Chicago Officials Pretend to Be Puzzled at Traffic Cameras Sending Out Undeserved Tickets

Chicago Tribune reporters
David Kidwell and Alex Richards have put together a massive
investigation documenting huge problems causing the city’s red
light cameras to send out thousands of tickets to innocent drivers.
Today they report that after a bunch of cameras stopped giving out
any tickets for a couple of days (suggesting possible downtime and
perhaps some sort of fiddling), they suddenly went berserk, giving
out
dozens of tickets a day:

Cameras that for years generated just a few tickets daily
suddenly caught dozens of drivers a day. One camera near the United
Center rocketed from generating one ticket per day to 56 per day
for a two-week period last summer before mysteriously dropping back
to normal.

Tickets for so-called rolling right turns on red shot up during
some of the most dramatic spikes, suggesting an unannounced change
in enforcement. One North Side camera generated only a dozen
tickets for rolling rights out of 100 total tickets in the entire
second half of 2011. Then, over a 12-day spike, it spewed 563
tickets — 560 of them for rolling rights.

Many of the spikes were marked by periods immediately before or
after when no tickets were issued — downtimes suggesting human
intervention that should have been documented. City officials said
they cannot explain the absence of such records.

City officials seem to be unable to explain anything at all,
even as traffic courts buck typical behavior and have reversed
nearly half the tickets appealed from one such spike.
Transportation officials claim they didn’t even know it was
happening until the reporters told them.

Oh, also of note: The company (which is supposed to inform the
city of any such spikes) and the city’s program are under federal
investigation for corruption. The company, Redflex Traffic Systems
Inc., is accused of bribing a city official to the tune of millions
in order to land the contract. The Chicago Tribune

reported last year how the controversy caused Mayor Rahm
Emanuel to disqualify Redflex from a new contract putting up speed
cameras near schools and parks to increase revenue safety.

The Tribune notes that these traffic cameras have
generated nearly $500 million in revenue since the program began in
2003, yet everybody in the lengthy story seems to dance around the
idea that the city or Redflex could have any sort of incentive to
make alterations to cause the system to suddenly start spitting out
tickets. Chicago’s CBS affiliate noted last fall that the
city’s budget for 2014 relied on revenue from its red light
cameras (and the highest cigarette taxes in the nation) for revenue
in order to balance.

(Hat tip to John
Tillman of the Illinois Policy
Institute)