Rigged red-light cameras net $170 million for crooked authorities
A red light camera system in Italy cheated drivers out of $170 million dollars in fraudulent fines.
More than 100 people, including police officers, are being investigated as part of the fraud ... it is now claimed the lights were rigged to change from yellow to red in three seconds instead of the regulation five or six seconds.Instead of an average 15 fines a day in some places, the figure jumped to more than 1,000.
More about the system, made by KRIA, here.
(Via Arbroath)
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now, in a free-enterprise system, each corner traffic light would be sold to the highest bidder to be operated independently. Like they do with radar cameras in China.
That has also happened here in the US. Just google it. It seems that this is a nice little scam going on around in the world. Some local authorities find out they can milk unsuspecting extra funds and start putting up cameras in every corner.
I wish I could say I was surprised.
@#1: Sounds like what we do with towing services in many major cities. Many are respectable businesses, but there are some predatory firms that will tow first and ask questions later. I'd assume privatized traffic light companies would have their own share of unscrupulous decisions.
That's whath appens when they view fines as a method of generating revenue. At least this group had the common decency to do it illegally so they can be busted for it, unlike all the other groups that just have the laws changes so that more people will be fined.
"the lights were rigged to change from yellow to red in three seconds instead of the regulation five or six seconds"
This is called Racketeering and agents of the government are not immune from prosecution.
Here in North America, there are numerous examples of cities with red light cameras boosting their revenues by shortening the duration of the yellow light, thus causing more divers to run reds.
http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/22/2269.asp
Wait, people are being swindled IN ITALY? Home of both The Mafia and The Holy Roman Empire (aka the Catholic Church). You honestly can't be surprised by this.
Mmmm, restitution...
Shortened red lights, whether shortened legally or not, also increase accidents and quite literally kill people.
Shortened red lights, whether shortened legally or not, also increase accidents and quite literally kill people.
Doctors in Sicily have been collecting payments for 50,000 dead patients for as long as 20 years. I'm sure that they can figure out a way to ticket the dead as well.
Wow, there's a standard length for yellow lights in Italy? Someone needs to get on that here in the states.
Having a standard yellow light is a bad idea, or at least it was until the damn cameras made it worth the city's while to reduce their duration.
In the city where I grew up, there are surface streets with speed limits between 25 and 60 mph. Any yellow light long enough for the 60 street is going to cost god-only-knows how many hours at the lights that don't need that long.
Before the cameras, they actually tuned them pretty well, taking into account the speed limit and local grade. I haven't been around to see any change, but it's almost guaranteed.
Unless, of course, they come up with a sensible (and pretty simple) formula from the speed and grade. It might be a little hard initially, from recalibrating all the existing lights, but since you only need to calculate it once for each light we're talking about one employee.
#1, traffic lights should not operate independently. In fact they should all be centralized and coordinated. I imagine, in an ideal system, they wouldn't be timed. They would all be linked to a control room, where operators manage them to maximize traffic flow and reduce congestion. Kind of a a flight control tower in an airport. There are camera feeds to every intersection and hundreds of monitor. Initially, humans would run everything, but eventually a neural net would be trained to take over. This is where a world-conquering AI will come from.