[Infowarrior] - Rise of the stealthy traffic camera fuels drivers' disgust

[Richard Forno]

Shudder speed
Rise of the stealthy traffic camera fuels drivers' disgust
By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 5, 2009

You rip open the envelope and there it is: Another darned photo- 
enforcement traffic ticket.

The photograph, the zoom-in on the tag, it's you, baby. Your car. Two  
weeks ago. Forty-one in a 30-mph zone.

It's from your favorite municipality. You can pay $40 now or $80  
later. You can also contest it, the infraction letter says, and that's  
a laugh. You remember seeing that the folks who went down to fight  
their automated tickets in Montgomery County got convicted 99.7  
percent of the time. Like a Soviet election, you think, a sham, a  
joke, and you, the chump in the parade.

There's something that doesn't smell right about these tickets, but  
you're not quite sure what.

Is it the huge profits the government and their cohorts, the camera  
manufacturers, make on them? The District doubling the number of  
tickets it issued just two years ago, raking in $36 million last  
fiscal year? The fact that Redflex, one of the big manufacturers of  
these cameras, posted a 48 percent jump in revenue last year while the  
rest of the economy tanked?

People get worked up. Put these cyborgs on a ballot, and the voters  
beat them to the pavement.

Three cities Tuesday -- two in Ohio, one in Texas -- voted to rip the  
things down. In College Station, Tex., the camera manufacturer and  
their subcontractors reportedly spent $60,000 campaigning to keep them  
in place, more than five times the amount raised by the opposition,  
and lost anyway. Voters in Chillicothe, Ohio, went against the cameras  
at a rate of 72 percent. In Heath, Ohio, the mayor got caught removing  
anti-camera campaign signs from an intersection. He, and the cameras,  
got sent packing.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/04/AR2009110404747_pf.html