Cool, thanks.
Paul M. wrote:
>Here's an even better article:
>
>Red-light cameras and the secret Gotcha! line.
>BY PATRICK BEDARD
>February 2002
>
>A certain stench hangs over the idea of bounty
>hunters. Behold the freebooting opportunist, pocketing
>profits for being just a hair quicker than cops to
>reach the prize. Or worse yet, for nabbing someone not
>worth a lawman's chasing.
>
>It gets even worse. Sometimes the law does a mutual
>back-scratching deal with the privateer, and they
>divvy up the loot.
>Which brings us to red-light cameras, a boondoggle
>that franchises bounty hunters, setting them up in the
>business of snooping out infractions too small to be
>seen with the naked eye. These are honey-pot deals
>where the city governments keep jacking up the take
>and rejiggering the split until there's profit enough
>to make both sides fat.
>
>When the flapdoodle over red-light running began to
>drown out the ball scores a few years ago, I called
>Tim Hurd at the National Highway Traffic Safety
>Administration. For every imaginable form of highway
>mayhem, he always has the latest body count.
>What did he have on red-light running? Exactly zip.
>NHTSA has never tracked it. Best he could do was
>fatalities within a few hundred feet of intersections
>(I've forgotten the exact distance). No smoking gun.
>In fact, no gun, period.
>
>Never mind the lack of evidence, NHTSA's sister
>agency, the Federal Highway Administration, was
>pumping money into one of those public-private
>partnerships that act as smoke-making machines for
>issues too weak to smoke on their own. Like those
>menacing green antifreeze puddles in parking lots,
>menacing because dogs love to lap them up. You'd never
>hear of such death threats if there weren't a
>public-private partnership making smoke over it.
>The name of this machine was "Stop Red Light Running,"
>a three-way among the Federal Highway Administration,
>the American Trauma Society, and DaimlerChrysler.
>Instead of facts, it had a fancy logo. From an address
>on Wacker Drive, in the heart of Chicago's advertising
>and PR district, it was belching out brochures and
>press releases and public-interest spots for radio and
>TV.
>
>In my driving, I rarely see red-light running. So I
>called the government guy on the project (Hurd gave me
>the number) and asked for details. "Are cars blowing
>right through full reds, or is this just stretching
>the green like always, now being whooped up to
>pandemic proportions?"
>He had no idea. His job was just to keep the machine
>smoking.
>
>The smoke is very good for red-light cameras. Lockheed
>Martin has been the 900-pound gorilla of the
>ticket-by-mail business. Its camera-enforcement
>division was sold this past summer for a cool $825
>million, prompting congressman Dick Armey, a Texas
>Republican, to say, "Consider[ing] they only get a cut
>of the entire ticket amount, you can see that
>red-light cameras are a multibillion-dollar industry."
>
>Two years ago I talked to Dana King, Lockheed's
>vice-president of marketing for photo enforcement. He
>allowed that the public is wary of photo radar. "Most
>folks speed a little." But they don't run red lights.
>And they have no tolerance for offenders. So he uses
>red-light cameras to get a foot into a community's
>door. After a year or two, up-selling to include the
>photo-radar package is as easy as saying, "May I?"
>
>Mesa, Arizona, is a fast-growing, slow-thinking burg
>on the outskirts of Phoenix, and it signed up for the
>full Lockheed Martin program in 1999, including five
>photo-radar vans and 13 intersections eyed by cameras.
>In the language of the bounty hunters, Mesa has 17
>camera "approaches," 11 straight through and six left
>turns.
>The red-light fine was set at $105, then hiked to
>$115. When the system became fully operational in May
>2000, it proved to be a money loser for the city. So
>that October, city officials jacked up fines to $170.
>In November 2000, the city's traffic-engineering
>department decided a three-second yellow was too brief
>for the lefts and increased the time to four seconds.
>Bam! Violations dropped 73 percent at left-turn
>intersections.
>
>The city's contract with Lockheed promised the bounty
>hunters a minimum of 18 violations per approach per
>day, or Mesa would have to pay a monthly fee of $2500
>for each low-yielding approach. In the early months of
>2001, 15 of the 17 approaches were hemorrhaging cash.
>
> Let's call this crop failure what it is a sturdy
>case of law-abiding traffic. Obviously, Mesa didn't
>have a problem.
>
>The town had started the program with lofty tones,
>allowing a 0.3-second grace period into the red, "so
>anyone ticketed was really guilty." Starting in April
>2001, adios, grace period. "It was believed this
>action might address the vendor's loss," said the city
>council report.
>In effect, Mesa had shortened its yellows to raise the
>take. It helped, but not enough. So the city and
>Lockheed set to renegotiating the contract. Instead of
>pocketing $48.50 for each paid violation, Lockheed
>would reap $73 for the first 900 each month, $65 for
>the next 300, then it was back to the original rate.
>The city also agreed to ease Lockheed's labor in
>writing out complaints, but if the vendor's costs
>didn't drop enough, the city promised to renegotiate
>again. Talk about a sweetheart deal!
>
>The sharp pencils at city hall said the new pact would
>raise its "break even" to about 2600 complaints each
>month (combined radar and red light) from 1800 before.
>But it planned to rejigger the law to give itself more
>time to serve complaints, "thus mitigating some of the
>negative fiscal impact."
>Just as casino odds favor the house, Mesa and Lockheed
>have rigged the cameras to favor themselves. On
>approach, first you cross the wide white "stop bar"
>painted on the pavement. You're supposed to stop
>before you reach it. Next comes the crosswalk. If you
>cross both on yellow, you think you're into the
>intersection and should continue through. Nope. Mesa
>flags a violation "when your car clears the second
>inductance loop" buried in the pavement, according to
>Mesa police officer Terry Gibbs. I checked with the
>system engineer. No, the system triggers when your car
>first breaks into the loop; so much for her court
>testimony. The cops are confused, and so are the
>drivers, because this Gotcha! line is completely
>unmarked.
>
>By making the Gotcha! line invisible, and by placing
>it long after the stop bar, Mesa does a late grab on
>cars at the tail end of the yellow, nabbing them when
>they think they're in the continue-through zone. Just
>a little trick to dig enough cash out of unsuspecting
>pockets to create a profitable business.
>They protest: This is a safety program. With a secret
>Gotcha! line? Yeah, right.
>
>=====
>Paul Misencik
>1971 MGB Vintage Race Project
>Huntersville, NC USA
>www.sopwithracing.com
>
>Learn the truth at www.misleader.org
>
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