Red Light Camera: PLACEMENT AND PUBLISHING

Is Your Camera Ticket A Fake?

This scenario was initially specific to the state of California, but with the expansion of ticket cameras into Arizona, the same scheme has surfaced there as well.

If your red light camera "ticket" does not have the full address and phone number of the Court on it, or if it says, "Do not contact the court," it's most likely not really a ticket at all and you may be able to just ignore it.

View A Sample Fake Ticket Here:

Sample Ticket

Why Does This Happen?

In some towns the police are going to great lengths to get registered owners to identify who was driving their car. A typical red-light camera contract (Inglewood's), signed before 2004, requires the city to pay the camera vendor (ex. Redflex) approx. $90 for each real ticket that the vendor prints and mails. This is true whether or not the the city collects any fine money.
When the police are first processing the photos and they see that the face photo is obviously not the registered owner, or that it is of such poor quality that it would probably not be accepted by a judge as proof of who the driver was, they sometimes send the registered owner a notice or "fake ticket" - which the City doesn't have to pay the vendor for. Sending you the fake ticket is an attempt by the police to get you to identify the driver, thus providing the proof they need. After the driver is identified, the city can be sure that it will get revenue back when it sends out the ticket.

Cameras' Biggest Supporters

By Don Russell
Philadelphia Daily News
July 1, 2003

From testifying before City Council to producing voluminous reports on the necessity of automated traffic enforcement, the National Campaign to Stop Red Light Running has positioned itself as an influential, "independent" authority on one of the major causes of traffic accidents.

Though the effectiveness of red-light cameras as a safety tool is still up in the air, the campaign is an unfaltering supporter of the controversial systems.

No wonder.

Far from being a group of grass-roots safety do-gooders, the organization is actually in the business of selling expensive red-light cameras to communities.

The national campaign is run by a Washington, D.C., public relations agency that was hired by the nation's biggest operator of traffic surveillance systems.

The agency, Blakey & Agnew, staffs the campaign and publishes its reports. One of the PR firm's principals, Leslie Blakey, is the campaign's executive director.

Blakey, a former restaurateur, and partner Jeff Agnew have run the firm since 2001. The agency was started by Blakey's sister, Marion, who left when she was named by President Bush as chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board. Marion Blakey is now administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration.

Blakey & Agnew runs several other so-called public-interest campaigns, including the Coalition for America's Gateways and Trade Carriers, which is backed by freight carriers, and the National Hardcore Drunk Driver Project, backed by distillers.

Leslie Blakey said the red-light campaign was started after some members of Congress, including former U.S. Rep. Dick Armey of Texas, spoke in opposition of the cameras as an invasion of privacy.

"We were concerned that among the various accusations and misrepresentations that came up in... in front of Congress, there was really no voice supporting photo enforcement," Blakey said.

The nation's largest red-light camera supplier, Lockheed Martin IMS (now Affiliated Computer Services), stepped forward, she said, and became the campaign's "founding sponsor."

Additionally, the agency touts an unpaid advisory board consisting of representatives from the insurance industry, highway safety groups, law enforcement and elsewhere.

Though the group does acknowledge that it is "industry-funded," that point is decidedly glossed over in campaign literature. The group's press events instead lean toward pathos, featuring horribly injured crash victims pleading for legalization of the $50,000 cameras.

Car And Driver - September 2002
By Patrick Bedard

When the nation's No. 1 cheerleader for red-light cameras admits there might be one teensy-weensy downside to the program, you just know it's going to be a lulu so large it couldn't be crammed under the carpet without making a bulge the size of a circus tent.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) recently enthused over traffic-tickets-by-mail schemes for an entire issue of its Status Report. On red-light cameras, however, it did allow that "most studies also reported increases in rear-end crashes."

It went on to say, "This isn't surprising. The more people stop on red, the more rear-end collisions there will be."

Duh!

Not to worry, however, because "photo enforcement leads to significant overall reductions in crashes," assures Susan Ferguson, the institute's senior vice-president for research.

Well, that depends on who's telling the story. The institute itself did two studies, both in Oxnard, California, the most recent one published in 2001. Other studies have been done, but the IIHS roundly pooh-poohs them. Why? Because they don't follow a curious methodology the IIHS invented especially for Oxnard.

IIHS insists that all red-light-camera studies must account for "regression to the mean" and for "spillover effects."

Regression to the mean is a fact of life; in any one year, there could be an extraordinarily large number of crashes at a particular intersection, but over several years the count will revert back to average (mean).

Funny that IIHS insists regression be accounted for in studies at stoplights when it never considers the same factor in its studies of speed limits.

Spillover effect is IIHS's trick for giving the cameras credit for reducing fatalities even where they aren't. It assumes that red-light cameras at a few intersections will cause drivers to stop promptly all over town, or all over the county, or maybe all over the state, so improvements outside the cameras' ZIP Codes are credited to them nonetheless. As statistical acrobatics go, this one is breathtaking.

But you ain't seen nothin' yet. The obvious way to gauge the payoff of red-light cameras is to compare intersections with cameras to those without, then zoom in on crashes actually caused by drivers running red lights. Instead, IIHS considered all crashes at all 125 signalized intersections in Oxnard and concluded that injury crashes dropped by 29 percent due to the cameras, even though they were installed at only 11 intersections.

Spillover effect, don't you know.

Skeptics will notice that crashes went down rather randomly all over town, and some ordinary intersections outperformed those with the gotcha equipment. The cameras look remarkably ineffectual until, just in time, spillover effect arrives to snatch victory from the jaws of ho-hum.

Skeptics will also notice that these IIHS studies, which pretend to be about red-light running, never bother to isolate those crashes specifically caused by running red lights. Why? It says, "The crash data did not contain sufficient detail to identify crashes that were specifically red-light-running events."

This is believable only to those who've never heard of police reports. Oxnard, like most California jurisdictions, reports crashes according to the California Highway Patrol protocol, which includes a "primary collision factor," i.e., the cause of the crash. Those reports are collected into a CHP database (SWITRS). Running red lights falls under the category of "stop signals and signs." According to Steve Kohler of the CHP, it includes stop signals and stop signs. Nothing else.

Since all signalized intersections in Oxnard are, by definition, controlled by signals and not stop signs, red-light running should be neatly isolated as a "primary collision factor." When IIHS finds numbers that support the story it wants to tell, it jumps on them like a trampoline. When it hides from numbers as it did in this case, you can bet they go the wrong way.

IIHS has refused to release the study's raw data so that others may verify its conclusions, but Jim Kadison, a disarmingly sincere member of the National Motorists Association, went directly to SWITRS for crash data on the nine signalized Oxnard intersections used in the first IIHS study. He smelled something funny in IIHS's breakdown of crashes; just nine percent were rear-enders. Across the nation, it's about 40 percent, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Looking at the data, Kadison could reduce rear-enders down to a single-digit share only by narrowing the definition of intersection to "between crosswalks." Narrowing that way chops off the entire approach to the intersection, exactly where rear impacts happen. It looks like IIHS purposely designed its study to avoid seeing rear-enders.

Sure enough, when he opened the "intersection" to include crosswalks and 100 feet each side of them, rear crashes rose to a more normal share. Over this enlarged zone, rear-end crashes increased by 33 after red-light cameras were installed. At the same time, side impacts dropped 25 percent. Kadison concludes that the cameras merely trade one type of crash for another.

IIHS's claim of safety from cameras is flatly contradicted by a number of cities that have tried them. "At some intersections [with cameras] we saw no change at all, and at several intersections we actually saw an increase in traffic accidents," admitted San Diego police chief David Bejarano on ABC News's Nightline.

In Charlotte, North Carolina, station WBTV had this to say, "Three years, 125,000 tickets, and $6 million in fines later, the number of accidents at intersections in Charlotte has gone down less than one percent. And the number of rear-end accidents, which are much more common, has gone up 15 percent."

In Greensboro, the News & Record reports, "There has not been a drop in the number of accidents caused by red-light violations citywide since the first cameras were installed in February 2001. There were 95 such accidents in Greensboro in 2001, the same number as in 2000. And at the 18 intersections with cameras, the number of wrecks caused by red-light running has doubled."

The granddaddy of all studies, covering a 10-year period, was done for the Australian Road Research Board in 1995 (cameras went up in Melbourne in 1984). Photo enforcement "did not provide any reduction in accidents, rather there has been increases in rear end and [cross-street] accidents," wrote author David Andreassen in the page-one summary.

Red-light cameras turn out to be a very expensive way to crank up rear-end crashes. Motorists in Washington, D.C., alone pay a half-million dollars a month in fines. That's not enough, IIHS says. It wants points on driving records, too.

Missing The Point

Politicians, the media, and others are missing the point when it comes to the issue of red light cameras. They point out privacy concerns or due process failures. True, these are legitimate complaints, but they distract from the heart of the issue.

Obeying intersection traffic signals is one law that is universally agreed upon. The majority of drivers obey traffic lights and expect others to do the same. They view signals as inviolate. The vast majority of red light violations are not the product of willing or casual non-compliance. Therefore, they can not be addressed or corrected by enforcement measures.

So why do intersections with high numbers of red light violations exist if the majority of drivers agree that these signals should be obeyed? Take a close look at those high-incident intersections and the answer will be found. The majority of these violations can be traced back to a flaw in the installation of the signal light, improper maintenance of the signal light, and/or operation of the signal light. None of these failings can be corrected by adding a ticket camera.

This point is repeatedly proven by intersections where violations continue in large numbers, even after ticket cameras are installed. It is also repeatedly proven at intersections where red light violations literally disappear after a simple change in yellow light duration. One further proof is that the same driving population that is punished for violating the red light at one intersection shows 100 percent compliance at other similar intersections. It's the same drivers; the only real variable is the intersection, most likely the traffic lights!

This is not an enforcement issue. Ticket cameras greatest detriment is not that they infringe on our privacy. Their greatest practical harm is that they reward and perpetuate improper installation, maintenance and operation of traffic lights. Motorists should not be penalized and cities rewarded because the city has failed its responsibility to ensure intersections that are properly engineered. Ticket cameras do not eliminate intersection flaws and they cannot correct traffic signal flaws.

Ticket cameras may be an affront to many peoples' sense of privacy, but they are even a greater affront to the safety, integrity and convenience of American motorists.

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Red-Light Cameras: The Trojan Horse

There has been wealth of attention focused on red light cameras over the past few months. Even though the press and politicians seem devoted to avoiding mention of the NMA, most of the stimulus for this attention has come from the NMA and its members.

It is slowly seeping in that red light cameras are primarily a money grubbing scheme. Any positive effect they might have can be equaled and exceeded by simple improvements and adjustments to traffic lights. In most instances adding a second or two to the yellow light duration eliminates red light violations at most intersections.

Once the tort attorneys put two and two together, they're going to figure out that there is a huge population of clients out there --victims not of red light runners, but victims of city governments that chose cameras over intersection safety improvements. How do you think a jury is going to react to a city that could have prevented a tragic accident by simply lengthening a yellow light, when instead the light was kept short to feed a ticket camera?

Nevertheless, red light cameras have served their primary purpose; they have opened the door for automated/camera based traffic law enforcement, most notably speed enforcement.

For two decades the insurance industry and ticket camera mer-chants have unsuccessfully tried to make photo radar a fixture of American Life. With the exception of a few cities dominated by cranks, social engineers, and nursing home residents, photo radar just couldn't disguise its image for what it really is, a device to milk motorists. The savior came in the form of the red Light Camera.

The driving public deplores "Running" red lights, honestly and rightfully so. How could anyone argue against a device that can identify and penalize these miscreants? Even NMA members who normally shunned camera enforcement warned that we should get on the side of the angels and support red light cameras. We didn't, and over time our position has been vindicated. We argued that red light cameras were just greasing the skids for multiple camera based enforcement schemes. And, that is exactly what has happened.

It turned out that the targeted red light runner "miscreants" were us, except we weren't really "running" red lights. We were getting trapped by short yellow lights or other intersection flaws.

The ticket camera merchants and their apostles probably knew (or should have known) that red light violations are primarily the product of lousy traffic engineering decisions. The general driving public has an inherent desire and willingness to respect and comply with traffic lights. This is proven by opinion polls and, more importantly, universal compliance at properly designed and managed intersections. Therefore, condemning the driving population at large for wanton "red light running" was a red herring from the get-go. The real gold mine is, and always was, camera-based speed enforcement.

Unlike traffic signals, the driving public generally ignores posted and statutory speed limits. Even if individuals and opinion polls say otherwise, compliance with speed limits is just about zero. The reason? Most speed limits have no merit, no practical basis, and lack legitimacy. Therefore they are universally ignored. Even the cops charged with speed limit enforcement acknowledge this with their five, ten, and fifteen miles per hour enforcement tolerances!

Photo radar devices and their ilk have the potential to generate not millions, but billions of dollars of revenue from the fat, comfortable and apathetic driving public. There's just a couple of pitfalls that the camera merchants have to avoid. First, they can't get too greedy too soon. They have to acclimate the victims by keeping the fines low and other consequences of minor concern. No points, no license suspensions, and no insurance surcharges. (This is how they blew it in San Diego, California. The $271 fines, points, and insurance surcharges exceeded the masses pain threshold.) The elected political operatives on the East Coast are more practiced at this and have largely avoided a public uproar by keeping the fines low and the drivers shielded from more onerous penalties.

The second and more subtle challenge is to make sure driver compliance is not significantly modified. The more obvious assumption is that compliance will dry up the revenue. However, of greater concern is that compliance with today's posted speed limits would bring transportation and our economy to a grinding halt! The only reason our streets, roads and highways in-and-around our major urban areas are not one massive linear parking lot is that higher speeds (often way higher than the posted limit) increase the capacity of our highway infrastructure. If the public were to actually drive the speed limit, especially on major arterioles and urban Interstates, thousands of people would starve to death in their cars before they ever reached their exits.

The ultimate goal of the ticket camera merchants is to have the public accept camera tickets as a surrogate speeding tax, just a little something extra they pay for the privilege of driving faster than the speed limit. The ticket camera fans must avoid getting greedy, taking their technology seriously as a safety tool, or stimulating demand for realistic and legitimate speed limits. Rocking the boat could turn off the tap on a multi-billion dollar industry. We certainly wouldn't want that to happen, would we?

California: Appellate Decision Strikes Down Red Light Camera Evidence
Three-judge appellate panel finds a total lack of evidence from Santa Ana, California red light camera program.

Appellate courts in California are becoming increasingly upset at the conduct of cities and photo enforcement vendors. On May 21, a three-judge panel of the California Superior Court, Appellate Division, in Orange County tossed out a red light camera citation in the city of Santa Ana in a way that calls into question the legitimacy of the way red light camera trials are conducted statewide. Previously, a string of brief, unpublished decisions struck at illegal contracts, insufficient notice and other deficiencies. This time, however, the appellate division produced a ten-page ruling and certified it for publication, setting a precedent that applies to the county's three million residents.

"This appeal involves an issue far too often presented to this court, namely the admissibility of evidence and the statutory compliance with the procedures employed by several municipalities in this county in what have come to be known as 'photo enforcement' citations," the unanimous ruling stated.

At trial, attorney R. Allen Baylis objected to the admission of the red light camera photographs because the city had failed to lay a proper foundation for the evidence. The court agreed.

"The photographs contain hearsay evidence concerning the matters depicted in the photograph including the date, time and other information," the ruling summarized. "The person who entered that relevant information into the camera-computer system did not testify. The person who entered that information was not subject to being cross-examined on the underlying source of that information. The person or persons who maintain the system did not testify. No one with personal knowledge testified about how often the system is maintained. No one with personal knowledge testified about how often the date and time are verified or corrected. The custodian of records for the company that contracts with the city to maintain, monitor, store and disperse these photographs did not testify. The person with direct knowledge of the workings of the camera-computer system did not testify."

Santa Ana Police Officer Alan Berg testified in the lower court case, but the appeals panel found his direct knowledge limited.

"This witness testified that sometime in the distant past, he attended a training session where he was instructed on the overall working of the system at the time of the training," the ruling stated. "Here the officer could not establish the time in question, the method of retrieval of the photographs or that any of the photographs or the videotape was a reasonable representation of what it is alleged to portray.... Here, Officer Berg did not qualify as the appropriate witness and did not have the necessary knowledge of underlying workings, maintenance or record keeping of Redflex Traffic System. The foundation for the introduction of the photographs and the underlying workings of the Redflex Traffic System was outside the personal knowledge of Officer Berg."

Lawyers for the city of Santa Ana argued that the evidence should be admitted under the hearsay exemption for official government records. The court rejected this argument because the photographic records were created by a for-profit Australian company, not a state or local government agency.

"Here, the signator of the document, Exhibit #3, states they are employees of the 'Redflex Traffic Systems,'" the ruling stated. "At no point does the signatory state that 'Redflex Traffic Systems' is a public entity or that they are otherwise employed by a public entity. Absent this critical foundation information, the document that they created cannot be and is not an 'official record' under Evidence Code section 1280."

With the evidence inadmissible, the appellate panel found that "there is a total lack of evidence to support the vehicle code violation in question." All charges were dismissed.

A copy of the ruling is available in a 600k PDF file at the source link below.

Source: California v. Khaled (Orange County, California Superior Court, 5/25/2010)

Red Light Cameras Are A Hazard

Adrian Lund, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, suggests our critique of red light camera studies is flawed and that the IIHS camera study is valid when concluding cameras reduce crashes communitywide. While he questions our research integrity, facts allow for concluding Lund is incorrect, as explained below.

Our analysis reviewed four of seven red light camera studies that were identified as the best research by a 2007 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration compendium. We also reviewed a fifth study, which was the IIHS study of camera use in Oxnard, Calif., even though it was not identified as one of the best research studies.
Among these five studies, three adhered to scientific research methods and found cameras are associated withincreases in crashes and injuries. Red light cameras are hazardous because they alter driving behavior in ways that are known to increases crashes, e.g., abrupt stops.
The remaining two studies (one was the IIHS study) violated sound research methods, yet the studies continue to be referenced by camera proponents. Lund failed to mention that we replicated the IIHS study and our criticisms are now published in the same journal (American Journal of Public Health) online under the title "Analysis Violates Principles of Sound Research and Public Health Evaluation" (available at http://ajph.aphapublications.org/cgi/eletters/92/11/1822).
It appears the IIHS study attempted to attribute the pre-existing time trend of declining red light running crashes to camera use. In their study, the intersection approaches with cameras represented only 2 percent of all approaches in Oxnard listed as "camera" approaches, and the remaining 98 percent of "camera" approaches in their study were signalized approaches that did not have a camera. This hides any increase in crashes at actual camera intersections.

Lund failed to mention that there was no significant decrease in total crashes, despite the methods used. Instead, the findings were incorrectly reported in their publication, creating the appearance of a significant decrease in total crashes when no such decrease occurred, as evidenced in our replication.

Contrary to Lund's opinion, our research is independent as it is not funded by any outside agency or special interest. Our critique differentiated valid camera research from invalid research, something the general public does have the ability to do. In contrast, the IIHS is funded by auto insurance companies.

Barbara Langland Orban, Ph.D., associate professor and chair of Health Policy and Management, USF College of Public Health, Tampa

Orginally appeared here: http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/letters/monday-letters-red-light-cameras-are-a-hazard/1095104