Shameless political exploitation is really for the money
School’s out for the summer, so it came as a bit of a surprise Wednesday when Baltimore County, Md., announced new steps supposedly being taken to protect school children. According to officials, construction has begun for the positioning of a speed camera outside Stoneleigh Elementary. There’s one problem with that — Stoneleigh students aren’t just gone for the summer, they won’t be back until fall 2013.
The entire Stoneleigh site is enclosed by a temporary construction fence while crews work to renovate the aging buildings. That means there are no classes, no teachers, no kids and no after-school activities. Yet there will be a speed camera.
In 2009, Maryland’s General Assembly swore that the photo ticketing program it put in place was only motivated by safety concerns. As such, it only allowed the devices to be used in school zones and highway work zones. Critics at the time said these “restrictions” were so loosely drafted that jurisdictions could effectively put a camera anywhere they wanted. They were right.
Stoneleigh, the closed elementary school, is situated on Pemberton Road. The speed camera will be activated five blocks away on Regester Ave. The trick of placing robotic cameras in “school zones” that have no schools is rampant throughout the state. Prince George’s County, for example, preys upon motorists on Glenarden Parkway because classroom buildings technically fall within a half-mile radius of the camera. Actual schools are often located on quiet, low-volume residential streets that don’t generate much ticketing revenue, so cities create the fake school zones on high-volume roads.
Greedy politicians around the nation have taken note and want in on this action. At an annual meeting in Florida last month, the U.S. Conference of Mayors called for the use of ticket cameras on school buses, saying the devices “enable bus drivers to focus on the road and on children to secure their safety rather than monitoring the actions of reckless drivers.”
Legislatures around the country have quietly snuck through bills to make this happen. In Virginia, for example, Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell signed a bus camera law last year, although the for-profit school bus camera companies haven’t set up shop in the commonwealth yet.
Speed cameras are the worst. They ignore road conditions (on 635 in Dallas, going the speed limit makes you a road hazard), calibration error, and plain old human error and judgement.
Houston threw out our red light cameras once they started ticketing right turns on red. I suggest that y’all do the same.
Easy way to beat a camera. Question the validity of the private contractor’s product. They will seldom call them from out of town to testify in a trivial case. But if you ran down a kid, they’ll pay and you’ll be toast..
Harold, this is avoided by having a $75 fine that can only be challenged in writing if you write an affadavit saying that you were not driving and finger who was. Otherwise, you have to appear in court to fight it. Anything more than a minimum wage job means that you lose money by fighting your ticket. Even with a minimum wage job, the decreased job security of taking off to go to court means that people don’t want to challenge them.
In Houston, even clearly wrong tickets went unfought because it is more expensive and problematic to fight them than to pay. This included my own, In the video, my wheels were clearly not spinning for a full second before making the right turn on red. That abuse of the system was what led to the repeal. Expensive as it was, it was worthwhile to bring integrity back to traffic court.