Astroturfing For Speed Cameras 342
New submitter dalosla writes "Chicago's mayor is pushing to change red light cameras near schools and parks into speed cameras. Just about everybody sees it as a cash grab by the city. Today's Chicago Tribune has an article about how the expanded speed camera program would benefit Redflex, the company Greg Goldner, one of the mayor's long time political supporters, lobbies for. This is of merely local interest, but of wider interest in the article would be information about Goldner's astroturfing for Redflex around the country. Redflex is the sole financial supporter for the Traffic Safety Coalition, a 'grassroots' organization to promote more traffic camera usage and fight any attempts to restrict such cameras. Goldner has already successfully facilitated the killing of one anti-camera ballot measure in Texas."
City overpaying? (Score:5, Interesting)
It appears that the cameras for this system are already in place, they just need a software update to judge speeds in addition to the red light function they already have. This should be cheap to do, so how much is the city of Chicago paying this politically connected man to do this? Is it a fair price, or payback for campaign contributions?
If I won the lottery... (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the things I would do is hire a statistician/economist to study speed/traffic enforcement and find out if law enforcement is even remotely performing enforcement relative to areas of high accidents. If its totally unrelated statistically, I'd hire a lobbyist (or maybe even a politician!) to publicly shame them for wasting money and just harassing people and possibly push for a law that would require the police to enforce traffic safety where there were actual problems with traffic safety. Maybe even make "speed traps" not in a state reported risk zone flat out illegal.
My guess is that 90% of police traffic/speed enforcement has literally nothing to do with traffic safety but instead is focused on where people are speeding (underutilized highways, in good condition, etc) and how easy it is to catch them (good hiding places, good weather, etc).
I've never heard of a police department doing an analysis on accidents, traffic volume, pedestrian volume and then choosing to focus enforcement efforts on areas where people actually have a lot of accidents related to traffic infractions.
I'm told by someone in law enforcement that in at least one upscale suburban community their speed enforcement on local streets has literally nothing to do with traffic safety -- they pick spots where people naturally speed by small margins (eg, 35 in a 30 zone) due to hills or lack of intersections for the express purpose of pulling them over, checking identification, and trying to get "easy" arrests for other offenses unrelated to traffic safety. Basically one step above a police state checkpoint.
Example in Italy, and a simple solution (Score:5, Interesting)
1. the community must actually buy the equipment in an open bidding contest;
2. payment for the equipment is upfront, and any variable fee, maintenance fee etc. is prohibited, to avoid the "tax farming" problem;
3.[this is the neat one] when writing the budget, the community is absolutely forbidden to write in a single penny of expected revenue from speed camera, and any revenue must be written in at the year end as general proportional tax credit for the citizens, and by citizens I mean the ones who paid the taxes to build the road in question; in the case of an Interstate, all the money goes to the federal government.
4. penalty for noncompliance is loss of eligibility for election or work in any goverment owned or controlled entity. If the decision was taken by a committee, all the members willbe subject to said penalty.
If you implement all these resolutions, the political morons will not put speed camera in place, because, to all intent and purposes, they cannot spend the money; to actually spend the speed tickets income as they like, they must first pass a rise in other taxes to accomodate that income, receive it, spend it , and then use the ticket fund to lower the taxation again without being able to move that money about at will. Moreover, they'll have to fight to own the roads, meaning being responsible for the upkeep, and liable for any defect.
Re:City overpaying? (Score:5, Interesting)
The cameras typically used (country wide, I have no specific knowledge of Chicago) can be set to trigger at virtually any speed on a permitted right turn on red [latimes.com]. So they can set it to catch a one mile per hour rolling stop, and issue a ticket even when there is zero cross traffic.
They are focused on small areas, the intersection. So the only place they monitor speed is in the intersection, and the only speeders they will catch there are the ones trying to beat the short yellows that have been put in place to raise revenue.
Going thru the intersection at 5 over to beat the light does not cause accidents, because cross traffic is already stopped, pedestrians are not permitted to be crossing at that time. Further the speeding can only occur when there is no traffic ahead, and the speeder will have to slow down as soon as they catch up to traffic.
In short, the only use case is to catch those trying to beat the short yellow.
This issue is starting to hit the main stream press in Chicago, and the mayor is currently in "no comment" mode over his relationship with Goldner. But Chicago being Chicago, this will probably be pushed through regardless.
How to disable these cameras for cheap (Score:5, Interesting)
A friend of mine discovered that it is trivially easy to blind one of these cameras.
From his local grocery store, he bought an empty sprayer bottle and some white glue (like Elmer's); this cost like three bucks. He mixed up a 1:1 solution of glue and water, then screwed his sprayer bottle's nozzle to the "stream" mode.
My friend started carrying one of those reusable grocery bags to the store. He'd just leave the sprayer bottle in it. Every time he went to the store, he'd walk up behind the red-light camera, stand just underneath it but still outside its field of vision, and then spray glue all over the lens.
Note that the red light camera systems usually have two cameras: one is a video camera, mounted higher up, which does detection; the lower camera is a high-res still camera, designed to capture the image of the license plate. You don't need to bother with the video camera; just blind the still camera. The system will still keep running, but the photos will be all blurred out and unusable.
My friend said that he'd walk by the camera two or three times a week, and the lens was usually cleaned off by the time he came back. That means that the red-light camera company was sending someone out to clean it, over and over, every week, costing the company lots of money.
My friend told me that someone once approached him in the grocery store and asked what he had been doing; they'd seen him spraying the camera and were curious what he was up to. When he explained how easy it was to disable a red-light camera, the person was delighted and decided to go start doing it herself, too.
Re:City overpaying? (Score:4, Interesting)
Many of these red light cameras have been driven out of town by proving they do not adhere to the national highway safety standard of 4-second yellow lights.
The cameras are deliberately defaulting (on installation) to 3 and 2 second yellows, to raise ticket revenue.
Once you force them to 4 second yellows, the company wants to pull out their cameras and install them in another town...
Re:Think of the children! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The West can fight this very, very easily... (Score:5, Interesting)
How about this: Set the speed limits sanely, then most people won't violate them.
When a road that should be 45 or 55 is set to 25 because some politicians' crotchety old grandma lives on that street and bitches or because some overconcerned parent with connections thinks that the whole world revolves around their children, it's the speed limit that is wrong and not those violating it. When a divided highway with good shoulders and large barriers is set to 55, it's the speed limit that's wrong and not those violating it.
Yes someone doing 120 in any of those cases is still in the wrong, but that's because they're exceeding the safe and proper speed for the road, which in almost all cases is somewhere between 10 and 35 MPH greater than the posted speed limit.
I don't have the references handy, but I've read a number of papers indicating that on average, people tend to drive the same speed on the same stretch of road no matter what the posted limit actually is. We know what feels right for the road and just do that. Whether the average road speed in clear traffic has anything to do with the posted limit is nothing more than an indication of how broken the politics are in that area. On that note, the D.C. metro area is a top offender here. Miles upon miles of smooth, wide, divided asphalt where the no-traffic comfortable cruising speed is 80-85, yet the speed limit is 55. If it's not gridlock, at least 80% of the vehicles on the road are doing 25+ over the limit.
Speed limits are necessary because we all know there'd be some people trying to do 150 everywhere if they weren't around, but don't try for a second to act like the limits commonly in place make a bit of sense.
Re:City overpaying? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's Obama's fault for being a puppet, then. Saying that it's his fault because he allows people to pull the strings is just the same as saying he's corrupt.
He could have put his foot down on any number of things at any point. He didn't.
Maybe it'd be hard to elect anyone else -- I voted for him because McCain/Palin is even scarier. But saying that he's not a rat bastard because the other guys are also rat bastards doesn't excuse him.