Opponents of red light cameras and speed cameras are taking the offensive against city councils and camera vendors who have been taking extreme measures to keep the issue of automated ticketing off the ballot. A Cowlitz County, Washington superior court judge will hear arguments later today in a countersuit that accuses the city of Longview of violating an anti-SLAPP law. The state last year banned what are called “strategic lawsuits against public participation” with a measure that grants expedited court procedures to initiative sponsors and a $10,000 penalty against anyone found to be exploiting the legal system to thwart a petition drive.

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Since 1994, the California courts have banned defendants from using scientific evidence to challenge certain charges for driving under the influence of alcohol (DUI). To foil defense attorneys who had become increasingly successful with juries, the state created a “per se” DUI charge that made it a crime to have 0.08 reading on a breathalyzer machine regardless of whether an individual was actually drunk or had a 0.08 percent blood alcohol content (BAC) level. Because of physiological variability among individuals, some people with the same blood alcohol level might read higher or lower on the breath machine. Challenges based on these differences are known as “partition ratio” arguments. The California Court of Appeal on Friday loosened what had become effectively a ban on scientific criticism of breathalyzer reliability.

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Drivers who pass a photo radar location frequently drop their speed far below the legal limit to be absolutely certain no citation will come in the mail weeks later. In response, officials in Valencia, Spain have begun issuing photo tickets to drivers who are moving “too slow.” Motorist Jesus Llorens received just such ticket in the mail on June 14 for sluggish driving past a camera in an Opel Vectra. The alleged offense happened in February at 11am in the tunnel of the Avenida del Cid.

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After Greenpeace attacked Volkswagen for opposing proposed increases in the EU’s emissions regulation, Ford is joining the opposition to tough EU proposals. Ford Europe CEO Stephen Odell railed against the EU’s recent White Paper On The Future Of Transport [PDF here], which calls for (among other things):

-“A higher share of travel by collective transport, combined with minimum service obligations”
-“The use of smaller, lighter and more specialised road passenger vehicles”
-“Road pricing and the removal of distortions in taxation [to] also assist in encouraging the use of public transport and the gradual introduction of alternative propulsion”
-All in the pursuit of the goal: “Halve the use of ‘conventionally-fuelled’ cars in urban transport by 2030; phase them out in cities by 2050; achieve essentially CO2-free city logistics in major urban centres by 203”

Now what about that plan might worry an auto executive?
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[Editor’s note: My take on the IIHS study’s shortcomings can be found here]

The public relations arm of the insurance industry yesterday released a report claiming red light cameras are popular in big cities. About 24 hours after Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) had begun spinning this study to media outlets, only a handful had run stories. Editors at one daily publication told TheNewspaper that they passed on writing about a claim they did not find credible.

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The controversy over red light cameras, once relegated to websites like TTAC, thenewspaper.com, motorists.org and highwayrobbery.net, is hitting the mainstream media thanks to a new study by the IIHS [PDF here]. The study used the following methodology:

Telephone surveys were conducted with 3,111 drivers in 14 large cities (population greater than 200,000) with long-standing red light camera programs and 300 drivers in Houston, using random samples of landline and cellphone numbers. For analyses combining responses from the 14 cities, cases were weighted to reflect each city’s share of the total population for the 14 cities.

And what did they find?

Among drivers in the 14 cities with red light camera programs, two-thirds favor the use of cameras for red light enforcement, and 42 percent strongly favor it. The chief reasons for opposing cameras were the perceptions that cameras make mistakes and that the motivation for installing them is revenue, not safety. Forty-one percent of drivers favor using cameras to enforce right-turn-on-red violations. Nearly 9 in 10 drivers were aware of the camera enforcement programs in their cities, and 59 percent of these drivers believe the cameras have made intersections safer. Almost half know someone who received a red light camera citation and 17 percent had received at least one ticket themselves. When compared with drivers in the 14 cities with camera programs, the percentage of drivers in Houston who strongly favored enforcement was about the same (45 percent), but strong opposition was higher in Houston than in the other cities (28 percent versus 18 percent).

Sounds like those red light cameras are pretty great after all, doesn’t it? That’s certainly the IIHS’s takeaway…
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Opponents of automated ticketing machines in Monroe, Washington have turned to a new tactic in battling a city council that refuses to give up the use of red light cameras and speed cameras. Instead of engaging the city and a wealthy traffic camera company in a costly legal battle, the group BanCams.com decided Wednesday to shame the council at every election until officials follow the public will.

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Almost two months ago, Saab was able to restart production after Gemini Investment Fund extended a €30m six-month convertible loan to the struggling Swedish automaker. Now, after another shutdown, it seems that Gemini has once again ridden to Saab’s rescue, as the company announces another six-month convertible loan from Gemini.

Swedish Automobile N.V. (SWAN) announces that it entered into a EUR 25 million convertible bridge loan agreement with Gemini Investment Fund Limited (Gemini), thereby securing additional short-term funding.

SWAN entered into a EUR 25 million convertible bridge loan agreement with Gemini with a 6 months maturity. The interest rate of the loan is 10% per annum and the conversion price is EUR 1.38 per share (the volume weighted average price over the past 10 trading days). SWAN may at any time during the loan’s term redeem it without penalty and it intends to do so once the funding from Pang Da and Youngman is received, in which case no dilution as a result of this bridge loan will occur.

Attention Chinese, Swedish and European Investment Bank regulators: you’d better cut through that red tape and approve the Pang Da and Youngman investments post-haste, or Saab will be back in the drink when these short-term loans mature. After all, hasn’t Valdimir Antonov been waiting for approval to buy into Saab since.. oh, 2009?

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From its very first paragraph, a recent New York Times article trolls hard for defenders of America’s car-centric culture:

While American cities are synchronizing green lights to improve traffic flow and offering apps to help drivers find parking, many European cities are doing the opposite: creating environments openly hostile to cars. The methods vary, but the mission is clear — to make car use expensive and just plain miserable enough to tilt drivers toward more environmentally friendly modes of transportation.

Does that not have your red American blood boiling? Stand by for some technocratic condescension from a Euro-crat

“In the United States, there has been much more of a tendency to adapt cities to accommodate driving,” said Peder Jensen, head of the Energy and Transport Group at the European Environment Agency. “Here there has been more movement to make cities more livable for people, to get cities relatively free of cars.”

Though the piece continues generally in this vein, the NYT has blessedly decided that there is “Room For Debate” on this issue, and has posted a number of diverging perspectives on it. Urban planning is a notoriously heated topic, accentuating the urban-rural divide as well as the central-planning-versus-absolute-freedom ideological divide, both of which are more pronounced in the US than in Europe. With this in mind, let’s make sure we approach this topic in a respectful, constructive manner. It’s a topic that will inevitably come up again in the future, so let’s take this opportunity to practice discussing it without resorting to ideological name-calling. [HT: David Holzman]

The battle over the Houston, Texas red light camera program returned to the legal spotlight Monday. A majority of voters agreed with Francis M. Kubosh and Randall Kubosh in November that the automated ticketing machines should be removed, but a federal judge intervened earlier this month and overturned the election (view ruling). The Kuboshes filed a reply brief with the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit Monday seeking to restore the result of the public vote.

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The UK government on Sunday officially terminated the policy of concealing safety and revenue information for individual speed camera locations. The Labour government had held this information secret, but Road Safety Minister Mike Penning, a member of the Conservative Party, insisted on making it readily available to the public online.

“We want to improve accountability and make sure that the public are able to make informed judgments about the decisions made on their behalf,” Penning said in a statement. “So if taxpayers’ money is being spent on speed cameras then it is right that information about their effectiveness is available to the public.”

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The Louisiana Supreme Court on Friday gave a green light to police officers looking to search automobiles without a warrant. The court ruled on an interim appeal in the ongoing trial of Derrick R. Kirton, 30, and Crystal N. Strate, 27, who were charged on February 23 with distribution and possession of heroin, respectively. A judge in the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court had ruled that the police search of Kirton’s vehicle was unlawful because it was not based on probable cause. The prosecution appealed.

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In a decision that has wide-ranging implications for photo enforcement, speeding tickets and driving under the influence of alcohol (DUI) charges, the US Supreme Court yesterday reconfirmed the Sixth Amendment right to confront one’s accuser applies to analysts who claim to have certified evidence from a machine. The 5-4 decision concluded that “stand-in” expert witnesses are not a substitute for the individuals who actually conducted the tests. The decision broadens the applicability of the landmark Melendez-Diaz ruling from 2009, which has already led to appellate division cases in four California counties to throw out red light camera evidence.

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Well, I just wrote about 1,500 words on this topic which our post editor just obligingly disappeared into the digital void, wiping out over an hour of work. This was, perhaps, an appropriate turn of events, however, as the majority of those 1,500 words were used to describe the frustrating political stalemate that played out over the last two days of hearings on “The Lasting Implications of the GM Bailout.” The dynamics of the government’s exit from GM seem to have changed little since I wrote “Government Motors: The Exit Strategy,” and the hearings focused on the political implications of the bailout. Having determined that the bailout will help the President’s reelection in midwestern states, the White House (as represented by auto task force member Ron Bloom) sought to retrench its “things would have been worse” position, and Republicans attacked on all fronts for the very same reason. The government’s favorable treatment of UAW-represented workers, especially in comparison to Delphi’s non-UAW retirees was a major point of attack, and the committee caused Bloom deny (under oath) having ever said that “I did this all for the unions,” despite the fact that both the Detroit News’s David Shepardson and Bloom’s task force colleague  Steve Rattner have quoted him directly. Emails obtained by The Daily Caller were also presented as (more) evidence that the government intervened in a number of day-to-day decisions at GM, including the Delphi retiree issue.

Ultimately, the Republicans landed some serious body blows on the policy, although nothing radically new was presented. Bloom, meanwhile, defended the bailout by arguing that the alternative would have been much worse. In short, the political stalemate over the auto bailout continues… much to GM’s dismay. And since insiders are indicating that any collusion to boost GM’s stock price in order to improve the taxpayers’ return would be worse than a larger loss, a $10b+ loss is as good as guaranteed. Which means the Republican attacks will continue and the political trench warfare over the issue will only continue.

[Watch the bailout hearings here]