,” Doria wrote to Since You Asked. “Can you shed some light?”
Phil Mann, Gainesville’s traffic operations engineer, calls them “tattle-tale lights” for their ability to alert police that someone has run a red light, no matter where the police officer happens to be situated.
The white lights are wired directly to the power supply that makes the traffic light turn red, so they turn on as soon as the red light does.
“It’s a safety issue,” Mann said. “When officers are doing red-light enforcement, they have to see both the red light and the vehicle running it, which means having to do what? Run the red light themselves. The white lights are visible from 360 degrees, so the officer can sit downstream instead.”
Mann said a Florida Department of Transportation grant in 2006 let the city install the lights at five intersections. The city chose the five intersections where the most red-light running crashes occurred: W. University Avenue and 6th Street, W. University Avenue and 13th Street, W. University Avenue and 34th Street, Archer Road and SW 34th Street, and 69th Terrace and W. Newberry Road.
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by admin — published on August 19th, 2008
FORSYTH, Ga. — A Moultrie man has been forced to pay a $280 speeding ticket to Monroe County despite the fact that he was rushing his son to Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta for a life-saving kidney transplant.
Felton McCant Jr., 59, of Moultrie said he got a call from doctors on May 12 saying that a kidney had become available for his son. Time was of the essence because McCant was called only after the initial recipient was found to be too weak for surgery, said Dr. John Whelchel, head of transplantation at Piedmont Hospital. If the McCants could get to Atlanta quickly, the medical staff said, the kidney would be his.
McCant’s son, Felton McCant III, had been on the waiting list for a kidney after suffering a stroke, having his kidneys shut down and being partly paralyzed on his left side. So father McCant, who’s a veteran truck driver, called his local sheriff’s office in Colquitt County and asked what to do. They told him to turn on his headlights and hazard lights and if he was pulled over, to tell the officer what he was doing and he would have no problem. (That makes extraordinarily perfect sense!) With his ailing son in the back seat of their Cadillac Deville, McCant drove north from Moultrie up I-75.
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