Red light cam­era. Photo by Scott Akerman.

With tight bud­gets, many cities have turned to traf­fic tick­ets to gen­er­ate a quick influx of cash.

The National Motorists Association (www.motorists.org), a motorists’ rights orga­ni­za­tion, has iden­ti­fied local­i­ties focused on ticket rev­enue that dri­vers may want to avoid.

1 — Chicago, Illinois

Chicago has an exten­sive red-light cam­era sys­tem. There are over 140 cam­eras posi­tioned to ticket dri­vers every­day. Less well-known is that their yel­low lights are timed to entrap motorists with short 3.0 sec­ond inter­vals, a tac­tic guar­an­teed to gen­er­ate thou­sands of red light tick­ets. A sin­gle cam­era has been known to gen­er­ate $700,000 to $800,000 per year.

These short yel­low lights fail to meet legit­i­mate traf­fic engi­neer­ing stan­dards and lead to unnec­es­sary red-light vio­la­tions, vio­la­tions that could be eas­ily pre­vented sim­ply by increas­ing the yel­low light dura­tion to the cor­rect levels.

The city also sold it’s park­ing meters to a pri­vate com­pany which promptly dou­bled the fees and plans to quadru­ple them within three years.

2 — Chillicothe & Heath, Ohio

Both of these cities started con­tro­ver­sial ticket cam­era pro­grams. Chillicothe started col­lect­ing money from dri­vers with­out both­er­ing to set up any kind of an appeal sys­tem — instead they referred dri­vers with dis­puted tick­ets to the cam­era manufacturer.

Heath, a city of 8,800 peo­ple, issued more than 10,000 tick­ets in the first three weeks of oper­a­tion. Before the city dis­missed many of the tick­ets due to pub­lic pres­sure, the rev­enue at $100 per ticket would have been $830,000, even after pay­ing the cam­era com­pany their fee.

3 — Los Angeles, California

The city of Los Angeles issued over 30,000 red-light cam­era tick­ets last year. At $159 apiece, these dri­ver penal­ties net­ted the city almost $4.8 mil­lion. However, it was later dis­cov­ered that over 80% of tick­ets were given for right turn on red vio­la­tions, which have lit­tle to no impact on traf­fic safety.

4 — Duncanville, Texas

This city, with a pop­u­la­tion of 38,500, issued over 43,000 red-light cam­era tick­ets last year. Much like Los Angeles, the city focused on right-turn on red vio­la­tions, which accounted for 85% of the tick­ets given out. Because of the amount of money they bring in, the mayor even went as far as arrest­ing an alder­man who dis­agreed with the city’s tactics.

5 — Phoenix & Scottsdale, Arizona

Despite wide­spread crit­i­cism from cit­i­zens, these two cities — and oth­ers in Arizona — con­tinue to relent­lessly expand their speed cam­era net­works. In 2008, Scottsdale alone issued $17 mil­lion in auto­mated tick­ets. Luckily for dri­vers vis­it­ing from out of state, the cities rarely bother to fol­low up on cam­era based tick­ets issued to non-residents.

6 — Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C. is over­run with ticket cam­eras. They even have ticket cam­eras installed on their street sweep­ers. The city has also been crit­i­cized for tick­et­ing motorists in their own dri­ve­ways. Over a six-year period, the District has issued more than 500,000 cita­tions and $32 mil­lion in fines via auto­mated tickets.

7 — Entire State of Florida

When it comes to respect­ing dri­vers, the state of Florida is a dis­as­ter. The state is home to two of the most noto­ri­ous speed trap cities in the coun­try (Waldo and Lawtey) and — despite the Attorney General rul­ing them ille­gal — numer­ous Florida cities have jumped on to the red-light cam­era band­wagon. Avoid the entire state if you can.

Many of the places on this list use some form of auto­mated enforce­ment, but it’s impor­tant to note that tra­di­tional enforce­ment tech­niques like speed traps (over 25,000 listed on www.speedtrap.org) are still extremely common.

For more infor­ma­tion on how to fight back against exces­sive and unfair enforce­ment of traf­fic laws, motorists are encour­aged to visit the National Motorists Association’s web­site at www.motorists.org.

Photo by Scott Akerman

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