Traffic Cameras Bring Tiny Ohio Village To A Stop

[Purveyor]

ELMWOOD PLACE, Ohio (AP) -- This little village had a big problem.

Each day, thousands of cars - sometimes as many as 18,000 - rolled along Elmwood Place's streets, crossing the third-of-a-mile town to get to neighboring Cincinnati or major employers in bustling suburbs or heavily traveled Interstate 75. Many zipped by Elmwood Place's modest homes and small businesses at speeds well above the 25 mph limit.

Bedeviled by tight budgets, the police force was undermanned. The situation, villagers feared, was dangerous. Then the cameras were turned on, and all hell broke loose.

Like hundreds of other U.S. communities big and small, Elmwood Place hired an outside company to install cameras to record traffic violations and mail out citations.

In the first month after the cameras began operating, late last year, 6,600 tickets went out - more than triple the village's population. Before some unsuspecting drivers realized it, they had racked up multiple $105 citations they would learn about when their mail arrived weeks later. Some 70 parishioners, or more than half the congregation at Our Lady of Lavang Catholic Community Church, were ticketed on one Sunday last September.

more...

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_CAMERA_VILLAGE?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-06-29-12-50-34

[randr]

1. Outsourcing to the private sector

is a conservative mantra. They should be happy.

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. Rather deliberately diabotical to MAIL the tickets days after the fact.

Usually if a cop stops you for speeding, you know the charge and, if sane, will not speed again.
But traffic cams can catch you dozens of times before you get teh first ticket in the mail.

clever fund raising scheme for towns.

[surrealAmerican]

9. This.

If the goal is to stop speeders, you stop them. If the goal is to raise money ...

[dixiegrrrrl]

11. You can shear a sheep many times

you can only skin him once.

[MineralMan]

3. Does the town have speed limit signs posted?

I'm betting they do. If I see such a sign, I check my speedometer and adjust my speed to match. Odd, huh?

[Purveyor]

7. If you could only perform a miracle now, I'm sure you will be a top candidate for Sainthood.

[MineralMan]

8. Odd. Is it unusual to observe

speed limits? I have been doing that since I was 16. That was in 1962.

[Posteritatis]

4. One solution - and this *may* sound like madness - is to actually obey the traffic laws. (nt)

[backscatter712]

5. Many of the speed cameras and red-light cameras are rigged to *ahem* maximize revenue.

For example, a red-light camera might be set up on an intersection where the yellow light is only two seconds long, rather than five seconds long like all the other lights.

Or the speed camera may be "miscalibrated" and hitting people with tickets who were not speeding.

Happens all the time.

[dixiegrrrrl]

12. As a matter of fact, there was a lawsuit in SF, I believe

where short yellow lights were the issue.

[LadyHawkAZ]

6. The town of Searchlight, NV has a highway running through it

that drops speed from 65 on the highway to 25 through town.

To solve the speeding problem, they have a patrol car regularly parked in the middle of town. Mostly it has a dummy sitting in it. Sometimes it has a live officer, though.

No one speeds much through Searchlight. Somehow they managed to do this without traffic cameras.

[1-Old-Man]

10. They couldn't afford a cop but they handed out $693,000 in tickets in a month

Let me see, 6,600 tickets times $105 per ticket comes out to $693,000 in the first month, but for some reason they couldn't afford a real live human being to hand out the tickets.

Let me just do some guessing here. I'm going to guess that a small town cop would be doing pretty well to take in $1,000 a week, or $52,000 a year. At $1,000 a week the cop would have to hand out ten speeding tickets a week, if the fine for one is $105; ten tickets a week, just two a day, to bring in more revenue to the community than they pay him or her.