Unsurprising given it's Chicago, but this is one of the hazards.
It is terrible that peoples' mistakes are used to fund a city. They really shouldn't. Furthermore anything that could reduce the fine aspect, say an advanced parking system that auto-charges you and warns you via text when you're close to your daily time limit, wouldn't make any money and would never get approved.
I use to be a sys admin for a debt collection firm; a company that was based entirely of making money from peoples' mistakes. I set up terminals for employees, many who were on welfare, to collect bad checks and credit card debt from other people who were also on welfare.
These types of revenue generators, whether they're run by a state or a private interest, rarely ever benefit society.
This is ridiculously conspiratorial. Traffic enforcement has a real benefit for people living in these cities who prefer not to be hit at intersections. Here's the conclusion of a study about the red light cameras (RLCs) in Chicago:
>Quantitative studies conducted in this project demonstrate significant safety benefits of the current RLC program. As a result, it is appropriate to recommend continuation of the program. Most of the intersections have experienced an improvement in safety, particularly in terms of severe angle and turn crashes, albeit with an accompanying increase in less severe rear-end crashes. The safety benefits extend beyond the immediate vicinity of the RLC intersections, evidenced by a significant spillover effect. However, some intersections appear to experience no significant safety impact. Recognizing that crashes are the result of complex interactions amongst many factors, and subject to considerable randomness, these deviations should be used as opportunities for detailed investigation and learning to design and deploy more effective automated enforcement programs
http://www.transportation.northwestern.edu/research/report-r...
Similar benefits have been demonstrated in NYC and other cities. Personally, I can't wait for speed cameras to see wider deployment, automated enforcement is our best chance to eradicate reckless driving. It also has the benefit of being unbiased (assuming they're deployed uniformly). Cameras don't make judgment calls about which motorists to pursue, so there's less room for discrimination by police officers.
>an advanced parking system that auto-charges you and warns you via text when you're close to your daily time limit, wouldn't make any money and would never get approved.
Some meters in Boston let you pay by phone, it can't be the only city, I'm sure stuff like this gets approved all the time.
Parking is an excellent example of why you need punitive fines, since it's expensive the fine has to at least be as higher than the legitimate cost of parking for it be an effective deterrent. There are already cities where people just "pay the ticket tax" and eat up on-street spaces to warehouse their cars. Being frank, if you're getting cheap (government subsidized) metered parking and not paying market rate, hundreds of dollars a month, you're getting a sweet deal and have no right to complain.
Parking enforcement benefits drivers who are looking for spaces, higher turnover on parking spots improves availability, and decreases traffic (fewer people on the street looking for spots). The incentive for city planners is to get people out of the spots, not trick them into "overstaying".
It was early Sunday morning in clear conditions, with clear visibility in all directions for about a quarter mile, not a car in sight. My trusty crapmobile had been stalling while resting at complete stops, and the destination was my mechanic's place, which was 100ft around the corner. Stopping at that light very well could have meant calling a tow truck to be towed 100ft, and I'd already made it about 25 miles with only minor issues at that point.
Well, I didn't see the red light camera that was newly-installed (let alone any notices for it), so I ended up with a $100 violation for rolling through a red at 5mph, issued via some company the local municipality contracted. You can't really argue context or circumstance with those people, since they're pretty much just call center employees ensuring that the video technically supports the violation. A stop-gap for the imperfect nature of their automation.
Ended up bitterly paying the $100. In retrospect, I wish a cop had stopped me instead, because there's about a 98% chance I would have gotten off.
The perverse aspect of the cameras is that in many states they don't count as moving violations, so that indicates it's not actually about safety but in fact revenue.
Even if you don't actually want to go to court, you can usually still write an answer. Then you can still propose a settlement more favorable to you by mail, if the case isn't dropped outright. Why pay $100 if you could pay $20 plus postage stamps?
The automated enforcement would completely fall apart if the contractor had to spend money on skilled human labor for every citation. So every time you get a ticket from a robot, write an answer, and request source code for the robot's software as discovery. People pay because they don't want the hassle, but when you just send in a check for automated traffic enforcement tickets, you are paying the Dane-geld, and will never be rid of the Dane.
"We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!" --R. Kipling, "Dane-geld"
(Not a lawyer. Not legal advice.)
The way you tell this story, those $100 were absolutely justified.
Philadelphia has a number of red light cameras which each generate about 10,000 tickets a year. That's about 30 tickets a day for each camera, $100 per ticket. 12 cameras generate $9 million a year [1].
If 30 people are "running" the red light each day, does that say more about the drivers or about the setup of the red light?
[1] http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/traffic/transit/Red-Light-Cam...
People drive reckless, ignore speed limits, race over intersections in the last possible moment, ...
... and then it's an injustice when someone fines them?
And that's what I mean by moral hazard. Revenue generation by these means changes the city's incentive. Rather than having traffic laws and enforcement designed to increase safety, you have laws and enforcement designed to turn the greatest part of your city's population into offenders as possible, in order to maximize your revenue generation, at the expense of public safety.
And it's an injustice because the well-off simply pay their fines and move on, while the poor end up trapped in a neverending cycle of fines and punishments, because the inability to pay the first fine leads to a cascade of involvement with a court system pressured to produce revenue, not justice or fairness.
1) https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/12/major-chicago-st...
The cameras don't care about your circumstances or safety, they only care whether you're over a line or not. Safety is just a sorta-value-added benefit that may or may not come with installation.
(Not that I'm convinced that these "injustices" people claim are more than anecdotes, or that there is an alternative to red light cameras that doesn't involve actual cops stopping people and the very real injustices of racial profiling and just-shooting-people we've recently seen in that practice.)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/12/major-chicago-st...
..because most people don't want to intentionally run red lights.
Furthermore, most cities run these as civil violations, but if you take them to court, the courts run them under criminal procedures. IANAL, but there was an excellent post someone shared on HN a few weeks back where a law professor fought one of these tickets (I can't seem to find it right now). He wasn't driving, but felt the burden of proof shouldn't reside with him, but the state.
He lost his case, had to appeal, won that case and was never given any of the bond he issued to appeal.
These tickets don't add points to your license in most states, their safety improvements are questionable, and they're pretty much a money making racket for cites and the companies that make/run the cameras.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/01/op-ed-how-i-turn...
Yes, it is.
> You're not more likely to get a ticket in a poorer, more high crime neighborhood, just because there happen to be more police there.
IME, you (the same person) are more likely to get a traffic ticket in a rich, low-crime neighborhood, because the police that are there are more likely to be concerned with writing traffic tickets.
People who live in poorer, high-crime areas are more likely to get tickets (in either poor or rich neighborhoods), but that's a different problem. (And, unlike the one you identify, one that automation might actually help.)
But, in any case, there's as much opportunity for bias (and by the same people) in placing devices that automatically issue tickets as their is in placing officers, plus automated devices don't mean that human officers can no longer issue tickets, so no matter which direction it operates in, the source of bias you identify (that is, inequity based on choices of deployment of officers) is not addressed by automation.
See: cars parked brazenly illegally are rarely beaters.
These types of "democratizations" usually leave the poor even worse off, where they have no extra-legal wiggle room (chat with the cop) and no intra-legal resources.
See: Modern credit cards, mobile phone billing, etc.
Look at what redlining hath wrought:
The busiest roads (and thus those most likely to get cameras) are fed by those who are commuting into town to a day job; not by those who live in-town. This immediately creates a bias based on income; the larger the city and the higher the costs of living in the city, the bigger the bias.
These decisions are also made by different groups of people, and a city's elected leadership tends to better reflect the population's diversity than the police department.
Why is there a need for a grace period? The yellow is all the grace period you need. If you speed up for or ignore the yellow with time to stop, you're already breaking the law...
Not that I'm a fan of the system at all - just, if you're going to do it, do it ... u know?
If the signal exhibits a steady yellow indication, vehicular traffic facing the signal shall stop before entering the nearest crosswalk at the intersection or at a limit line when marked, but if the stop cannot be made in safety, a vehicle may be driven cautiously through the intersection.
Edit: Found the relevant Illinois law 625 ILCS 5 Sec. 11-306 (a)1.:
Vehicular traffic facing a steady circular yellow or yellow arrow signal is thereby warned that the related green movement is being terminated or that a red indication will be exhibited immediately thereafter.
Well it is much more dangerous to cross an intersection 20 seconds after the light turns red compared to 0.2 seconds.
Maybe it's just where I live but it seems like law enforcement is more focused on revenue generation.
Now I can definitely see how automated enforcement ripe for abuse when there are revenues to be had, and it's concerning when operations like this are given to private companies with little to no transparency. But given those concerns can be resolved, what's the problem at a constitutional level?
OTOH, since you can sue property (for example in asset forfeiture cases), that might not hold any water.
Most of these cameras can't demonstrate that the owner of the car was the one driving at the time. In a criminal court that'd be plenty of reasonable doubt, but red light tickets (at least around here) are handled as civil manners that go to collections agencies if unpaid to circumvent that issue.
They didn't say they thought it was unconstitutional. They said they thought it should be unconstitutional.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-red-light-camera-ticke...
If you search around, there's tons of cities that were caught manipulating the timing on the cameras to increase the number of tickets.
Are you going to call the camera into court for questioning? Are they going to let a third party audit the code that runs the timers?
They simply won't be making that 17mm off of people.