DC's New Traffic Cams

These are not poorly designed intersections… these are people that willfully and wantonly ignore the law and either speed up to get through before the what you call delayed green… if they follow the guy ahead of them close enough through the left turn the now oncoming traffic has to let them through…

No it’s not the design of the intersection it’s to many people willing to push the limits and a lack of enforcement because there is too much traffic and to many intersections… of course we don’t want the police at every intersection either and would call that harassment…

As much as I don’t like them, If anyone don’t think the lights are a safety issue, just turn them off and watch what happens… with them working and someone going through them they are the safety problem and they put everyone else at risk…

Maybe gates coming down and blocking the road is the better answer… boy I could hear the crying then…

This isn’t complicated… we make it complicated for argumentative sake, that’s all…

there isn’t enough people to police the problem, no one wants to pay for enough of them…
use of cameras and very stiff fines is a great answer…. Any fraud or graph found of any kind by the operators or officials, become felonies with automatic penalties…

I am interested to hear about the constitutional issues… did they have traffic lights or speed cameras in mind…

How do I not support our rights and freedoms…
so you are saying you have a right to ignore the traffic lights and the freedom to decide for yourself without regard for others safety…

yep, Welcome to the bizarro world of immorality, where up is down and wrong is right.
Where everything someone disagrees with becomes a constitutional issue and we become the victim who’s rights have been violated…

JJBIRISH wrote:
It matters not what word you use to describe it… they are needed more than ever… just today every intersection with a light I came to had no less than 3 running the light while making left turns across traffic alone…

How do I know??? The ones going in the same direction I saw as many as ten drive on through after the light changed to red (not short yellows), and the ones coming from the other direction had fewer because I could only count the ones coming through after I already had the green light… there is a period of time where the lights are red before opposing traffic gets a green light…

Also at one light two ahead of me clearly ran the red light, I stopped and one in the lane to my left but behind me and two in the lane to my right went through the light after I stopped, one straight through and one turned right…

So go ahead and install these revenue generating cameras, they are needed and after they produce plenty of revenue they will also reduce the number of violators…

I would rather take my chances with the camera than the idiot drivers that just plain ignore the laws…

What you just described is a poorly designed intersection. Traffic cameras are a band-aid at best, not a fix. The city/county/state - depending upon which owns the road - needs to conduct a traffic study and have a traffic engineer redesign the intersection. A well designed road can significantly influence a driver's behavior. So who's going to spend $$$ on a traffic study and several million on the road work? Other than left turn cameras to record who is at fault during a left turn accident, most all other cameras are merely easy to install revenue generators. They fix nothing.

Long before there were traffic cameras, a low-tech solution at intersections with a history of drivers running red lights was to configure the lights as "Delayed Green". It used to be about enforcing good behavior in drivers and keeping them safe from each other. Nowadays it seems that it is all about profiting from bad behavior.

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It matters not what word you use to describe it… they are needed more than ever… just today every intersection with a light I came to had no less than 3 running the light while making left turns across traffic alone…

How do I know??? The ones going in the same direction I saw as many as ten drive on through after the light changed to red (not short yellows), and the ones coming from the other direction had fewer because I could only count the ones coming through after I already had the green light… there is a period of time where the lights are red before opposing traffic gets a green light…

Also at one light two ahead of me clearly ran the red light, I stopped and one in the lane to my left but behind me and two in the lane to my right went through the light after I stopped, one straight through and one turned right…

So go ahead and install these revenue generating cameras, they are needed and after they produce plenty of revenue they will also reduce the number of violators…

I would rather take my chances with the camera than the idiot drivers that just plain ignore the laws…

What did we expect would happen when "public safety" functions of governments were privatized. Private companies are in it for the money and when our elected officials see how much money these private companies are making they will want a piece of the revenue for their pet projects.

I have no issues with some of the cameras like those on school buss stop signs or at high risk areas like active work zones or school zones. Other cameras are clearly designed to make money. I also have little sympathy for drivers in the DC metro areas caught on speed cameras when typically traffic is rolling at >65mph in 55 zones when the traffic is light.

The real issue is the lack of review of photos and the non functioning path for disputing incorrect tickets.

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Since those with their blinders on will refuse to click on your link, D & M, I have copied the article you linked to, here:

Speed camera vendor Brekford Corp. on Friday made its first public statement since losing its exclusive deal to run Baltimore's massive and once-lucrative camera network -- casting the development as a positive step for the firm.

The Anne Arundel-based company, which last week agreed to a $600,000 settlement to sever its 5-year contract with the city, said parting ways with Baltimore allows it to "refocus" on its "core business segments."

City officials have declined to explain in detail why they cut ties with Brekford citing a non-disparagement clause in the contract termination agreement approved by the Board of Estimates.

But test findings by California-based URS Corp., a consultant hired to provide outside monitoring of the camera program, show that Brekford's program suffered from a number of flaws, including some cameras with defective radar, hundreds of tickets with incorrect citation numbers and preventable error rates that some weeks were as high as 30 percent.

The test results were obtained by The Baltimore Sun through a Maryland Public Information Act request. They show that problems with the city's latest batch of cameras persisted for months this year, while the cameras have largely been offline.

In a news release, Brekford depicted the experienced with Baltimore as positive, saying it was "proud of its efforts and accomplishments in working with the city to analyze and remedy certain elements of the speed and red light camera program that needed attention from the City's previous contractor."

Xerox State & Local Solutions, of Dallas, previously ran the city's speed and red light cameras, but lost the contract at the end of 2012 amid questions about the accuracy of some of its radar cameras. Its speed cameras had generated more than $50 million for city government.

"Despite significant Company resource allocation and expenditures, it was evident that we could not reach agreement on a clear 'go live' date for the program," Brekford president Rod Hillman said in a statement. "Brekford supports the City's decision ... and we will assist with the transition in keeping with the terms of our agreement with the City. Our working relationship with the City remains solid, as evidenced by our recent receipt of a contract for IT and vehicle up-fitting services from the Baltimore City Department of Public Works."

That contract is valued at $50,000.

In the statement, Brekford said it will be keeping 10 portable speed cameras and the 82 speed camera modems installed in city cameras. City officials purchased 72 fixed cameras from Brekford for $2.2 million. The city has acknowledged it might not be able to use those cameras to catch speeders, but could perhaps use them for some other purpose.

"We can now refocus management's attention and our corporate resources upon the expansion of our core business segments, which include automated traffic enforcement, parking citation issuance and collection services, and vehicle up-fitting services," C.B. Brechin, Brekford's CEO, said in the statement.

Just when I thought my neighbor to the South was getting all silly, my neighbor to the North gets sillier.

Baltimore Speed Cameras

I love the first sentence in the article

"Speed camera vendor Brekford Corp. on Friday made its first public statement since losing its exclusive deal to run Baltimore's massive and once-lucrative camera network..."

No graft, corruption, revenue gathering, or mishandling there. LOL

Can't wait to see how much they increase the fines too with the new company.

Hammerhead wrote:
All we had to do was mail or fax proof that we traded in the vehicle and it was no longer ours.

Maybe you have the time and patience to defend yourself against an inanimate law enforcement system. I don't.

Anybody who thinks these cameras in DC are for anything other than revenue have no idea how things in this Nation's Capitol work. I live here and I know better than to believe they are for anything else.

Bruce

I'm all for taxes/fees that I don't have to pay since I know how to drive. :)

We received a ticket in the mail from a photo radar van many years ago for a car we no longer owned. Our name still showed up because it was a trade-in and it had not been registered with a new owner yet. (I guess they were on a joy ride for the test drive?) All we had to do was mail or fax proof that we traded in the vehicle and it was no longer ours.