Los Angeles, California red light camera racks up $500 tickets with a split-second mistiming.

An intersection in Los Angeles, California is billing drivers nearly $500 for making a turn in the split-second before a permissive green turn arrow appears. Los Angeles hired American Traffic Solutions to operate thirty-two cameras in order to generate about $4 million a year in revenue. The cameras now pounce on drivers making technical mistakes on right-hand turns.

Motorist Stephen Lo found this out the hard way while driving his 2004 Nissan 350Z at the intersection of Sepulveda and Victory Boulevards at around 1:30pm on January 4. As he slowed to make his turn, looking both ways, a 0.6 second gap appeared between the end of the yellow light and the illumination of the green arrow. Because Lo was caught in between the split-second lag between the lights, the photographic evidence showed him apparently breaking the law. A look at the video evidence, however, shows that the vehicle’s front wheels had barely entered the intersection by the time that the green arrow appeared.

“I might just decide to pay the ticket,” Lo told TheNewspaper. “I weighed my options and I don’t have time to go into court to battle this out.”

Lo found himself in the company of about 80 percent of recipients of tickets in Los Angeles who were billed for making rolling right hand turns, according to a 2008 Los Angeles Times report. Despite the heavy focus on right-hand turns for citations, of the 1926 collisions reported at enforced locations between 2006 and 2008, only 2.6 percent were caused by “unsafe turns” — a figure which includes the much more common left-hand turn collisions.

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Houston, Texas sues red light camera company while Baytown, Texas schedules shut down of program next week.

Red light cameras are no longer issuing tickets to motorists in America’s fourth-largest city. The Houston, Texas city council on Monday canvassed the results of the November 2 vote and ordered the cameras unplugged. In the nearby city of Baytown, red light cameras will be disabled at midnight on November 26.

“The voting public has spoken,” Houston City Attorney David M. Feldman wrote Monday in a letter to Jim Tuton, CEO of the camera contractor American Traffic Solutions (ATS). “Houston must follow the mandate of the electorate. Houston hereby terminates its contract with ATS. This termination is effective immediately. ATS is required to turn off all red light cameras installed and/or monitored by reason of the contract and ATS is to do so immediately.”

ATS is upset, and wants financial compensation, because the city terminated the ticketing contract before its 2014 expiration date. Given the massive amount of revenue generated by the program — $17,760,900 worth of tickets were mailed in 2009 — Houston Mayor Annise Parker initially attempted to ignore the results of the vote and to keep issuing tickets for another four months to cover the damages to ATS. It eventually became clear that Parker lacked the votes on the council for this option. On Monday, she filed suit in federal court against ATS.

“Houston… requests this court, after consideration, to declare the rights and obligations of the parties under the express terms of the contract,” Feldman wrote in the brief to the court. “Specifically, a controversy has arisen between Houston and ATS with respect to the interpretation of certain terms and conditions of the contract and parties’ rights and obligations with regard to termination of the contract in light of the results of the election on the Proposition 3 measure.”

For its part, ATS has pledged in public to cooperate fully while vowing to pursue the “difference of opinion” regarding the city’s contract termination payment obligation. US District Court for the Southern District of Texas Judge Lynn N. Hughes has scheduled a pretrial conference on the matter for February 7, 2011.

After Baytown shuts down its cameras next week, all of the photo enforcement elections for the year will be complete. Officials in Garfield Heights, Ohio shut down cameras immediately after seeing the will of the voters. Anaheim, California; Mukilteo, Washington and Sykesville, Maryland had cameras blocked before they could be installed (Anaheim’s referendum was sponsored by the mayor and city council who wanted to prevent future administrations from installing the devices).

Tickets are no longer being mailed based on evidence created by freeway speed cameras in the state of Arizona. After a year-long campaign against the devices, activists succeeded in convincing Governor Jan Brewer (R) to end the photo enforcement contract that her predecessor, Janet Napolitano (D) signed. As a result, the cameras were remotely shut down at 12:00am today.
In January 2008, Napolitano’s budget predicted that 100 speed cameras would issue $165 million worth of tickets by 2010. Only 36 fixed and 42 mobile cameras were ultimately used, and the Australian company in charge of the program, Redflex Traffic Systems, mailed 1,105,935 tickets worth $200,727,202. Unfortunately for the state budget, two out of three recipients threw their citations in the trash on the advice of groups like CameraFraud and newspapers like the Phoenix New Times who correctly pointed out that unserved tickets were invalid. Only 432,367 citations were paid.
Photo enforcement advocates insist that taking down the cameras will result in a ten-fold increase in speeding and accidents. Opponents counter that the other side is making false claims to protect a highly profitable enterprise.
“The spokesman for Redflex is throwing out bogus figures in an attempt to fool the public into fearing other drivers on the road — it’s pure desperation,” CameraFraud’s Shawn Dow said “Arizona’s photo radar program was a complete failure. Neither Janet [Napolitano] nor the cameras are welcome back in Arizona.”
As an example of the false claims, Redflex and DPS both claimed that the freeway photo radar program was the first of its kind in the US, with the claim blindly repeated in publications such as the New York Times and Arizona Republic. In 2001, the state of Hawaii signed a contract with a different Arizona company to run freeway speed cameras. The “talivans” as they were popularly known sparked such a revolt that the legislature had no choice but to end the program prematurely. Illinois started its own modest freeway camera program more than a year before Arizona’s program started.
The same backlash that hit Hawaii struck in Arizona, and Dow intends to bypass the state legislature and use the local initiative process to shut down the remaining municipal cameras on a city-by-city basis. His first target is Paradise Valley, which is not the oldest speed camera program — speed cameras were operational in Texas in the 70s — but rather the oldest program that is still operating. According to Dow’s figures, a majority of the city’s registered voters signed the statewide petition to end photo radar. The localized version of the initiative now includes a provision calling for the refund of all camera citations collected.
“Paradise Valley is going to pay the price for twenty-three years of scamming the citizens out of their money,” Dow said.
Dow hopes to get several local initiatives on the November ballot, joining four confirmed ballot votes in cities as large as Houston, Texas. By November 2011, he predicted there would be no more speed or red light cameras in the state of Arizona. Photo enforcement has never survived a public vote.

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Houston, Texas likely to become the largest city to date to vote on banning red light cameras.

Residents of America’s fourth largest city will likely have the chance to vote to banish red light cameras on November 2. Houston, Texas joins three other cities where a referendum on automated enforcement is virtually assured a place on the ballot. The city council in Anaheim, California and a grassroots effort in Baytown, Texas and Mukilteo, Washington succeeded in meeting the requirements to let voters decide. Other signature gathering efforts continue nationwide.

“The story from Houston is that we’ve reached our number, but we’re going to continue to collect signatures because we fully expect the opposition to spend at least half-a-million dollars to try to knock off private citizen signatures one-by-one,” campaign manager Philip Owens told TheNewspaper. “They do not want the people to vote… They know once it’s on the ballot, they’re going to have to spend a whole lot more.”

Placing a measure on the city ballot requires 22,000 valid signatures. The Citizens Against Red Light Cameras effort, led by the brothers Paul and Randy Kubosh, will spend the remaining few weeks to push their total over the top to thwart any challenge. The Houston group’s highly organized effort used a combination of mass mailing and pavement pounding to get the word out.

“Collecting petitions the old-fashioned way in this heat is tough,” Owens said. “We’re getting very, very positive response door-to-door… I can’t think of anybody who supports the cameras other than the people being paid by the camera company right now.”

American Traffic Solutions (ATS), the private company that operates the red light cameras in return for a cut of the profit generated, has already poured millions into an advertising and lobbying blitz in a desperate attempt to keep the program alive. ATS retained the high-dollar Begala-McGrath public relations firm to create the appearance of a “grassroots” presence in support of automated enforcement. The same effort in College Station failed, despite the firm’s use of paid, out-of-town employees brought in by bus to appear on street corners to support camera use as if they were residents. So far, photo enforcement has never survived a public vote. With the Houston battle taking place in a major media market, the referendum is certain to generate interest around the country.

“This is going to be that start, the other side of the mountain, where they start to lose their influence,” Owens predicted. “We’ve gotten phone calls from Louisiana, California and elsewhere in Texas.”

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PAUL DAVENPORT | 05/ 6/10 08:35 PM

PHOENIX — Arizona is ending a groundbreaking and contentious program that put speed cameras along Phoenix-area freeways and in vans deployed across the state.

Opponents have argued the cameras open the door for wider “Big Brother” surveillance and are more about making money than safety. The program has been the target of an initiative measure proposed for the November ballot.

Even Gov. Jan Brewer has said she doesn’t like the cameras, and her intention to end the program was first disclosed in her January budget proposal. That was followed by a non-renewal letter sent by the Arizona Department of Public Safety this week to the private company that runs the program.

FILE – In this July 18, 2008 file photo, an Arizona Department of Public Safety photo radar enforcement van’s strobe lights up a speeding car while recording its license plate number in Phoenix. More than a year after Arizona became the first state in the country to deploy dozens of speed cameras on highways statewide, threats to the groundbreaking program abound. Profits are far below expectations, a citizen effort to ban the cameras continues to gain steam, the governor has said she does not!

Scottsdale-based Redflex said Thursday that the 36 fixed cameras will be turned off and the 40 vans taken off highways on July 16, the day after its state contract expires.

The non-renewal letter was first reported by The Arizona Republic.

The camera program was instituted by Brewer’s predecessor, Janet Napolitano, now the Homeland Security secretary. Cameras were introduced in September 2008 and were added until all 76 were up and running by January 2009.

Lawmakers considered repeal proposals within months, but set the issue aside and appealed for calmer debate when a passing motorist fatally shot a camera-van operator doing paperwork in his marked vehicle in April 2009.

The mobile and fixed cameras snap the photos of speeders going 11 mph or over the speed limit, and violators get tickets in the mail. Supporters said the cameras slow down drivers, reduce accidents, and free up law-enforcement officers for serious criminals.

Napolitano estimated that the program would bring in $90 million revenue in its first year, but actual revenue fell far short as many motorists ignored notices received in the mail.

While hundreds of jurisdictions across the country use speed cameras and some states have limited programs using cameras in certain areas, Arizona’s statewide deployment remained the widest state use of the technology.

The state’s decision is a setback for supporters of speed-enforcement cameras, said Jonathan Adkins, a spokesman for the Washington-based Governors Highway Safety Association.

“We need to look and see what happened in Arizona why didn’t it work,” he said.

Shawn Dow, a leader of the initiative campaign, welcomed the decision to end the program but said the drive’s organizers still plan to file petition signatures on

the July 1 deadline to qualify it for the November ballot.

The end of the state program does not affect local governments’ use of cameras for speed enforcement, but the proposed ballot measure would prohibit state and local governments from using cameras for both speed violations and red-light running.

Redflex, a unit of Australia-based Redflex Holdings Ltd., said in a disclosure to the Australian Securities Exchange that it could write off $5 million of assets because of the program’s end. Under the state’s contract, Redflex supplies cameras, vans and other equipment.

Department of Public Safety officials declined to comment on the contract or to immediately release the letter. Redflex quoted the letter as saying the non-renewal reflected “a change in the agency’s focus.”

The end of the program will be a disappointment, Redflex spokeswoman Shoba Vaitheeswaran said. She said it comes as the program continued to mature, with improvements being made in court processing procedures and other areas.

Arizona lawmakers approved legislation this year that imposes new signage requirements and other changes for the program.

Joanna Peters, a Phoenix traffic-safety activist, called the Brewer administration’s decision irresponsible.

“They’re ignoring a silent majority of folks who actually support the program,” Peters said. “This is something we could fix, not just throw out the baby.”

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