The paranoia against red-light cameras is caused mostly by today's crybaby attitude among the masses.
If there's a problem with the cameras, FIX IT, so they can serve their legitimate purpose of reducing accidents. Good citizens should be demanding the necessary corrections in the system, rather than whining against the law being enforced more efficiently.
The problem is that they are about revenue, not safety. If you fix them they become money sinks and the governments don't want them. Thus, in practice all traffic cameras are bad.
If the cameras are fundamentally flawed, then that can only mean that the traffic laws are more harm than good and should be done away with -- the traffic lights eliminated. If a law cannot be enforced without causing more harm than benefit, then that law is a bad law which should be repealed.
No. It means that the traffic laws
as written have some serious flaws. In practice basically all traffic enforcement is at locations where the law is out of touch with reality for some reason. Common examples:
Yellow lights set too short causing unavoidable red-light running. Governments routinely play games to set the yellows short when there's a camera involved. It's set as short as legally possible and often less in order to get revenue, even though that often decreases safety. This is an issue with both cops and cameras.
Ticketing right-on-red turners. Think about the reality of how you do a right on red when there are a bunch of cars trying it: You stop in the line of cars. When the first car goes the line moves forward so the next car is in the go position. The stop line gets ignored in this situation, both by drivers and by cops. However, it's not ignored by the cameras. The
majority of camera red light tickets are to such drivers--doing something that is not the least bit unsafe.
Speed limits set below the 85% percentile. Again, an issue with cops and cameras. When we moved into this house there was a spot on the street coming in that was narrow because a lot hadn't been built yet. (Nonsense from our government. If the land beside the road hasn't been developed they only lay two lanes/no sidewalks. When the land is developed they finish out the road to the proper size and bill the developer. On occasion it results in crazy situations like a 45 mph road that was practically S-shaped as it weaved back and forth between the developed parcels.) Because of that spot the limit was 25 mph on the whole street. Someone running radar at a point before the restriction was a common sight as we came home. Eventually the offending lot was developed, the limit went to 35 mph where it should have been and I haven't seen a cop running radar there since.
Furthermore, the only time I've ever seen a cop doing traffic enforcement at a location without disconnect between reality and the law was when they were doing crosswalk stings. Have a plainclothes cop start to cross at a point where you would have to do a hard stop to avoid going through the crosswalk even though just going on through would get you past before they could reach your lane--once again, sacrificing safety for revenue.
In practice most drivers obey what the rules
should be. After all, we don't want to get hurt or die! That is not to say we shouldn't have traffic laws, but rather that enforcement should apply to the small minority that don't behave or are incompetent to drive.
Instead, it's an adversarial system where they try to gotcha to get revenue, resulting in drivers not trusting that the signs they see reflect the true situation. You're in the middle of nowhere and the speed limit suddenly drops--does that mean a hidden threat or a speed trap? An awful lot of drivers will react to the situation by looking for cops or where they might be hiding rather than trusting there's a valid reason and slowing down.
The cameras are a more efficient way to enforce the law. If you oppose them, you are just against the law being enforced. You prefer to have the cops do it manually, because you know they cannot be there most of the time and so you probably won't get caught. I.e., they won't enforce it.
And there's nothing wrong with the city having this revenue source. It's preferable to many of the obnoxious taxes we pay. Is it better for the city to have no revenue at all because they're all a bunch of crooks?
I want them to write tickets for safety, not for revenue.
(And another fairly small problem: DUI = in control of a motor vehicle while over the limit. While the law doesn't require you to actually be driving so they can bust the guy passed out behind the wheel it also sweeps up some who were not driving in the first place, for example drunks sleeping it off in the bar parking lot. Some of them even have the engine running to keep warm.)
