by Bob Pinzler
California Assemblywoman Laura Friedman of Burbank has received initial committee approval of a pilot program to introduce the use of cameras to enforce speed laws. The program would be operated in Los Angeles, San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland, Long Beach and Glendale. The cameras would be set up in school zones, places with speeding problems and high accident areas.
The cameras would be activated when they sense a speed of 11 mph or more over the posted limit. The fines would be on a sliding scale, ranging from $50 for 11 mph over to $200 for 26 mph over. However, during the first 60 days of its operation, a warning letter will be sent rather than a citation. The presence of the camera system would have to be conspicuously posted and locations must be identified in press releases, and on the city’s websites prior to their installation.
According to the Assemblywoman, the reduction of accidents in New York was 17 to 70 percent after the introduction of speed traffic cameras. The Federal Highway Administration found an average of 54 percent in their broader study.
About a decade ago, my company worked with a major traffic management group in Phoenix to introduce a similar system on freeways in that area. The results were as one would expect. Traffic slowed, accidents decreased, and the public went crazy with their outrage.
Again, as one would expect, there is strong opposition to the bill, AB 645, but for diverse reasons. The Western States Trucking Association is an obvious opponent, but the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and other privacy groups oppose it for the problem all of these systems have: indiscriminate collection of personal data.
While the camera system will only trigger a citation for speeding events, it is monitoring every car that passes by, and retains that data. As with license plate readers in general, the number of plate reads that are of immediate use is minimal compared to those collected. The question in that business has always been what happens to the data that is of no actionable use.
In this bill, a limit of five days retention is proposed for data that is not part of an enforcement action. This is a substantial improvement over the retention policies regarding general license plate reads, which range from one year to no requirement to remove them at all.
My experience in Arizona was that public outrage was the killer of these kinds of projects. Cameras were vandalized. License plates were made unreadable by actions which I will not detail here since they are illegal. (We used to test the techniques, so I know them well.)
In one case, a supervisor of the company running the operation was attacked by a driver while he sat at the side of the road monitoring the system’s performance. There were gunshots involved.
The concept of slowing down traffic to improve public safety is generally accepted as the most effective means of meeting that goal. Yet, we speed, no matter the possible cost.
I am reminded of something I found in a novel by Ruth Rendell. “Did you ever notice,” she wrote, “that when people lose track of time, they are never early.” ER
