Archive for January 24th, 2009
North Carolina: Another City Dumps Red Light Cameras
Rocky Mount, North Carolina decides to stop its red light camera program after court ruling sends profit to school system.
Add Rocky Mount to the growing list of North Carolina cities that have dumped red light cameras after the state’s highest court insisted that profit from the devices must be given to the public schools. The city last week decided to allow its contract with Traffipax, a German ticket camera operator, to expire without renewal.
Like most North Carolina cities, Rocky Mount was eager to install cameras in September 2002, adding a total of five intersections to the program to ensure a steady stream of revenue. By 2005, The National Campaign to Stop Red Light Running, the red light camera industry trade group run by the public relations firm Blakey and Agnew, created data designed to show incredible accident reductions at intersections within the state that used red light cameras. The programs were all declared a success.
“North Carolina ranks third in the nation for the number of communities using this technology,” the industry group boasted in a press release.
This excitement ended in 2007 when the state supreme court upheld a ruling that found Article IX, Section 7 of the North Carolina Constitution applied to red light camera tickets. The provision states that “the clear proceeds of all penalties… shall be… used exclusively for maintaining free public schools” (read final opinion). This meant that local governments had to turn over photo ticketing revenue to the schools and not the general municipal operating budget. Any city wishing to continue its photo ticketing program would have to pay for it.
In addition to Rocky Mount, Charlotte, Fayetteville, Greenville, Greensboro, High Point and Raleigh shut down their red light camera programs after the court ruling.
Source: City ends red light camera contract (Rocky Mount Telegram, 1/21/2009)
Intell agencies to link databases
By GCN Staff
Jan 23, 2009
Program aims to allow cross-domain searches, merge e-mail systems
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has launched a program to link the databases of the federal government’s 16 intelligence agencies to put all of those agencies on one e-mail system and allow cross-domain searches, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Under the Information Integration Program, the e-mail systems of the six largest intell agencies–including the CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency–would be merged by the end of the month, and all intell agencies and the Pentagon would be on one e-mail system by 2010.
Linking the databases would allow for Google-like searches of most of the agencies’ databases by the end of the year. Program leaders also plan to create social networking sites for sharing information.
Defense and intelligence agencies have been working on a variety of information-sharing projects since Sept. 11, 2001. ODNI and other agencies have made headway in exploring Web 2.0 technologies on such projects as Intellipedia, while trying to balance information sharing with security.
Evaluations of Warnings to Prevent Right-Angle Crashes at Signalized Intersections
Author: goldironTest Track and Driving Simulator
Evaluations of Warnings to Prevent
Right-Angle Crashes at Signalized
Intersections
OCTOBER 2008
16. Abstract
Two experiments (simulator and test track) were conducted to validate the concept of a system designed to warn potential victims of a likely red-light violator. The warning system uses sensors to detect vehicles that are unlikely to stop at red traffic signals and uses signs and flashing lights to warn drivers who might collide with a violator. Several human factors issues need to be addressed before such a system could be deployed. The experiments for this study addressed one of these issues—whether, if warned, a sufficient number of drivers would respond in a way that would allow them to avoid a rightangle collision. The results suggest that in the case where no other vehicles precede or follow, a majority of drivers who receive a conspicuous warning will act by braking sharply. Driver responses in both tests were similar. The test track results support the continued use of driving simulators in development of the system. Further research is required to assess responses to warnings given to drivers within a stream of traffic.
Page 39:
CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
The results of these experiments show that drivers are likely to respond appropriately by stopping or slowing for an infrastructure-based warning that they have not previously experienced. However, before recommending that such an infrastructure-based warning system be deployed, several other questions need to be answered. First among these is the effect of the presence of other vehicles. In both of these studies, other vehicles were absent, and now that there is evidence that drivers will respond to warnings in the absence of other vehicles, it is necessary to determine what drivers would do in a stream of vehicles approaching an intersection. In particular, the following questions should be considered:
• Would drivers who know there are vehicles not too far behind them brake aggressively in response to a warning?
• If a driver sees preceding vehicles not braking in response to a
warning, is that driver less likely to brake?
• What is the probability that warnings would precipitate rear-end
collisions, and how severe are those collisions likely to be?
Although any rear-end collision that might result from a warning would likely be less severe than a side-impact collision with a red-light violator, further development of the warn-the-victim concept includes a need to examine and quantify the potential for rear-end collisions that may result from signal violation warnings. Research to address remaining questions concerning redlight violation warnings is currently being conducted by the FHWA.
PDF 49 pages:
http://www.tfhrc.gov/safety/pubs/08070/08070.pdf
Arizona: Freeway Photo Radar Ban Proceeds
Arizona state House committee votes to ban photo radar as speed camera documents may have been falsified in up to 1000 cases.
A committee of the Arizona state House of Representatives yesterday voted 5-2 to approve legislation banning the use of speed cameras on freeways. The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee decided to act in response to a rising tide of public opposition to the largest single deployment of speed cameras ever attempted in the US. State lawmakers voted to reject the program despite the testimony of state police officials that the automated ticketing machines were improving safety on Arizona’s highways.
“Arizona Department of Public Safety statistics show on average photo enforcement is saving three lives per month on Valley freeways,” a state police press release from December 28 claimed. “Results show 116 fewer injury crashes.”
On Thursday, Department of Public Safety (DPS) Commander Thomas Woodward appeared before the panel to repeat these widely reported Phoenix metro area freeway accident statistics. The numbers were based on the first eighty days of freeway ticketing from September 26, 2008 to December 16, 2008 and compared with the same dates in 2007, before the installation of cameras. Woodward gave credit for the drop in accidents entirely to the use of cameras.
TheNewspaper obtained a comparable ninety-day dataset covering accidents on Las Vegas-area freeways between September and November 2007 for comparison with the same dates in 2008 (December data were not available) from the Nevada Highway Patrol. This agency does not use photo radar because state law bans its use under any circumstances (Nevada Revised Statutes 484.910). Using the DPS methodology, one could conclude that this ban on photo radar resulted in 142 fewer injury accidents and an overall drop in collisions of 551.
More likely, however, is that accident statistics reflect a nationwide drop in travel linkd to a slowdown in overall economic activity. When fewer cars are on the road to be involved in accidents, the number of collisions drops. According to the Arizona Department of Transportation, traffic on Maricopa County freeways declined an average of seven percent during the period in question.
Lawmakers at the hearing were concerned with more than just accident statistics. State Representative Andy Biggs (R-Gilbert) was also upset to learn that the Redflex freeway cameras have been recording video twenty-four hours a day to track the movements of drivers not accused of any crime. Last September, TheNewspaper first reported the plan to link all continuously recording photo enforcement cameras into a nationwide surveillance network.
House Bill 2106, endorsed by the committee, would allow such surveillance to continue as long as the cameras used are not deployed on a state highway. Local jurisdictions would remain free to issue tickets and track drivers with these systems. That is why a local group, CameraFraud.com, vows to continue collecting signatures for an initiative that would give voters a chance to ban all forms of photo enforcement on both the state and local level.
If enacted, House Bill 2106 would spell financial trouble for Redflex, the Australian vendor that holds the lucrative contract to operate the freeway ticketing program. Redflex rival American Traffic Solutions (ATS), however, has its own problem yesterday. Tucson courts are expected to throw out up to 1000 tickets after a process server was allegedly caught falsifying documents.
Under Arizona law, motorists cannot be held responsible for an automated ticket that is sent in the mail. Instead, the citation must be hand-delivered by a process server who certifies that the recipient actually received the notice. ATS outsourced this function to E-Z Messenger Legal Support Providers and compensated the company with a bounty for each ticket successfully delivered. E-Z Messenger fired process server Michael Dimenstein after the Tucson Courts uncovered evidence that Dimenstein may have certified tickets as delivered to collect payment even when no attempt was ever made to contact the ticket recipient.
ATS spokesman Josh Weiss was quick to point out that E-Z Messenger is not a “fly-by-night” company and is frequently used by government agencies and attorneys in the area on official court business. Photo enforcement companies around the world are frequently involved in similar legal troubles.
A copy of HB2106 is available in a 25k PDF file at the source link below.
Source: 
House Bill 2106 (Arizona State Legislature, 1/23/2009)
goldiron