Here's an even better article:
Red-light cameras and the secret Gotcha! line.
BY PATRICK BEDARD
February 2002
A certain stench hangs over the idea of bounty
hunters. Behold the freebooting opportunist, pocketing
profits for being just a hair quicker than cops to
reach the prize. Or worse yet, for nabbing someone not
worth a lawman's chasing.
It gets even worse. Sometimes the law does a mutual
back-scratching deal with the privateer, and they
divvy up the loot.
Which brings us to red-light cameras, a boondoggle
that franchises bounty hunters, setting them up in the
business of snooping out infractions too small to be
seen with the naked eye. These are honey-pot deals
where the city governments keep jacking up the take
and rejiggering the split until there's profit enough
to make both sides fat.
When the flapdoodle over red-light running began to
drown out the ball scores a few years ago, I called
Tim Hurd at the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration. For every imaginable form of highway
mayhem, he always has the latest body count.
What did he have on red-light running? Exactly zip.
NHTSA has never tracked it. Best he could do was
fatalities within a few hundred feet of intersections
(I've forgotten the exact distance). No smoking gun.
In fact, no gun, period.
Never mind the lack of evidence, NHTSA's sister
agency, the Federal Highway Administration, was
pumping money into one of those public-private
partnerships that act as smoke-making machines for
issues too weak to smoke on their own. Like those
menacing green antifreeze puddles in parking lots,
menacing because dogs love to lap them up. You'd never
hear of such death threats if there weren't a
public-private partnership making smoke over it.
The name of this machine was "Stop Red Light Running,"
a three-way among the Federal Highway Administration,
the American Trauma Society, and DaimlerChrysler.
Instead of facts, it had a fancy logo. From an address
on Wacker Drive, in the heart of Chicago's advertising
and PR district, it was belching out brochures and
press releases and public-interest spots for radio and
TV.
In my driving, I rarely see red-light running. So I
called the government guy on the project (Hurd gave me
the number) and asked for details. "Are cars blowing
right through full reds, or is this just stretching
the green like always, now being whooped up to
pandemic proportions?"
He had no idea. His job was just to keep the machine
smoking.
The smoke is very good for red-light cameras. Lockheed
Martin has been the 900-pound gorilla of the
ticket-by-mail business. Its camera-enforcement
division was sold this past summer for a cool $825
million, prompting congressman Dick Armey, a Texas
Republican, to say, "Consider[ing] they only get a cut
of the entire ticket amount, you can see that
red-light cameras are a multibillion-dollar industry."
Two years ago I talked to Dana King, Lockheed's
vice-president of marketing for photo enforcement. He
allowed that the public is wary of photo radar. "Most
folks speed a little." But they don't run red lights.
And they have no tolerance for offenders. So he uses
red-light cameras to get a foot into a community's
door. After a year or two, up-selling to include the
photo-radar package is as easy as saying, "May I?"
Mesa, Arizona, is a fast-growing, slow-thinking burg
on the outskirts of Phoenix, and it signed up for the
full Lockheed Martin program in 1999, including five
photo-radar vans and 13 intersections eyed by cameras.
In the language of the bounty hunters, Mesa has 17
camera "approaches," 11 straight through and six left
turns.
The red-light fine was set at $105, then hiked to
$115. When the system became fully operational in May
2000, it proved to be a money loser for the city. So
that October, city officials jacked up fines to $170.
In November 2000, the city's traffic-engineering
department decided a three-second yellow was too brief
for the lefts and increased the time to four seconds.
Bam! Violations dropped 73 percent at left-turn
intersections.
The city's contract with Lockheed promised the bounty
hunters a minimum of 18 violations per approach per
day, or Mesa would have to pay a monthly fee of $2500
for each low-yielding approach. In the early months of
2001, 15 of the 17 approaches were hemorrhaging cash.
Let's call this crop failure what it is a sturdy
case of law-abiding traffic. Obviously, Mesa didn't
have a problem.
The town had started the program with lofty tones,
allowing a 0.3-second grace period into the red, "so
anyone ticketed was really guilty." Starting in April
2001, adios, grace period. "It was believed this
action might address the vendor's loss," said the city
council report.
In effect, Mesa had shortened its yellows to raise the
take. It helped, but not enough. So the city and
Lockheed set to renegotiating the contract. Instead of
pocketing $48.50 for each paid violation, Lockheed
would reap $73 for the first 900 each month, $65 for
the next 300, then it was back to the original rate.
The city also agreed to ease Lockheed's labor in
writing out complaints, but if the vendor's costs
didn't drop enough, the city promised to renegotiate
again. Talk about a sweetheart deal!
The sharp pencils at city hall said the new pact would
raise its "break even" to about 2600 complaints each
month (combined radar and red light) from 1800 before.
But it planned to rejigger the law to give itself more
time to serve complaints, "thus mitigating some of the
negative fiscal impact."
Just as casino odds favor the house, Mesa and Lockheed
have rigged the cameras to favor themselves. On
approach, first you cross the wide white "stop bar"
painted on the pavement. You're supposed to stop
before you reach it. Next comes the crosswalk. If you
cross both on yellow, you think you're into the
intersection and should continue through. Nope. Mesa
flags a violation "when your car clears the second
inductance loop" buried in the pavement, according to
Mesa police officer Terry Gibbs. I checked with the
system engineer. No, the system triggers when your car
first breaks into the loop; so much for her court
testimony. The cops are confused, and so are the
drivers, because this Gotcha! line is completely
unmarked.
By making the Gotcha! line invisible, and by placing
it long after the stop bar, Mesa does a late grab on
cars at the tail end of the yellow, nabbing them when
they think they're in the continue-through zone. Just
a little trick to dig enough cash out of unsuspecting
pockets to create a profitable business.
They protest: This is a safety program. With a secret
Gotcha! line? Yeah, right.
=====
Paul Misencik
1971 MGB Vintage Race Project
Huntersville, NC USA
www.sopwithracing.com
Learn the truth at www.misleader.org
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