ERIC BRADY The Roanoke Times

Bob Archer and his wife, Sandy, have a Volkswagen Beetle with the license plate BUG IN. Though the vehicle has never left the Roanoke Valley, the Archers have gotten tickets from red-light cameras in Northern Virginia and Washington that should have gone to the owner with the plate BUG 1N.

Dan Casey is The Roanoke Times' metro columnist.

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Don't try to tell Salem's Bob Archer about the wonders of red-light cameras.

Or about how safe they make intersections.

Or about the revenue stream they provide to local governments strapped for cash.

Those robocams, once again under consideration in the city of Roanoke, bug the living daylights out of the longtime Roanoke Valley beer distributor. When you hear his story, it's easy to understand why.

Archer's 46 pages of documentation would be a great basis for a movie script.

The film would be a Kafka-esque horror.

The villains would include clock-watching bureaucrats who have no names and never answer their phones. And greedy businessmen who have figured out a way to get governments to do their dirty work, screwing ordinary hardworking car owners. And a computer that spits out citations like a Domino's oven pushes out pizzas.

Archer would be in the flick, too.

He would be the frustrated protagonist who nearly goes insane trying to explain to traffic department paper pushers that his 1998 Volkswagen Beetle could not be the scofflaw car that racked up hundreds of dollars worth of red light violations and parking tickets in Washington and Arlington in 2000 and 2001.

Archer knew this was impossible because his Beetle has never been out of the Roanoke Valley. Ever.

But Archer's light green Bug has a near doppelganger. Though the other car is black, the almost doppelganger has a similar tag.

Archer's Virginia tag is BUG IN.

The doppleganger's Virginia tag? BUG 1N.

In kindergarten, if not earlier, you and I and Archer learned the difference between numbers and letters in the alphabet. Maybe those brainless bureaucrats failed pre-K.

Because it took Archer more than a year, plus a bunch of letters from an attorney, to teach them the difference.

It all started on May 10, 2000, when Archer and his wife, Sandy, received an automated ticket in the mail from the District of Columbia's Office of Automated Traffic Enforcement.

It had a black-and-white photograph of a dark-colored Beetle with the license tag BUG 1N. The letter noted the car had been photographed running a light in northeast Washington on April 20, 2000, a little after 3 p.m., and that Archer owned it.

It demanded $75, or $150 after the "due date" of May 24.

Archer tried to call the office and got nothing except voice mail. He left some messages, but they were never returned.

Then he wrote the office back, informed it that his car had never left the Roanoke Valley, that his tag was slightly different than the one in the picture, and, by the way, the color was very different, too.

The office wrote back that it accepted his explanation and said it would cancel the ticket. He believed it was all taken care of.

But his ticket nightmare was just beginning.

In September, another deluge of letters began.

This time it was parking tickets. A slew of them, including four racked up within two days. One was for parking on a street that was pegged to be cleaned. Another was for not having a front tag. A third was for -- get this -- not having a current tag. All were for the Beetle with the tag BUG 1N.

Again Archer tried calling and got only voice mail. Again, nobody returned the messages he left.

So Archer wrote them letters, and his lawyer wrote them letters.

The early letters fell on deaf ears.

Washington's Department of Motor Vehicle Adjudication Services responded with unsigned form letters generated on an ancient, dot-matrix printer. In part, they read: "I have considered your response and other evidence and found you liable for the infraction below."

Then in 2001, Archer began getting letters from Arlington County for an unpaid parking ticket for BUG 1N.

Eventually, all of this mess got cleared up.

But it took scores of unreturned phone calls, five letters from Archer and three from his attorney, who managed to trace the owner of the black Beetle bearing the BUG 1N tag.

It was owned by an auto financing company, which leased it to the still-unidentified scofflaw.

And that saga has led Archer to an unshakable conviction.

Even though the red-light camera technology worked reasonably well back in 2000, the bureaucrats who use that technology are dumber than your average door stoppers.

That's why Archer believes red-light robocams are a bad idea for any community.

"Unless there's a way to adjudicate issues like this that works for the average citizen, these things can be a disaster," Archer said.

Amen to that.

Dan Casey's column runs Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday.