Three quick things:
It’s not surprising that tens of thousands of people signed petitions to ban red-light cameras in Tucson. What is surprising is that people are still making the same old lame-ass arguments for having done so. Why no, I’m not signing this just so I don’t have to be more careful (and maybe—gasp!—put my phone away) when driving. I’m doing so to defend the Constitution of the United States.
I have always agreed that it was a huge mistake to allow private companies to play a part in the process. Governmental entities (cities, counties, states) should have bought the equipment and run their own programs. This would have eliminated the only valid complaint that people had with the program. As for the profit argument, I really don’t have a problem with the people who are breaking the law having to pay more for police protection and road improvements than the rest of us do. And privacy concerns? There’s really no such thing as privacy, especially not in your car, out in public.
So, the cameras will be going away and the streets will be less safe. I hope the petition passers are happy. But, I also have a question. What if there were a way to use cameras to catch people breaking the law in a manner in which there is no subjectivity (short yellow-light times, weird intersection rules) whatsoever? Would you still stumble around in search of an excuse to oppose them?
Consider the intersection of River Road and La Cholla Boulevard. According to the posted signs, there are no U-turns allowed in any direction. I stood on the corner one day and counted 24 illegal U-turns in a 15-minute period. No interpretation involved. No funny intersection design, no rigged signal timing. Just 24 people breaking the law, one right after the other. Would that be an okay use for a camera, and if not, why not?
Please pardon my ADHD moment (I know, I know. People say, “Moment?! Singular?!”), but I have to address something else. We could take a step forward as a country and as a civilization if politicians, bad Letter to the Editor writers and really bad Guest Columnists would stop using the phrase, “You can’t just throw money at the problem.”
The thing is that you really can throw money at a problem and make things much better. Let’s say that the Sultan of Brunei is in Tucson to catch a Wildcats game. He’s tooling around in his rented VW Jetta and he hits a monster pothole. He gets to the game, watches the Wildcats kick the snot out of somebody, then heads for the airport. At the car-rental place, he tells the woman behind the counter, “I had such a good time. Please tell the leaders of Tucson that I’m sending them a billion dollars with which to fix that pothole.”
Would Tucson then have bad-ass streets or what? In all seriousness, if Tucson had no money for streets, the roads would be impassible (or nonexistent). If it had a billion dollars, the roads would be nearly perfect. So the quality does go indeed up with the money. It may be a logarithmic curve that flattens out after a while, but even the graph of log base 2 of x, which appears to approach the horizontal as it nears infinity, is always going up.
Obviously, Tucson isn’t going to have a billion dollars to fix its streets, but more money would make things better.
These days, that phrase most often shows up in truly pathetic attempts at defending how Arizona’s Legislature (and now, Governor, also) are finding near-sociopathic glee in strangling the life out of the state’s once-proud public education system. Why are teachers so greedy?, we are asked. Why do schools need buses? Do we really have to have Special Ed? As you know, we can’t keep throwing money at the problem.
That argument is absurd, especially seeing as how those who are responsible for providing sufficient funding for schools are actually doing the opposite of throwing money at a problem, and they’re breaking the law while doing so.
Just imagine if a starting teacher were paid $100,000 a year with a generous year-end bonus while somebody on Wall Street would start at $28,000 a year and have to provide his own supplies. I think that would be a valid and noble reason to throw money at a problem. Of course, teacher and Wall Street guy are not analogous. Teachers do what they do to help make the world a better place. Wall Street guy just wants to make his loft a better place. Teachers have a heart; Wall Street guys have gizzards.
Finally, Tucson Unified School District’s plan to allow students to evaluate their teachers is … oh, I don’t know … let’s go with STUPID!! What good can possibly come from this? The district claims that the questions were written in such a way as to prevent the students from taking revenge on a teacher. Yeah, right. Lousy students aren’t going to be introspective and objective, and good students aren’t going to want to waste their time on something that is (what’s that word again?) STUPID!
The district will never share the results, but I’m betting that at least 80 percent of the surveys will come in with either all 1’s or all 4’s.
This article appears in Jul 30 – Aug 5, 2015.
Sophomoric column from a jaded individual. Tucsonans deserve better than this.
It’s not a question of “being more careful”, it’s a question of using peoples mistakes against them to line the pockets of the police department. I have been stuck behind a semi on a left turn at Kolb and Speedway, When the behemoth finally turns I start forward and when the turn signal is finally revealed, it’s yellow. I’m already halfway in the intersection and the camera goes off when my left rear tire is on the line marking the intersection. I guess I should have stayed far enough back to be able to see the light but the guy behind me is literally two inches from my bumper, a situation that stretched all the way back along the left turn line. My bad. That’ll be 250 bucks please. The cops themselves aren’t above using any stupid rule they can to harass, intimidate, and line their pockets. I was once given a ticket for “failure to observe a traffic control device”. I was on Swan, turning left onto Speedway at rush hour. The “traffic control device” was the lines painted in the left turn center lane. Traffic was backed up two blocks. I needed to turn left, so I got into the left turn lane and drove forward. Unfortnunately, The lines on the road break every time there is a side street. The motorcycle cop that pulled me over said that when the line breaks, I am REQIUIIRED to turn left! I am NOT ALLOWED to continue in the lane to make a left, I have to do it RIGHT THERE! Its the law! I told him that it was a chicken s**t ticket and that he was a chicken s**t cop. That will be 300 dollars please. Thank you. Extracting money from citizens in this way amounts to robbery.
Amen Kentop.
We are also victims of the Speedway and Kolb revenue grab. Everyone is afraid to make a right turn on red anymore.
That intersection looks like East Germany before the wall came down with these hideous cameras everywhere. There never seems to be a shortage of motorcycle personnel either. Always busy writing citations to working stiffs who already over pay with property taxes for the lame government in Tucson.
Oh yeah, I forgot, it’s about “safety”.
Tom you have always been a hard ass about traffic violations.
We don’t seem to hear much from you concerning some other types of law breaking however.
How about a comment about illegal entry into this country and cities violating federal law to give sanctuary ( sometimes to convicted felons) Maybe a word or two about people living in parks that they have turned into outdoor restrooms and drug dealing markets, or is that not up your P.C. alley
Hey, maybe even something about government corruption besides just in Phoenix.
Never a peep from you concerning Rio Nuevo locally. How about Washington D.C. and the ATF with the “Fast and Furious” debacle that hit so close to us.
No, just keep whining about illegal U turns and Phoenix politicians. Tedious man….Tedious.
Every driver & his narcissistic bastard kid brother thinks he’s a Special Little Snowflake who shouldn’t have to wait for a red light. I know people who’d kill for one of those laser guns like emergency vehicles have so they’d never have to. That’s the *real* problem people have with intersection cameras They don’t want their invincible forward thrust blocked.
And whether or not “throwing money at a problem” helps or not, withholding it sure as hell makes it worse. What really doesn’t help is throwing philosophy.
Ah yes, the mantra of the ultra-conservative, “Throwing money at the problem is no solution.” Guess what, we’ve been methodically de-fundinou our state government since 1990. 25 years of tax reductions to “grow the economy”. Our tax burden is now 44th in the nation. One would think that our economy would be booming and we’d be awash in jobs. Sadly, not the case. In fact the feds Bureau of Economic Statistics shows that the Arizona economy grew at a paltry 1.4% less than the national average of 1.8% and far below high tax California’s 2.4%.
And we are promised more tax cuts.
We need to get smart, we need to fund education, infrastructure (the pot hole that Tom refers to), DPS, The social safety net, Child Safety all the stuff that we keep defunding in order to provide more tax cuts.
$100000 teachers? Probably a better idea than so many $100000 County bureaucrats. However, many teachers, if not most, are paid well above the average Pima County salary – it may take a few years. To say all teachers are underpaid is a well honed myth, sharpened by comments from the media and unions.
A cop could do the same thing you did (be stationed at the intersection) and ticket those individuals – no need for cameras. Cameras, and the way they are set up, is purely for filling money coffers which the city will spend foolishly anyway – and not on potholes!! However, I agree with your statement on TUSD.
The system is poorly designed. Most people caught are not people about to kill someone but someone used to the Tucson following yellow arrow getting caught on a technicality.
If they fixed 2 things I’d favor it:
1) Eliminate technicality tickets. If you’re going 2 miles an hour right when the light changed, forget about it. Ticket the dangerous people.
2) Have the city run the program instead of a for-profit company.
Any one who thinks the surveillance cameras will go away when the red-light cameras are removed is smoking something.
Drivers like me are easy pickings for cops. Any time they feel like it, they can pull over any car and make something stick. They know what they are doing. It may be the color of your skin, it may be the color of your car, or it may be the boss yelling at them to write more tickets. Traffic cops have no interaction with drivers except to issue tickets. As far as I know, Tucson has never, ever reached out to drivers about how to avoid traffic tickets. That is because they do not want you to avoid tickets. They need the money.
Send me a sign? They are all over town. They can help you avoid those pesky tickets.
surveillance cameras, bslap? you mean the detection cameras?
kentop, it’s not difficult to not get tickets, 15 years here and i’m yet to get one. MVD puts out a book, or you can takes lessons, if you need a refresher.
You can’t cross-examine a red light camera in court if you challenge the ticket. That’s why I’m against these cameras. I’m also wary about the performance of the devices when they’re baking in the extreme summer heat.
I doubt Tom talked to anybody about why they signed our petition. Because if he did he would realize the vast majority of people who singed realized it is an inherently flawed, unfair system, and did not sign it as an excuse to be a BAD, UNSAFE driver. They also did not sign it in defense of our Constitution, although many did.
Other untrue statements by Tom:
The city will never invest in this technology. It is too expensive and problematic in administering the program.
The money from the tickets DOES NOT go to road improvements or hiring more police, buying police equipment, etc. The money goes into the General Fund and is never seen from again.
The vast, vast majority of complaints about the cameras are not centered around surveillance or privacy concerns, although they are many who oppose them on that basis.
And again, the argument that if we fix the program and make it fair would you support it, needs to be debunked, in that, it is designed from the get-go to be a sophisticated form of entrapment.