Ross, Arthur wrote:
Red light running cameras have been considered in Madison. To make a long story short, we need enabling legislation from the state to grant us the ability to ticket the owner of the vehicle for these violations. Madison Police and others are working on this.
We have such cameras in Vancouver. There is a lot of controversy associated with them, some of it justified.
For one thing, motorists just hate them, and a promise of getting rid of these cameras was one of the things that helped elect the current "Liberal" provincial government. BC citizens have paid a heavy price for that in terms of reduced social and education spending and such absurd boondoggles as the 2010 Winter Olympics. But I digress.
Another issue has to do with accountability. What the camera needs to capture is a readable image of the license place. It also captures in imperfect image of the vehicle and the driver. But what the enforcement people know is only who is the registered owner of the vehicle, so that's who gets the ticket. Since this is a moving violation, there are insurance and license implications beyond the raw cost of paying the ticket. There is a complicated scheme for determining accountability, and having been through the process when our vehicle was loaned to a foreign visitor that triggered one of these violations, I have to say that I still don't understand it. It involves getting a certified statement from the actual perpetrator, et cetera.
Because the potential impact of a moving violation is severe, the law says that it's not enough for the government to mail the owner one of these violations-- if the owner doesn't respond within a certain period of time, enforcers have an interval within which to physically serve the citation before it is dismissed by default. Of course, they don't have the staff to do that reliably, so many of these tickets are simply ignored. Without saying how I know it, I can confirm that simply failing to respond is a fully effective way to avoid the not-so-long arm of the law. I'm far from the only motorist to have figured that out.
What's my point? I guess it's that while camera-based enforcement sounds like a great way to get enforcement on the cheap, in fact it has enough problems in the details that it is, in fact, a marginal way to get enforcement on the cheap.
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