The whole idea of camera traffic enforcement strikes me as Big Brotherism and instinctively I don't like it at all. If the cops want to go out there in person and catch motorists, fine, that's their job. But, it bothers me to have cameras watching us and it bothers me even more to have them issuing tickets. It seems like the first step down a very slippery slope.
It would appear that I am not alone in this view. As we got ready to go to press, House Majority Leader Dick Armey was quoted in the Washington Times as terming their use by the National Park Service on Virginia's George Washington Parkway as a "spy camera program" that constitutes an "encroachment upon our liberty." Noted Armey:
"I'm committed to doing what it takes to make our roads safer, but not at the cost of our fundamental rights. Likewise, I am concerned that this may be seen as a step toward a Big Brother surveillance state, where the government monitors the comings and goings of its citizens."
In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that we have these cameras all over the place around here. Red-light cameras are in use in Baltimore, and in nearby Columbia, Maryland, and Washington, DC, too, as well as speed-monitoring cameras on the Washington Beltway (I-95/I-495) and the G. W. Parkway. But, no, I have not been snared by them and have no axe to grind, nor do I know of anyone who has. Nor, for that matter, have I noted any decrease in aggressive driving in either jurisdiction as a result of these contraptions. I should note, too, that in September, 1996, I was the victim of a red light runner who caused a three-car pile-up several blocks from the Ride&Drive offices and which left me laid-up for about six weeks. So, to say I appreciate the serious nature of the problem would be an understatement.
My specific objections to these cameras are varied. I am concerned both with the concept behind them and the ways in which they are used.
To begin with, it bothers me that these cameras are so unforgiving. There are valid reasons why someone might run a red light. Have you ever been in a funeral procession? (Don't think I'm kidding. Read on.) What if you are rushing a loved one to the hospital? Suppose an ambulance is coming up behind you in crowded traffic and the only way you can clear a path for it is to move out into (or even thru) the intersection despite the red light? I've been in this last situation more than once and I assume many of my readers have, too.
What if you are being threatened while you sit at an intersection waiting for the light to change and run the light in self-defense? People are sitting ducks while trapped at traffic lights and this is an especially serious problem at night in our inner city areas. People are robbed that way and there are carjackings, too. A while back something more mundane, but quite disturbing, happened to me along these lines. A "squeegie kid" at an intersection — this "kid" was twenty-five years old if he was a day, but they always refer to them as "kids" — became so hostile that I feared for my physical safety and ran a red light to get away from him. Of course, I made sure there was no cross traffic when I did it and I was making a left turn from one one-way street onto another so it was no big deal and nothing ever came of it. But, still...
Later, I discussed this incident with two of my neighbors who happened to be assistant state's attorneys (prosecutors). Had I been ticketed, I told them, I didn't believe any jury would have convicted me. They assured me it never would have gotten to trial in the first place because the cop would not have written me a ticket under the circumstances and, if he had, the state's attorney's office never would have prosecuted it. Probably so…but if a camera had been at that intersection I would have had a ticket in the mail because the camera only registers WHAT transpired, not WHY. The camera, in short, is not interested in extenuating circumstances, yet law enforcement authorities, from the cop on the beat all the way up to the judge and jury, treat such matters very seriously.
There is also the question of poor design and maintenance of intersections, and of traffic signals and signs. I inadvertently ran a red light several years ago because the light had burned out. I was lucky to have avoided a serious collision, and the cop who pulled me over a few block beyond quickly decided to let me go as soon as he was apprised of the situation. Yet, a camera would have issued me a ticket.
Then, there is the whole issue of faulty arrangement of traffic signals, the poor sequencing of them and of confusing traffic patterns. There is a dangerous intersection two blocks from my home where three heavily-traveled streets come together. It has always been chancy, but several years ago some genius in the city government revised the sequence of the signals. As soon as I saw the new sequence I predicted that the result would be an epidemic of red light running by drivers confused by the new set-up. Sadly, I was right; you could pull up a lawn chair there and watch people running the light hour after hour any day of the week. Even though I now approach this intersection with extreme caution, I have nearly been clobbered on several occasions by drivers running the red without even realizing it. (This was not the intersection where I actually WAS clobbered, btw.) If the city were to erect a camera at this intersection, a huge amount of revenue could be generated but the problem would remain.
Some of these camera systems are set-up to identify the driver, some are not — they simply ticket the vehicle and the owner has to pay. The cameras on the Washington Beltway are not set-up to identify the driver and my understanding is that the red-light cameras in Baltimore are not, either. For me, it is even more troubling when the vehicle itself, in a sense, is being charged and found guilty. In the law, this is known as an "in rem" proceeding, literally going after an inanimate object rather than a person. When you attach a lien to someone's property in order to force him or her to pay a debt, that's an in rem proceeding. This is, however, something unprecedented in criminal law. If my car is seen speeding away from a bank holdup, it is certainly evidence that the police would follow in hopes of gathering still more evidence to determine my involvement in the crime, but the mere observation of my car leaving the scene would not be enough to land me in jail. (Someone may have stolen my car. My next-door neighbor might have borrowed it. I might have seen guns or heard gunshots and fled the scene in a panic. The car that was seen might have been similar to mine. How many green Pontiacs are there in the Baltimore metropolitan area, anyway? Who knows?) Yet, with camera traffic enforcement, there is not always an attempt to pin the crime on an actual person.
This is not an insignificant problem. In our society, many of the people driving vehicles at any given time are not the titled owners of those cars or trucks. I have no idea what the percentage is, but it must be substantial. People rent cars, lease cars, use company cars, borrow cars, etc. It might be possible to prove that a Honda press car was assigned to Ride&Drive Features on the day the red light was run, but that still means that three different people could have been driving it. In what other area of law enforcement can the state say, in effect, we have reason to believe that someone who works for your company broke the law — although we aren't positive and can't tell you who — therefore your company has been found guilty and has to suffer the consequences?
Baltimore has a very high auto theft rate. If my car is stolen, I'll have problems enough with which to deal without having to fight the thief's traffic tickets, too. I can see myself spending days arguing with the Motor Vehicle Administration (MVA) trying to convince them that I don't owe the ticket.
Don't laugh. I had a similar problem with a tag renewal a few years ago. In Maryland, you cannot renew your tags if you have unpaid traffic or parking tickets. At tag renewal time, the MVA sent me a notice saying I had an unpaid parking ticket on my personal car, which, as I noted above, happens to be a Pontiac. When I asked where and when, I found out that "my car" had been ticketed in a bad neighborhood on the other side of town — a place I had probably never been in my entire life. Further research revealed that the make of car listed on the ticket was a Chrysler. Obviously, someone got lazy — either the cop when he wrote down the tag number or a clerk at the MVA, but it was not easy getting it straightened out. Fortunately, this was not a "criminal" offense that carried points against my driver's license, as would have been the case with a traffic ticket. If so, my problems would have been multiplied many times over.
In a similar vein, someone has to interpret these tag numbers on the camera's film. What happens when they make mistakes? What if the records they're using are unreliable? Washington, DC, is notorious for sloppy record-keeping. You can read stories all the time in the newspapers about people getting parking tickets intended for someone else, people who got new tags because they just bought new cars or recently moved into the District. The typical story has the victim returning to his parked car after dinner at one of Washington's posh restaurants only to find it "booted" because the tag number was owned years ago by some scofflaw who ran up 138 unpaid parking tickets. Most people don't realize that in many states old tag numbers are retired only briefly, then reissued anew. (The motor vehicle people are SUPPOSED to purge the old records before the numbers are reissued, but…)
What happens when a camera is improperly installed or simply malfunctions? Big trouble for innocent motorists, that's what. In the District last year, a single malfunctioning red-light camera improperly ticketed 20,000 cars. Included in the lengthy list of victims were mourners involved in funeral processions, as well as ambulances, police cars and other emergency vehicles.
Baltimore is no paragon of efficiency, either. After a recent election, it was revealed that the city had "forgotten" to purge the voter rolls of 67,000 people who had moved, died or let their registrations lapse. Are we being asked to believe that the traffic enforcement department is an island of perfection in this sea of incompetence?
I can appreciate the myriad problems the authorities confront when it comes to traffic enforcement, but attempts to find "simple" and "infallible" solutions rarely work as intended. The world does not happen to be a simple place, nor are our public servants or systems infallible. Far from it on all counts.
It is worth bearing in mind, too, that just because something works doesn't mean we should do it. You could cut down on illegal drug use by staging house-to-house sweeps through entire cities without benefit of warrants. But, do we really want that? Most people, I think, would say that it is better to tolerate a certain level of drug abuse if the alternative is having the police storming through our homes at will.
In fact, in a free society a certain level of crime is always tolerated because it cannot be reduced below that level without trampling on the basic rights we all cherish. If the last century taught us anything it was that terrible things happen when fanatics are free to impose some "good" upon society at all costs.
On the other hand, are we really sure that these camera enforcement systems work as well as their proponents claim? A few months ago, we reported on a brewing scandal in Britain regarding cameras used to clock motorists and issue speeding tickets. In Northamptonshire, the police are claiming a 28 percent reduction in fatalities between 1999 and 2000 as a result of the use of these cameras. Not so, claims a citizen's watchdog group, which contends that the 2000 stats differ hardly at all from the five-year average. Said spokesman Nigel Humphries:
"This is typical statistical chicanery by the authorities, who are desperate to justify a hugely unpopular scheme by claiming they have saved lives. This scheme is so unpopular in Northants, where the number of speeding tickets has risen from 4,000 to 100,000, that they are now deliberately targeting through traffic on the M1 and A14 [motorways] in order to raise their revenue from people who don't live locally and therefore cannot make trouble."
What? Government agencies cooking statistics? Safety crusaders making unsupportable claims to advance their latest schemes? No, no, it can't be…
So, are we helpless to stop red-light running? Of course not. We can work to get better design and maintenance of signals, signs and traffic patterns at difficult intersections. We can increase the presence of law enforcement officers at these intersections during peak hours of the day.
We can also improve driver training, which is a joke in this country. It is many times more difficult in most states to get a license to cut hair than it is to get a license to operate a two-ton projectile on the public highways. In Maryland, if you show up at the testing center sober and don't actually slobber on the clerk who gives you your written test and don't physically assault the State Trooper who gives you your driving test, you walk away with a license.* And, then, we complain about the level of driving skill we observe on the roads…
Furthermore, we can outlaw the use of cell phones by drivers. A significant portion of the red lights that are crashed probably involve people who are yakking instead of paying attention to where they're going. Recently, one of our colleagues in the press corps was T-boned at an intersection in Virginia by a woman gabbing away on her cell phone. You hear about this all the time. Is it just a coincidence that the sudden upsurge in red-light running in recent years has come with the exponential increase in cell phone use? I have not heard of any studies that address this particular issue, but common sense would leave little doubt that there is a relationship.
No, there are many, many things we can do before we put George Orwell in charge of traffic enforcement … R&D
* The written test in Maryland is not only NOT a test of knowledge, it actually dispenses incorrect information. The procedure in Maryland (and in the District, as well) is to hand out a booklet with questions and answers about driving, in general, and state traffic laws, in particular. The questions on the written test are then taken verbatim from the booklet. Thus, all the would-be driver has to do to pass the written portion of the test is memorize the booklet. When I moved to Baltimore from the District in 1985, I had to take the written test to get a Maryland license. But, not the driving test because they assumed that, since I already had a license from another state or jurisdiction, I knew how to drive. This was an assumption I also made, and I spent most of my time (which wasn't much) prepping for the written test by studying the questions that pertained to Maryland law. What I hadn't counted on was that one of the questions about driving was actually wrong. It went something like this:
"You should turn on your windshield wipers…
a) As soon as it starts raining
b) Wait a while, then turn them on
c) Never
Granted, it was a badly written question and I should have taken into account that the entire test was designed for mental defectives, but as a professional driver I knew that "a" was incorrect. It takes a certain amount of fluid to enable the wipers to operate properly. If you turn them on as soon as the first drop of rain hits the windshield, all you will accomplish is to smear the accumulated road film that has probably collected, thus reducing — not improving — your vision. Thus, you should wait until enough rain has fallen to lubricate the wiper blades, i.e., wait a while before turning them on. So, I marked "b" as the correct answer…and they docked me points. I still got my license because that was the only question I missed, but after sixteen years I'm still ticked about it!
