The drone part is just silly. You want to take out a camera, you mount your payload on the end of a long pole. (better control, cheaper) And you wear a mask.
Something translucent, like hairspray, should disable the camera without affecting the streetlight in any significant way. It’s vastly cheaper for activists to do this (and keep doing it) than it is for the city to guard every single camera.
(Disclaimer: this post is for informational purposes only, and is not meant to advocate any specific course of action. YMMV. Consult your lawyer to see if civil disobedience ™ is right for you.)
It is good to have a brief pause and look both ways before you go on green as there are idiots and assholes who do blow through red lights and who will kill you.
I chose the place I live. I chose it because it can support my family; it has running water, game, timber, tillable land, etc. and it’s close to the schools and other facilities my family want. And cities make me crazy, I can’t live in a filthy hive. I’d get nature deficit disorder and start acting like a city person.
After I bought my house, the place I work for moved. Now it’s farther away. I didn’t move.
But then again, I’m not complaining, so I guess your comments don’t apply to me specifically.
LAPD commander Blake Chow says other moving violations are issued directly by a police officer to a driver. But the red light camera tickets are different.
"The court has taken the position that the individual driving is not necessarily the registered owner of the vehicle. The only thing that ever would happen is that citation would go into a file or database in the court, but never reported to the DMV, not going on a credit record," Chow says.
...
"[$500 is] a lot of money. I heard a lot of people want a refund; we're not giving refunds. It's like, once you plead guilty, you plead guilty. You can't say, 'Oh by the way, I don't want to plead guilty.' "
Ah, thanks for the non-biased studies from the National Motorists Association. Next perhaps you could provide links to articles on the National Petroleum Association that disproves climate change.
Why does bad faith implementation mean the idea is bad? That’s like saying law enforcement is a bad idea because there are some dirty cops. The yellow timing should have a mandated minimum relative to the speed of the road. Period. End of fun and games.
Where I live I welcomed the cams, even though at first I picked up a few ticket for not coming to a complete stop for a right on red. People here barely slow for stop signs, and 2 or 3 cars will go through a after a light turned red. I don’t buy the “it causes more rear end when people stop” argument. That’s like arguing stabbings go up when you limit guns so don’t limit the guns.
Which is why I moved closer to my job. (And also positioned myself relative to other places I may look for work in the future such that I won’t require a car to live my life.)
I don’t complain about having to drive 15 miles to work. Never have. But what does roil my bowels are sanctimonious d-bags like the poster upthread who say things like “I support most any means - dirty trick or not - to make it more expensive.”
Stoplight timing with camera enforcement is a moral hazard problem - it’s too tempting for cities (or for companies that contract to provide cameras to cities) to set the yellow-light timing too short for safety if they’re getting extra revenue from tickets, so intersections tend to become less safe unless the timing is strictly enforced.
I run yellow lights less with my new car than with my old van - it was heavier and took longer to stop, so there was more risk of stopping in the middle of the intersection if I stopped the moment the light turned yellow.
This assumes you even have a choice in the first place, or that potential choices are feasible given larger contexts and realities.
In an ideal world, maybe everyone could live in places where they can bike around to work and everywhere else they need to go. But the world we live in is far from ideal. Not everyone can simply move closer to their jobs, because housing doesn’t work like that, for one thing.
People can only operate within the confines of their environments, and human environments are pretty slipshod, poorly planned places. Even our best attempts at civic engineering are deeply flawed due to inherent problems of physical geography and the complexities of human needs and movements.
The end result is that for our economy to go on operating on the fundamental level that it does, we require motorization to make people more mobile than mere bicycles ever could.
Funny. I emailed a Chicago Sun-Times reporter when the cameras were proposed and said that the cities that get cameras always shorten the yellow light time when revenues drop.
The followup story is that the state and city don’t want to refund the fines for the people who got caught by the short timing cameras.
Chicago NEVER had a red light running problem in the first place. I’ve driven Chicago streets for decades and can recall maybe 2 close calls.
Now if they ever followed through with the threat to put in stop sign cameras they’d have a goldmine. I’ve had people behind me drive around because they couldn’t figure out why I was stopping.
I’d wager “some guy in LA” is Jay Beeber. You know, it’s ok to post a comment on a blog with facts from memory, without references. Of cousre, this is the internet. Someone’s bound to pop up with a snarky reference to being full of shit.
