>"I've been ticketed here twice, and it's ridiculous because they it's just not fair," one driver said who didn't want to be identified. The person that does the determination when you ran the light, it's just a random. Whoever they want to pick, pick you to say, okay, you're gonna pay the ticket."
This is the opposite of my understanding of red light cameras. I always considered the supposed impartial application of the traffic law as the main benefit.
This is funny quote. Is the driver even disputing that they were the driver? They seem like they're just mad they got caught.
Maybe they just stop running red lights?
I suspect this is some light with chronically-bad timing that gets run by tons of people every day. The camera is taking a photo with a bunch of vehicles in the frame and it's ticketing the one that had the license plate unobstructed, even if a few of the vehicles in the frame technically entered the intersection when the light was yellow.
Sometimes lights are just so poorly implemented, and drivers pass through them so often, it feels like whoever designed the intersection was actively goading drivers into running the light.
My hometown got busted making yellow lights shorter than the legally required duration, then hitting drivers with tickets for running a red light they couldn't have safely and reasonably avoided.
There are standards for this kind of thing, like if a light is on a road with a speed limit of X, then a yellow light has to last Y seconds. Imagine a yellow light that lasted .5s: you'd have to stand on your brakes and risk causing a rear end collision from the car behind you to even have a chance of not getting fined. That's the opposite of safety. My place wasn't that bad, but a defendant successfully demonstrated that the yellow light he was tricked by was illegally short, and a judge basically threw out all the tickets from it and others.
I mention this as just one example of specific light setups that suck. I bet you're right, and this is just a money grab from the local gov't.
Read this if you want to be angry today: https://ww2.motorists.org/blog/6-cities-that-were-caught-sho...
In same states they also mark the intersection start where the curb ends and not at the crosswalk starts, so you think since you passed the crosswalk under yellow you are safe to proceed but you have not yet entered the intersection.
Is this the case where instead of admitting to it, the municipality attempted to have the complainant prosecuted for practicing engineering without a licence?
No, that was Oregon's turn to be Embarrassment of the Week: https://ij.org/press-release/oregon-engineer-wins-traffic-li...
In my city they synchronized the light so that each one turns red just as the pack of cars is reaching it. To be clear the obvious implication I'm making is that they did this to increase the chance someone would run the light and increase revenue.
This does mean that if you're in the front of the pack and go about 15 over the speed limit, you won't "catch" the red light.
When you're not in the front of the pack it can be frustrating trying to travel just 3 or 4 miles with the red lights not even a full half mile from each other. Even late at night if you follow the speed limit, you are penalized. You will sit at every red light and look at the vast stretch of nothingness that has the right of way.
If they didn't do this to generate red light revenue, they could have done this to generate more revenue from the gas tax they collect by making people start & stop more often, and from sitting in traffic longer. But I suppose both things could be true. And no, I won't accept any other plausible explanations (/s, but holy heck is government awful here).
I haven't run into those (I mostly drive in rural areas--in fact, there's no stoplight in my county) -- but I do run into some lights that just change in the middle of the night, for no reason, and then take a really long time to change back to green, despite not even a single car being present / going through.
Lights with sensors have a backup pattern of timed changes so that you won’t get stuck at a light where the sensor isn’t seeing your car.
> Maybe they just stop running red lights?
Some lights change timing depending on the time of day so e.g. rush hour might have different timing than midday or late night.
I also believe there are and likely still are cases of malicious short yellow lights at camera intersections to increase revenue.
If someone is using your car they cant legally give you a ticket. If the picture taken doesnt clearly show you theoretically it needs to be dropped but of course thats not how it works in reality
Seems silly. Just attach the ticket to the car itself and then the registered owner can handle obtaining payment from whoever was driving the car.
If the registered owner wants to claim that someone stole their car or was operating it without permission then there can be some very hefty punishment for making false statements if it can be proved that it was actually the owner in the car.
I believe the issue is that moving violations often give you points on your license. If it was just a fine I think they could put it on the car, but because the of the potential loss of a license they need to actually have evidence of a person committing the violation.
I suppose they could also put the points on the car and impound it after it accrues enough points to have a drivers license suspended. Hard to drive if you don’t have a car.
In North America, from what I understand, the issue is that the authorities need to verify your identity in order to ticket you and traffic cameras don’t do that whereas a police officer does.
I agree the automated systems are impartial, but they cannot ID you without it becoming super invasive.
In Europe and places with more omnipresent cameras, the laws are such that they can ticket you without needing to ID. The car gets the ticket so to speak.
It depends on whether the ticket is considered a criminal or civil matter in the US.
For a criminal case, yes, they need to prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" - which would require that you are positively identified as the driver.
For a civil case, they only need to prove by a "preponderance of the evidence" - which is a much lower standard.
This is why tickets from red-light cameras in many states are zero-point citations. You're still charged a fine, but there's no finding of guilt attached to the offense, which keeps it away from being considered a criminal matter. (This is the same way parking tickets work.)
What does "North America" have to do with Florida?
I'm in Canada and they issue you a fine without any ID. It goes straight to the registered car owner. Simple as.
The issue is that currently in FL there are points / demerits issued for violations, and these can cause the loss of a license, increases to insurance, etc. This is not a problem if an officer can ID you directly.
In Brazil, you can identify who was driving the car and they will get charged with the fine and get the points on their licence. You can do it all using an app on your phone. It's really simple.
I don't know what happens if the other person denies it though.
Many US states have switched to that approach. The ticket goes to the registered owner of the vehicle and no penalty points are attached. It's treated more like a parking citation than a traditional moving violation.
Systems don’t necessarily react based on the legal situation. A red light camera that’s improperly installed, poorly maintained, etc could essentially act randomly from a drivers perspective.
... which is why they are supposed to be regularly calibrated by an independent third party - with tickets automatically being void if law enforcement can't prove that it was functioning properly.
Sure in theory, in practice the incentives don’t align for local governments to particularly care if these things actually work well.
Here there was no attempt to photograph the driver rather than just assume the owner was responsible or would point to the responsible party.
Which is why they are supposed to have a sworn officer review the camera footage. I have certainly had a camera flash me while waiting to turn right on red, still outside the intersection. They never sent me a ticket however since I had clearly not done anything illegal.
This person is not articulating it well but I think they are complaining that the person identified as the driver is random. Presumably the camera can impartially identify a car running a light, but not necessarily who is driving.
"I've been ticketed here twice, and it's ridiculous because they - it's just not fair. The person that - [let me start over] - the determination when you ran the light [of who is responsible], it's just a random whoever they want to pick ... [they] pick you to say, okay, you're gonna pay the ticket."
Obviously it's not actually random, it just defaults to the vehicle's owner, but with a generous reading I think you can interpret the quote this way based on the context of the article.
I think it's kind of irresponsible and lazy for the publication to use a verbatim verbal quote like this, when it isn't from someone notable who really needs to be quoted. If you don't understand what they're saying then don't put it in the article, and if you do understand then put in a sentence explaining what they're saying.
Everywhere I've been, the owner of the car gets the ticket, and it's up to them to figure out if they were driving, or if not them, collect from whomever they loaned the car to.
No camera I've ever seen tries to figure out who the driver is.
The logic is, it's your car, you're responsible for loaning it/owning it, so you get the fine. Don't like that? Don't loan your car out.
The trade off is no points are deducted from a driver's license. It's a pure fine, because they can't prove you were driving.
So the person just seems to be speaking gibberish to me.
edit:
More context...
The same logic applies for parking tickets. No one cares who parked the car, the car's owner gets the ticket... not the person who parked it. While I dislike red light cameras, the logic holds.
> … the owner of the car gets the ticket, and it's up to them to figure out if they were driving, …
That's exactly what makes it unconstitutional here in the US. The Constitution specifically requires that they have evidence of who committed the crime _before_ charging someone with it. If you do it the other way around then you are making an assumption about who is guilty in advance of the evidence.
It's not a crime, it's a fine, and are you suggesting parking tickets don't exist in the US?
I've never gotten an automated ticket so I don't know what is normal. It doesn't seem insane to give it to the vehicle owner, but I can certainly understand feeling indignant about getting a ticket for something you didn't do, especially if it's a new process.
That somebody got nailed twice suggests to me that they are at least making borderline yellow-light decisions, if not running the red outright. I doubt they actually know anything about how tickets are handed out, claiming it's just some guy handing them out at random is flagrant cope.