The success of citizen initiative petitions to stop photo enforcement have forced local officials to react swiftly. In Heath, Ohio the mayor has begun forgiving recipients of multiple speed camera tickets in a desperate attempt to paint a friendlier face on the program after formal acceptance of the petition that will put the future of the program up for a public vote in November. A similar petition also succeeded in College Station, Texas, but officials are turning to far more hostile tactics. Local resident Jim Ash, who led the charge to gather signatures, now says city officials will attempt to sabotage the ballot initiative later today.

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Police in Frankston, Australia used automobile seizure laws this weekend to impound a toy motorcycle belonging to a little girl. While under her father’s supervision, Laney Frankland, 5, had been riding in circles around a reserve near the end of a neighborhood cul-de-sac on a 49cc motorbike. Police arrived on the scene late in the afternoon to tell the little girl that she was not supposed to be riding in that location. The officers then summoned a tow truck to take away her bike. The girl ran to her mother. “I thought she had hurt herself,” Tracey Frankland explained in an interview with 3AW Radio. “She came back and she was hysterical. Her face was bright red and tears were pouring down her face. Now she thinks the police are bad.”

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The state of Arizona began deploying speed cameras on freeways last year for the stated purpose of slowing drivers. Scottsdale was the first jurisdiction in the state to use such cameras and issued $17 million worth of automated freeway tickets before the state took over the program. The city paid a local professor $75,000 to create a study to show that drivers had slowed. An expert in radar technology produced a report last month insisting that is not the case.

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A California judge last week began throwing out red light camera citations issued in Santa Ana. Orange County Superior Court Commissioner Kenneth Schwartz declared the city’s program void because it had ignored several provisions of state law. Local attorneys Mark D. Sutherland and R. Allen Baylis had challenged the city for its failure to provide the required thirty-day warning period before beginning the program and its use of a prohibited per-ticket “cost neutral” compensation scheme.

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The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling last Tuesday imposing restrictions on the ability of Indian tribes to use roadblocks to detain motorists who are not tribal members. The court examined the case of motorist Terry Bressi who was stopped at a checkpoint on the Tohono O’odham Reservation in Pima County, Arizona while traveling on State Route 86 on December 20, 2002. Tribal police, Border Patrol and Immigration and Naturalization Service agents manned the roadblock.

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The benefits of a mandated increase in yellow light timing at photo enforced intersections in Georgia have not diminished after six months. In response, the city of Norcross is dumping red light cameras while Duluth is keeping them. The Norcross City Council made its final decision Monday based on the continued low number of violations following the timing change. The city of Duluth, on the other hand, voted last week to keep cameras even though the number of potential tickets has not increased.

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Motorists who passed by speed cameras and red light cameras yesterday in the province of Caserta, Italy were greeted by the sight of the devices shrouded in black plastic trash bags. They were not vandalized. The carabinieri — a national police force — affixed official warning notices explaining that the cameras were in “protective custody under Article 321.” An investigation is underway into possible fraudulent conduct on the part of local officials in thirty-three municipalities as well as fourteen private companies who operated the equipment under contract. In addition to seizing camera equipment, documents were taken from the offices of both photo enforcement companies and local police chiefs and mayors.

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The Pebble Beach Concorso Italiano is promoting the fact that they will assemble a world record number of Ferrari 288 GTOs (more than 12). It got me thinking: what happened to the good ol’ days of driving fast for no good reason to set a Guinness world record? Or for that matter driving fast after having a few Guinnesses. Don’t answer the latter, I think I know the answer to that one. Whoo, whoooooo. That’s me making siren noises. Anyway, here’s the correct answer.

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Am I the only one who finds it ironic that TTAC received the press release for National Stop Red Light Running Week arrived in the middle of same (August 2 – 8)? Equally strangely, the PR flack writing this tardy tiresome tirade seems to see red. “While the message is sound, this particular safety campaign is unlike traditional safety programs like ‘Click It or Ticket.’ The ‘Stop on Red Week’ program has a decidedly corporate slant. The big push behind this week appears to be coming from the photo enforcement industry. These are the companies that install red light cameras. Photo enforcement is right in the middle of the ‘safety vs. revenue’ debate taking place nationwide. It’s likely this campaign is mostly about telling the public how necessary photo enforcement is and encouraging towns to install such cameras.” How long before THAT gets pulled? Meanwhile, how about some common sense tips on how not to run a red light? Seriously.

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Cruising through this morning’s autoblogoshpere, I clicked on an Automotive Aftermarket Industry Association (AAIA) report on telematics. In case you didn’t know, telematics is “the science of measuring, sending, receiving and storing information via telecommunication devices. In automotive terms—it is the ability to establish two-way connection with a moving vehicle.” Like, a cell phone? Yes, but better! “Did you ever drive your dad’s car somewhere you weren’t supposed to be, or faster than you were supposed to go? With skypatrol, your dad would have received an e-mail or text message telling him you were traveling outside of your assigned geofence [!] or moving faster than the speed limit . . . With skypatrol, you can use GPS travel histories to analyze your route planning to maximize your effectiveness.” Question: can we make a rule that the “you” in question is always the “you” who owns the vehicle—and no one else? Just askin’.

Arizona’s Department of Public Safety frequently issues press releases with the boast that it’s running the “first ever” freeway speed camera program in the United States. This, of course, is not true. The state of Illinois began allowing a private company to deploy speed camera vans on freeways in May 2006. The true claim to the title, however, goes to the state of Hawaii. The Aloha state’s speed camera program lasted five months—before intense public pressure sent the camera vans packing.

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RSA’s Saturday Star reports that a set of speed cameras in Johannesburg accused a Geely automobile of reaching impossible speeds. On April 26, a camera on the N12 South flashed the Chinese import belonging to motorist Francisca Al-Halaseh near Canada Road Bridge. Just 19 seconds later, according to the tickets, she was flashed driving 102km/h (63 MPH) in an 80km/h (50 MPH) zone at Randshow Road Bridge. The only problem is that those locations are 2.9 miles apart, meaning Al-Halaseh would have to have been traveling 549 miles per hour.

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Black motorists may be as much as three times more likely to be stopped and searched than a white motorist while driving through the state of West Virginia, even though they are less likely to be carrying contraband. This is so according to a report by the state Division of Criminal Justice Services. The agency performed a statistical analysis of 301,479 traffic stops that took place between April 2007 and September 2008. Among all 348 state, county and local law enforcement agencies, blacks were 64 percent more likely than whites to be stopped. Hispanics were 48 percent more likely to be stopped.

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Physics Central’s Buzz Blog reports on a study which shows that breaking the rules can be the best way to help keep traffic flowing. The study by Sweden’s Umea University modeled traffic composed of “normal” pedestrians and “rule breakers,” finding that when over 60 percent of traffic consists of “rule breakers” things actually move more efficiently. “The interesting finding is that if most of the people are law-abiding, and you have a certain amount of people who are breaking the rule, then you are actually getting the minimum chance of a [traffic] jam,” says one of the study’s authors. Exactly following the rules of the road can cause traffic to build up behind a single negligent driver (who hasn’t seen that happen), and often the jam is only relieved by a driver breaking the speed limit to pass. Of course, there are other studies coming out which indicate that higher speed limits lead to higher death rates, but death only hurts for a few seconds. The pain of being stuck in a jam of mindless motorists can feel like an eternity.

Red light camera and speed camera manufacturers fear that last month’s US Supreme Court ruling in the case Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts could create legal turmoil for the industry. The National Campaign to Stop Red Light Running issued a statement yesterday warning that the ruling has armed motorists with a greater ability to challenge the basis of automated traffic citations. Speed cameras, for example, depend heavily on legal faith in a certificate that claims to confirm the total reliability of a machine’s speed reading. In the Melendez-Diaz case, the high court ruled that merely producing such a certificate in court is insufficient. Defendants have the right to cross-examine any individual who claims to have certified evidence.

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