Many cities have installed red-light cameras in an effort to (choose one):
a.) snare red-light runners and save lives.
b.) snare drivers, give them tickets and raise a lot of money. Denver, for example expects to make nearly $2 million from red-light tickets next year.
In any case, in Denver, the courts have tossed out hundreds of tickets because the cameras for the new system were not set up correctly.
The Rocky Mountain News reports that it is not abnormal for a high percentage of red-light tickets to be tossed out. It raises all sorts of questions that you could investigate locally.
The
Rocky says:
More than 60 percent of the 2,545 suspected red-light violations caught on camera from the end of a 30-day grace period to Aug. 15 have been tossed out.
The reasons vary, but police said that most of the citations were rejected because the "threshold speed" that helps trigger the cameras was set too low, generating hundreds of false readings.
"The cameras fired, but the picture clearly showed all of the vehicles in compliance," said Mary Dulacki, records coordinator for Denver's Department of Safety.
Since then, the threshold speed was reset to the correct 12 mph, which fixed the problem, she said.
Bill Cowern, transportation operations engineer for the city of Boulder, said the number of citations that Denver has rejected isn't abnormally high, especially since its program is so new.
Boulder's red-light cameras had a rejection rate of 66 percent in 2003 and 40 percent this year.
Tickets are rejected for a lot of reasons, from glare in the windshield to a license plate being obstructed by another car, he said.
"We really want to make sure, from an integrity standpoint, that we're only sending out really good quality pictures where we can make out the driver and make out the license plate," Cowern said.
Slightly extending the length of the yellow light (to something...
