On Wednesday, October 16, 2013 3:08:04 PM UTC-4, Nate Nagel wrote:

But you see, I'm not actually anti-camera in principle, only in
practice. If you can assure me that yellow timings will be properly
set, and that the cameras are reliable enough that only a tiny fraction
of the tickets will be issued in error, and that there will be some kind
of review and appeal process that will allow people ticketed in error to
have their tickets reversed without undue time and financial effort,
then I'm OK with them. But I believe that in a typical camera
installation, NONE of those things are true, which is why I am opposed
to them.

I agree with everything above, except the last sentence. If the abuses were really as great as the anti-camera crew pretends, they'd be extremely easy to document. Yellow lights are easy to time with a stopwatch. It's easy to prove a speed limits is less than state law allows. And while I think the appeal process should be easy, realistically that won't matter when the camera clearly shows your car busting a red. (One lawyer I know well, who does a lot of traffic work, says that almost nobody challenges the cameras simply because they know they were in the wrong, and there's incontrovertible proof.)

- Frank Krygowski