Do you live in New Jersey, but travel around states where a traffic enforcement camera could ruin your day? You may soon be able to put that fear aside, thanks to a new bipartisan bill going through the state’s legislature.
Autoblog reports the bill would prohibit the New Jersey Motor Vehicles Commission from sharing plate numbers and related identification to another state or an interstate information network for the sole purpose of levying fines on New Jersey drivers. The bill, which targets the aforementioned cameras and other similar traffic enforcement devices, was introduced to the assembly in July, and made its appearance before the senate last week.
The reasoning behind the bill, sponsored by Republican assemblyman Declan O’Scanlon and Democrat senators Nick Sacco and Nick Scutari, is that the cameras put the blame on the owner of the vehicle in question, and not upon the driver behind the wheel at the time the vehicle was caught on-camera. The same criticism led city officials in Baltimore, Md. into scrapping the city’s cameras, and the state legislature in South Dakota to protect its constituents from Iowa’s line of cameras along the border shared between the two states.
Enforcement of the law may prove difficult should the New Jersey bill be enacted, as there is no specific language on how to block information access from out-of-state automated enforcement while allowing for human enforcement to proceed unhindered.
Long straightways with a “75 mph” limit just SCREAM OUT. To be sped on.
I wish I had a Veyron:SS capable of 300 mph and a pass from
The state to test it there (or i80) because the Roads are PERFECT for it.
Took my girl to the Borgata in Atlantic City.
Everyone was doing between 80 and 90. For the most part the cops won’t bother you. Coming back there was no one on the road. Why can’t you go a little faster to make better time?
>> I wish I had a Veyron:SS
Less than 3 mpg and a 26 gallon tank means a couple of fuel stops to kill your average speed. Give me a Mooney Acclaim S or Cessna TTx, 270+ legal MPH without little old ladies driving Avalons getting in your way. Cars aren’t for going long distances fast.
Amen. A member of my flying club did a day trip from eastern PA to Newport RI this weekend. Total one-way time in the air? 1:15. And that’s in his 182.
Combine higher speeds with direct routing and even our slow club C150s turn multi-hour car trips into relatively painless experiences. Plus, you’re flying which beats driving almost any day! And, it’s certainly cheaper to own and operate than a Veyron.
#1 If you own a Veyron, the cost of fuel and maintenance is IRRELEVANT.
Pennies on your dollar.
#2 The Veyron will empty its fuel tank in 5 minutes at that speed, but I only need to hit 300 for a few seconds – just to prove I could – and then for the rest of my ownership, I’d probably never exceed 150 mph.
You don’t buy a car like that to go fast. You buy it to drive really slow around bus stops and “minimum wage hike” rallies.
#3 As for FLYING: If I had the money, I’d build a quadcopter like the AR PARROT DRONE – with a bubble cockpit – big enough for two – using electric motors, gyros and sensors.
An electric quadcopter would be more fun than a Schweizer 333.
There’s a happy medium in there. My 328i did 25mpg at 105mph average in Germany. That included plenty of 130-140mph running, but also some 60mph through construction zones. That’s 375 miles usable range, or nearly 4hrs. Seems like plenty. A diesel BMW would be even better – just as fast, more range, better economy. The BMW is one heck of a lot less expensive than something with wings.
I’m actually OK with red light cameras, except for the cash grab aspect. They should be setup to catch the truly dangerous idiots, the ones who go through the red light LONG after the other way has turned green. I could have gotten nailed by an oblivious cell-phone clutching SUV driving woman this afternoon – the light had been green long enough for me to de-clutch, move the shifter into 1st, and look both ways before she went sailing though. Had I just stepped on it when the light turned green, I would have gotten creamed.
I was born and raised in AC. Before moving to the Capitol Wasteland, I was avering about 20k miles annually on the Garden State Parkway and Atlantic City Expressway, plus some Rutgers runs on the Turnpike. Basic rules of NJ highways
State troopers won’t blink under 80, unless you’re swerving / tailgating / being a jacka$s.
ACPD doesn’t care about speed.
Every other shore town will ticket you for 5 mph under the speed limit, since that’s most of the municipal budget
State troopers will cut you a break if you’re honest with them; Why was I doing 90, because I’ve worked a 14 hour day and just want to get home. Scream or harass them, and they’re impounding your car.
State troopers WILL ticket you 3 days or less before the end of the fiscal quarter, cause quota got to get made.
NJSP use unmarked cars. I don’t mean unmarked Chargers or Impalas. I’ve seen a 15 year old beat up F-150, an ancient, decrepit Camry, and a limousine with hidden lights pull someone over (the limo is the best).
“Why can’t you go a little faster to make better time?”
I don’t know. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that 40 thousand Americans are killed on the roads every year? MW
As an Indiana resident who’s earned two NJ camera driving awards, I will petition our legislature to reciprocate. If all states do as NJ intends, cameras will have to earn their way on the backs of local residents. Let’s see how that goes over with over-taxed NJ residents.
The crooked pols that got the scameras put up in the first place are quite open that it is basically an outsider tax. Breach the mutual consent to allow the other states to rip your people off and maybe this scourge will evaporate in short order.
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So then ;
Driving legally is out of the question ? .
-Nate
You still need to worry about everyone else that may drive a car registered to you.. or a car with similar plates.
And it’s unconstitutional deprivation of due process anyway.
This is NJ Assembly bill No. 3527. Encourage the adoption of this brilliant application of the golden rule.
So it would seem.
As mentioned in the article, many municipalities make the owner of the car liable, not the driver, so how you drive may not matter. There’s also the problem of manipulating the environment to create citations (illegally short yellow times with red light cameras, poorly marked speed limit changes with unusually low and rapidly varying speed limits with speed cameras). Proper speed limits and yellow light times can practically eliminate incidental traffic violations, leaving only those who deliberately don’t care about traffic law, but there aren’t enough of them to make money off of.
Of course, other states could reciprocate by hauling every NJ resident into the jail for a hearing and payment of the fine before release on every human stop. Right?
This would only work for camera violations. If they pull you over then they’ve got your driver’s license and don’t need to look you up.
And that’s always been the main issue with camera enforcement, it sends an automatic fine to the owner, not necessarily to the offender. The government hasn’t had an issue turning citizens into tax collector’s on it’s behalf, but this is just ridiculous.
Traffic laws are largely a state matter. New Jersey has no authority to interfere with another state’s enforcement of its own traffic laws.
Right. If this bill were to be the case, they’d be choosing not to interfere.
The only thing that New Jersey could do would be to not report the out-of-state tickets on New Jersey driving records. It couldn’t prevent another state from issuing a ticket, collecting the fine or penalizing the driver if he fails to respond to the ticket.
They wouldn’t be preventing, they just wouldn’t be aiding and abetting. I’m not sure what if any obligation they have to share the owner of the car’s info, likely none. Those types of agreements are usually quid pro quo.
The states issuing the tickets can collect the information from the driver with regards to who to fine.
Actually, there are two different driver license compacts that provide the mechanism for sharing information, the Driver License Compact (DLC) and the Non-Resident Violator Compact (NRVC). Most states belong to one or both of them, and New Jersey is a member of both.
If Virginia wants to mail tickets to New Jersey drivers, then there isn’t a damn thing that New Jersey can do about that. It sounds as if they’re responding to complaints about those tickets — Virginia is notoriously ticket-happy — but New Jersey has no authority to make those tickets disappear. If NJ drivers try to ignore those tickets, then they’re going to be in for a nasty surprise.
>Actually, there are two different driver license compacts that provide the mechanism for sharing information, the Driver License Compact (DLC) and the Non-Resident Violator Compact (NRVC
Those are the qui pro quo agreements I was referring to. It’s not mandatory for states to be a part of them. They could withdraw if need be.
@PCH101
If NJ doesn’t want to tell other states who a particular license plate belongs to, I see that as NJ’s prerogative. That is a VERY different issue from pulling someone over for an infraction and requiring that they show their licence, registration, and proof of insurance so that a ticket can be issued.
Of course, the next level of escalation to this is that the ticketing state will issue the equivalent of an arrest warrant for that plate in their jurisdiction, and God help whoever is driving the car when it is spotted. And in this day of automated plate readers that WILL happen.
I could see some outfit such as, say, Experian becoming a third-party source for car registration information. After all, insurance companies keep this data and what’s to stop them from providing it “for legitimate law-enforcement purposes”? Even better, they could add another “service” to get us to pay to police and correct bad data, just like credit reports!
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Profit!