Traffic Cameras Rife With Bogus Violations, Audit Shows [View all]
Source: ABC News
At an intersection in Baltimore, video shows a driver clearly stopped, but the unmanned speed camera cited the car, with brake lights on and traffic whizzing in front of it, for going 38 miles per hour in a 25 mile per hour zone.
It’s a costly mistake at $40 a ticket, and a pretty common one at that, according to an audit leaked to the Baltimore Sun that has the city council investigating.
An evaluation in 2012 by consultant URS Corp. of the camera system run by Xerox State and Local Solutions found an error rate of more than 10 percent, a figure 40-times higher than initial claims, The Sun reported.......
“If there is one thing we know about the power of markets is that if you give people financial incentives it will change their behavior, and so if you give companies an incentive to ticket more, lo and behold they will ticket more,” said Phineas Baxandall, a senior analyst with the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. “That is not really what this should be about. This should be about maintaining safety.”
Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2014/01/traffic-cameras-rife-with-bogus-violations-audit-shows/
Yet more reasons not to outsource a government function. When the hell should it be OK for a private company to write traffic tickets (and profit from them)? Note that I'm not inherently against traffic light cameras (not since a wonderful 8 year old child I knew was killed by a moron who ran a red light), but I'm vehemently opposed to a private for-profit company operating the things.
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