Port Richey hires new traffic spy

PORT RICHEY — The city has hired a new set of eyes to watch for red-light runners at its busiest intersections.

The City Council agreed last week to let Jacksonville-based Traffipax install its own camera at U.S. 19 and Ridge Road, pointing toward the three southbound lanes of the highway. It would replace a camera at the same spot by American Traffic Solutions, which backed out of its contract with the city in August.

Traffipax also plans to install a camera overseeing the three northbound lanes at that intersection.

The details of the Traffipax contract, including how the traffic ticket revenue will be divided and how soon the cameras will go up, will be ironed out by City Attorney Michael Brannigan in the coming weeks, said police Chief David Brown. The contract may also include installing cameras at U.S. 19 and Grand Boulevard, and at Leo Kidd Avenue and Ridge Road, Brown said.

"We'd like more intersections to be monitored, because it helps diminish crashes and save lives," Brown said. "Is there a monetary incentive for the city? Yes. But we expect you to be a good driver and abide by state law."

On May 2, the city began issuing tickets to red-light runners caught on the American Traffic Solution camera at U.S. 19 and Ridge Road. Port Richey became the first in Pasco and third in the state — behind Apopka and Gulf Breeze — to use the cameras.

The camera takes two pictures of the vehicle and its license plate — one right before the vehicle is at the white line, and another as it crosses the white line and enters the intersection.

Of the $125 citation, $85 goes to the city's general fund, and $40 to ATS.

Since May 2, Port Richey has issued about 1,900 citations, netting $109,565 for the city's general fund, according to the Police Department.

But the program hit a speed bump in August, when ATS backed out of its five-year contract with the city.

The company said then it was "unable to obtain permits to install additional red light cameras on Florida Department of Transportation and other rights of way, which prevented further expansion of the program."

Officials at ATS agreed to keep their camera in place until another company was hired.

Josh Weiss, spokesman for ATS, said his company rebid on the project after resolving its issues regarding installing additional cameras, although he declined to elaborate on what those issues had been.

The council voted unanimously last week to switch to Traffipax instead of keeping ATS.

Gulf Breeze, which uses Traffipax, says the system has operated smoothly since the city began using it in March 2006.

Since then, 4,000 citations have been issued at $100 each. The city keeps about half of that revenue, said Gulf Breeze police Chief Peter Paulding.

Two cameras on U.S. 98 and Daniel Drive track about 60,000 cars heading eastbound and westbound every day, Paulding said.

"Most crashes in the city happen on that roadway," he said.

Back in Port Richey, Mayor Richard Rober says the program has brought greater caution and safety to a major intersection in the city.

"I won't say it's a cure-all," Rober said, "but it definitely helps."

Camille C. Spencer can be reached at cspencer@sptimes.com or (727) 869-6229.

Red light cameras far from perfect

More than 7,000 drivers were cited for running red lights in Temple Terrace since the city installed new cameras in mid October, but a third of the tickets were tossed by the city, tampabays10.com reports.

Tammy Jackson has gotten three citations for running a red light at Bullard Parkway and 56th Street and is irate because she says she stopped at the light before making a turn. Her ticket shows her brake lights on before she went through the intersection, but a video shows she didn't come to a complete stop.

The new cameras are just a way for the city to generate revenue, Jackson contends.The city gets 60 percent of the money from citations, while the company that owns the cameras gets the rest. The city says it's about safety, not money.

Since the cameras were installed on Oct. 16, the city has sent out 4,787 citations at $100 each. At the current rate, the city would make $2.4-million dollars in the first year of operation.

The Hillsborough County Commission voted in March to begin installing the cameras on county roads. Port Richey installed its first red light cameras in March. Brooksville voted in April to install them.

Red light camera company backs out of contract

In just a few short months, the red light camera at U.S. 19 and Ridge Road has been a success for the city, raking in thousands of dollars from traffic tickets and making drivers think twice about gunning it through one of Pasco's busiest intersections.

So officials were surprised to find out this week that the Arizona-based company that installed the camera is backing out of its five-year contract with the city.

City Manager Richard Reade said, "both sides said it was probably best to end the agreement," but wouldn't elaborate.

But according to a brief statement from American Traffic Solutions, the problem was getting permission to install additional cameras.

The ATS statement released Thursday said the company "was unable to obtain permits to install additional red light cameras on FDOT (Florida Department of Transportation) and other rights of way, which prevented further expansion of the program."

It's against the law to place the cameras on state-owned property along the road, said state Department of Transportation spokeswoman Kris Carson.

But it's okay to put them on private property, with the owner's permission. ATS got permission several months ago from Denny's to place its camera at U.S. 19 and Ridge Road, angled to catch southbound drivers.

City officials discussed placing additional cameras on city property at two other intersections — Grand Boulevard and U.S. 19, and Leo Kidd Avenue and Ridge Road — but had yet to do so.

It's unknown whether ATS ended its contract because it ran into problems at those two intersections.

But city officials want to keep the camera they have at U.S. 19 and Ridge Road.

That camera will remain in place until the city contracts with another company, said ATS spokesman Josh Weiss.

When Port Richey police began issuing tickets May 2 using the red light camera, the city became the first in Pasco and the third in the state — behind Apopka and Gulf Breeze — to use the ATS system.

Since then, police have issued hundreds of citations at $125 each, raising about $15,130 as of July.

The camera takes two pictures of the vehicle and its license plate — one right before the vehicle is at the white line and another as it crosses the white line and enters the intersection.

An officer watching streaming video on a computer decides whether the driver has run the red light. If so, the officer sends a ticket. Drivers can go online and see the footage themselves.

Reade said he plans to review other cities' red light camera systems before signing a contract with another company.

To be sure the city moves swiftly, Reade plans to discuss the red light camera soon with city officials.

"You'll see a proposal, probably to piggyback on another city's contract, at the next meeting," Reade said.

by Camille C. Spencer

What is a "Snitch Ticket"?

This post is about a scam coming from a place you would never expect it, your local police department. They send out fake red light camera "tickets."They call them Nominations. I call them Snitch Tickets.
If the document you received does not give the name of the Court and its street address and phone number, or if it says, "Do not contact the Court," it may not be a real ticket. It could be a fake - a Snitch Ticket - generated by the police.

A real ticket will tell you to contact ("Respond to") the court . . .and you should.Your ticket is a real one if you can look it up on the court's website. But please note -(a) If it's not on their site, it still could be real! Or, it could be a fake, a Snitch Ticket.(b) Make sure you are looking on the court's website, not the one where you go to look at the ticket pictures (which is operated by the camera company).Your ticket is real if you've received a Courtesy Notice from the court. But please note -(a) You could still have a real ticket even if you haven't received a Courtesy Notice.(b) A Courtesy Notice will never tell you to contact anyone but the court.Your ticket could be real even if the court's phone number is missing and its address is incomplete. That's because some cities are leaving that info off their real tickets, to make it harder for defendants to fight their ticket in court.

Snitch Tickets are designed to look very much like a real ticket - but are legally very different. To add to the confusion caused by the similar looks, real tickets and Snitch Tickets both ask the registered owner to turn-in (or snitch on) the person who was driving the car. Despite all that, there are some differences that you can rely on. One of the best "tells" is that most Snitch Tickets will say, in small print on the back of the page, "Do not contact the court about this notice." Snitch Tickets also lack any wording directing you to contact or "Respond to" the court. In fact, on a typical Snitch Ticket there is no phone number for the court, and the court's address usually is missing or incomplete. (Please note, however, that in some towns the real tickets carry an incomplete address.

The police are going to great lengths to get registered owners to identify who was driving their car. In those towns, if the technicians reviewing the photos see that the pictured driver is obviously not the registered owner (gender mismatch, great difference in age, or a rental car) or that the photo is too blurry to be sure of who it is, one tactic they use is to send the registered owner an official-looking notice telling him that he must identify the driver.

Many cities use RedFlex as their camera vendor and have contract terms which give either the city or RedFlex (or both) a big monetary incentive to issue more tickets. When the police are first processing the photos and they see that the face photo is obviously** not the registered owner, or that it is of such poor quality that it would probably not be accepted by a judge as proof of who the driver was, they sometimes send the registered owner a notice ("Snitch Ticket") - which the City doesn't have to pay RedFlex for. Sending you the Snitch Ticket is the police's attempt to get you to identify the driver, thus providing the proof they need. Once you have filled-out the blanks on the Snitch Ticket form, the police can be pretty sure that a ticket will stick and that they will be able to recoup the $90 it will cost them to have a real one issued. So they go ahead and have RedFlex issue (print up and mail) one.Contracts signed after Jan. 1, 2004 cannot, by law, provide for a per-ticket payment to the vendor. It has to be "flat-rate." A typical flat-rate contract requires the city to pay the vendor a rent of $6070 per month per camera. Even though the city is not paying for each ticket issued, their need to recoup the rent gives them a big incentive to issue more tickets that will stick.

Probably the biggest reason Snitch Tickets work so well is that they take advantage of your trust and confidence in the police. "Confidence" is the first word in "con man."From an Internet newsgroup discussion:Post-er # 1: "BS. It is self-evident that any so-called citation which doesn't tell you when and where to challenge it in court, is not a legal ticket."Post-er # 2: " 'Self-evident' only to those of us who have been pulled over by a cop and given a regular ('good old fashioned') ticket a few times. I admit that that describes me. I suspect it describes you, too. You and I know what a real ticket says and what it orders you to do. But there are at least two groups of people who don't have that knowledge.1. Your auntie, who never has had a ticket in her life, until now she gets one in the mail. (Cameras with too-short yellows tend to catch mature people, who drive at moderate speeds. The young lead-foots are going fast enough to make it through on a short yellow.)2. People here from another country where tickets are handled in another fashion, such as by payment directly to the officer who pulled you over. That's not just Mexico, by the way."The Media Cover-upSnitch Tickets are working because the Mainstream Media (TV, radio, newspapers, magazines) is afraid to write about them; doing so would get the police mad at them, and the media gets many of its story "leads" from the police.

Canada: Intersection Cameras

The citizens of Manitoba are not death crazed scofflaws blowing through red lights as a hobby as some officials and media would have you believe. In fact fatalities caused by red light running are a are extremely rare, maybe one every few years if that. If we take Century and Silver as an example of a busy intersection we find a red light violation rate that ,in a bad month is around 45 violation. This intersection sees some 47,000 vehicles per day (weekday counts). This gives us some where over 1,000,000 vehicles through this intersection per month. Now consider that over 80% of all red light violations occur with in the first few tenths of a second and can be considered non dangerous, as most intersections have a 2 second all red phase. This means that less then 9 violations out of 1,000,000 can even be considered dangerous, and only a small fraction of these ever result in a collision. Other then anecdotal public opinion the police have failed horribly in proving any increase in red light running or for the need for RLCs.
Winnipeg streets get safer every year. Collision, injuries and fatalities have been constant or have declined almost every single year since records have been kept.
When you take into consideration that there are more drivers driving more kilometers every year, and thus more chances for collisions to happen, it is amazing to see a steady and ongoing trend towards safer streets. The only noticeable change is a slight increase in non injury collisions. While most people will agree that some days it doesn't seem like the roads are safer in fact they are. Most of the perceived issues, I believe, stem from ignorant, impolite and poorly trained drivers and the fact that our street are poorly maintained/engineered and are more crowed then ever before. These things that photo enforcement cannot counter act.There are presently 48 intersection cameras that will have issued almost 300,000 tickets!! Well, that should equate to a whopping jump in safety. Strange the death and injury rate has not changed in the past few years . The city auditors report on photo enforcement notes large increases in collisions at monitored intersections, as compared to a 7% average increase for non monitored intersections (Auditors report). Well not that surprising..... Studies going back 10 years and more have shown little or no safety benefits to red light photo enforcement. Virtually the only ones showing any benefits have been done or paid for by parties that have something to gain, like the police, insurance companies, governments etc.
So RLC's are not the answer (at least from a safety stand point). What can be done? The simplest thing is lengthen the yellow light cycle! Seems only obvious and it is simple to do and costs next to nothing to implement. How big of an improvement can this make on violations?, and do not people just get used to it and start running more reds as time goes on? The answers are huge and no, yet the city refuses to change yellow light timings despite the overwhelming evidence that it can dramatically reduce red light violations. A test in Virginia saw a reduction in violation of some 96% when the yellow light was lengthened by 1.5 second. The RLC was removed and three years later this very wide intersection has kept this reduction almost intact at 90% reduction despite a rapid population growth in the area. While this is an extreme case adjustments of a few tenths of a second can often reduce violations by 30%-70%. The city is on record as being unwilling to change light timing at monitored intersections. The city also refuses to make its contract with ACS public despite a Freedom of Information application. Contracts in other locations have often had clauses in them that prevent the city from changing any aspects of the intersections including light timing. A quick check I did some time ago shows that of Winnipeg's 24 (original) cameras 75% are 1km or more away from any of Winnipeg 30 most dangerous intersections and over 62% are several kilometers or more away from any intersection of note. It certainly does not look like the police are very concerned about safety, judging by their camera placement. There is in fact no documented policy to determine where a camera goes, so the police are allowed to place them where the most money can be made.
Many people believe falsely that photo enforcement is widely supported. One of the studies done by the NHTSA (National Survey of speeding and other unsafe driving actions, Volume III countermeasures, by John Boyle) in the US said there was a 70% support for photo enforcement, similar to the 71% claimed for Winnipeg. What is not promoted is that 35% of respondents had never heard of photo enforcement. The other 65% maintained varying degrees of knowledge on the subject. Keep in mind that these survey questions are often supplied by the camera vendors to elicit a positive response, and that no camera program has yet to pass a free vote by the public in North America. I think it is safe to say there are but a select few in our city who actually have any factual information regarding these so-called safety devices and their alternatives. Lets face the facts most of the respondents could not provide a qualified answer to the question. Most drivers can’t even tell you the size of their tires or engines in their cars let alone anything about photo enforcement other then what the proponents spout courtesy of your tax dollars and the willing media. If the questions asked by the Winnipeg Free Press/ Probe Research poll had been stated differently, or if some attempt to present unbiased information was made, the results would be VERY different. This is very misleading ruse that helps dampen the public back lash as most people now believe they are in the minority if they disagree, when in fact they’re not.
One of the studies often quoted (and used to promote our program) by the proponents of automated enforcement is the Oxnard, California, study (IIHS April 26, 2001). This insurance industry-sponsored study made great claims, purportedly showing RLCs reduce crashes. There are major issues with this report, including the fact that no specific crash types were identified (red light running accidents are not even identified). RLC intersections were not analyzed separate for the other intersections either. The study claims a 5.4% over all reduction in intersections crashes and a 40% reduction of RLV’s, (Red Light Violations) at the 11 monitored intersections. Santa Barbra, a neighboring town with out cameras saw a 10.2% reduction in overall collisions! Further more lengthening of yellow lights can reduce RLVs as much as and often many times more than enforcement and this is also acknowledged in this study. The study also had to redefine the definitions of intersection approaches from 100 ft prior to the intersection to the cross walk in order to hide the increase in rear end accidents that occurred. Perhaps the best and most comprehensive study on RLCs was done in Melbourne Australia, by David Andreassen, covering 10 years and 41 camera sites done over 10 years ago( this study was not considered by the police). The study could find no correlation between monitored intersections and non monitored intersections, other then a large increase in rear end collisions, and, contrary to expectations an increase in red light collisions at many sites! Many other locations found similarly poor results when the data is properly analyzed.
The three main bodies of information the city used in its decision to roll out photo enforcement were the Oxnard study, the Washington, DC, police department, and The National Campaign to Stop Red Light Running (http://www.stopredlightrunning.com). We have covered the first two to some degree, so let's look at this site. At first it appears to be an grass roots organization like MADD, but for red light runners. Impressive enough. Look deeply and you will find that that it is a lobby organization funded and founded by camera vendors, the biggest contributor being none other then our own contractor, ACS! It quickly becomes clear the police/city did nothing more then look at pro -camera information provided by the vendors and did nothing that could be described as an "evaluation" or "study". The only thing that was studied was how to implement the program with the least amount of public backlash.

Cities in the US that use red light cameras- State begins with "W"

Please note- this list is always growing. Please comment if your town or city is not included and also uses the cameras!
R = red light camera; S = speed camera

Washington
Auburn R
Bremerton R S
Burien R S
Fife R
Lacey R
Lakewood R
Lynnwood R
Monroe R S
Moses Lake R
Mountlake Terrace R
Puyallup R
SeaTac R
Seattle R
Tacoma R S

Cities in the US that use red light cameras- State begins with "T"

Please note- this list is always growing. Please comment if your town or city is not included and also uses the cameras!
R = red light camera; S = speed camera

Tennessee
Chattanooga S
Gallatin R
Germantown R
Jackson R S
Kingsport R
Knoxville R
Morristown R
Mount Carmel S
Red Bank R S
Selmer R S

Texas
Allen R
Arlington R
Austin R
Balch Springs R
Balcones Heights R
Bedford R
Burleson R
Carrolton R
Cedar Hill R
College Station R
Coppell R
Corpus Christi R
Dallas R
Dalworthington Gardens R
Denton R
Duncanville R
El Paso R
Farmers Branch R
Forney R
Fort Worth R
Frisco R
Garland R
Grand Prairie R
Granite Shoals R
Halton R
Harlingen R
Houston R
Humble R
Huntington R
Hurst R
Hutto R
Irving R
Jersey Village R
Killeen R
Lake Jackson R
Lancaster R
Lewisville R
Longview R
Lubbock R
Lufkin R
Marshall R
McKinney R
Mesquite R
Mission R
Montgomery County R
North Richland Hills R
Oak Ridge North R
Plano R
Port Lavaca R
Richardson R
Richland Hills R
Roanoke R
Rowlett R
Southlake R
Sugar Land R
Terrell R
Tomball R
University Park R