| There's a disconnect in your understanding. While these cameras do catch blatant red light runners, they also trigger tickets for safe, benign, and legal behavior. It penalizes the human experience way too much and it's caused overwhelming frustration. There's often a line that you can't cross during a red light. If your vehicle even slightly tip toes over it, even if you're not impeding a crosswalk or the intersection in any way whatsoever, you get a ticket in the mail. Lots of people are surprised when they get a ticket for resting their front tires on this line, as it is normally permitted behavior. It does not put anyone in danger and it is reasonably interpreted as not entering the intersection. It's not as though they're fighting the law. In that way it does create "new" rules. Sometimes you have no idea where that trigger line is because it isn't labelled. Sometimes you do know but the camera is poorly calibrated, and the line becomes invisible once more. Sometimes you go up to the same line you always do every weekday on the way to work, but today it decided to issue you a ticket. Sometimes you're taking a legal right turn on red but have to stop midway through the turn because a person decided to start walking across the street randomly. The camera might get confused and trigger a ticket, for an action you took to obey another right-of-way law. Sometimes you're taking a left turn on a solid green light with no arrow. You have an opening and begin to take it, but someone else runs a red light, almost t-boning you in the process. You stop very suddenly to avoid the accident. They rightfully get a ticket. But your green light turns yellow and you quickly try to make it before it's red. You don't, and so you also get a ticket for someone else's wrongdoings. Imagine the same scenario except you didn't stop in time. Your car gets smashed and you face death in the eye. An ambulance arrives just in time and takes you to the hospital. Your job doesn't offer health insurance and you're barely living paycheck to paycheck, but thankfully the car insurance is going to cover some of your hospital bills. You're still left with a final bill that amounts to your yearly income. A couple weeks later you call someone at the hospital to haggle it down, as the internet suggested you could try to do with some success, but they won't budge. You agree to a long-term payment plan with the hospital. It cuts deep into your finances and you have to make some sacrifices. You decide to start working a second job instead of selling things off. Meanwhile there's a letter waiting in your mailbox. A traffic camera caught a picture of your accident and an automated system mailed it to you. It's quite a graphic picture of the incident in black and white. It claims you ran a red light. You've been fined $300. Attached is a brochure about being a safe driver, which touches on the consequences of running a red light. You could kill someone and change your life forever! The website on the ticket has all kinds of information about the camera system on the front page, claiming how accurate it is and how safe it will keep people. You get a popup about a randomly selected survey asking how you like the website. You can't seem to dismiss it on any page you go to. But anyway that's okay -- This is obviously all a misunderstanding, and with all the free time and money you have, you can go see a lawyer that will help you fight it. Maybe you can even contest it without a lawyer, you read on the internet. You think there might be an FAQ on the system's own website but you can't read it without taking the survey. It's really hard to type with the cast but you try. You write a short essay with some very poorly spelled words about how you don't like their website very much. You later learn there is no FAQ. You start imagining what life would be like if you had tons of money in this situation. You conclude you'd probably just pay the ticket and not waste your time fighting a wrongly issued ticket. |