Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Metro columnist Dan Casey: Big Brother is watching, and making a bundle
Dan Casey is The Roanoke Times' metro columnist.
dan.casey
@roanoke.com
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Dan Casey
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Read Dan's blog
The city of Roanoke is considering whether to install red-light cameras at nine intersections in the city.
During the upcoming debate we will hear this is much more about reducing accidents, and much less about revenue these cameras will rake in.
Roll your eyes. Allow yourself a snicker. And don't believe that cockamamie argument for one second.
These cameras are ALL about the money they haul in. That's why I call this odious scheme "the robotax."
The safety argument is fallacious window dressing, and that's the gentlemanly way to put it.
Here's how we know:
This past Thursday, Nassau County, N. Y., set up four robotax cameras around the Long Island locality. Friday, the county yanked them. Why?
Because officials there suddenly realized, after the fact, that they were mounted in two different Nassau County villages, and the villages would reap the revenue rather than the county.
Oops!
By the way, Nassau County Executive Thomas Suozzi held a news conference Wednesday at which he bragged that 50 planned cameras would haul in $20 million annually. As an aside, Suozzi observed the cameras also should reduce serious accidents.
In a seven-year study of red-light cameras in six Northern Virginia localities, the Charlottesville-based Virginia Transportation Research Council concluded the cameras resulted in a net increase in the number of accidents, and in the number of accidents with injuries.
That's because although the number of red-light-running accidents dropped, the number of rear-end crashes skyrocketed because of timid motorists who stomped on their brakes at yellow lights. Other studies in North Carolina, Canada and Australia have arrived at similar conclusions.
In tiny Heath, Ohio, which is about 10 square miles, the city overlords approved installation of 10 red-light cameras earlier this year.
In their first month, those cameras issued a total of 10,000 tickets, or more than 30 per day, per camera -- in a city of 8,527 people.
Residents of Heath are now putting a great deal of heat on their council members.
The northwestern Chicago suburb of Schaumburg last November installed a robotax camera near a shopping mall. In its first three months, it generated $1 million in fines, according to a July 15 letter to the editor in the Daily Herald by Illinois state Sen. Dan Duffy, R-Barrington.
An estimated 70 percent of those citations were issued to motorists who turned right on red legally, Duffy noted.
The cameras "are being used as ATMs by some towns, making camera companies rich, and are actually increasing accidents in some intersections," he wrote.
Golly, a money stream like that could pay for an amphitheater or something.
The truth is, the city needs money. But the robotax is a sneaky and underhanded way to squeeze it out of the citizenry.
It's like those embarrassingly dumb "bad driver" fees the General Assembly enacted (then quickly repealed and refunded) a couple of years ago. That happened because lawmakers in the House of Delegates lacked the political courage to raise the gas tax.
The best and most honest way for Roanoke to raise revenue is by increasing the meals and/or real estate tax rates.
But as we have already seen, Roanoke City Council is too cowardly to do that.
(Do you have some tongue-in-cheek ideas for other types of "cams" the city of Roanoke should install? Post them on my blog, or e-mail me. We'll review the most creative suggestions in Thursday's column.)
