Speed Cameras not a Quick Fix for Budget Woes

Speed cameras are a wonderful concept. They take two photos of your car as you drive past to determine whether or not you're speeding. If you are speeding, the camera recognizes your license plate number and mails a ticket to the address of the offending party. The speeder then mails a check to the police department and learns a valuable lesson in the process, right?

Not necessarily.

The Des Moines city council has approved and is setting up speed cameras on stretches of roads across the city. Each of the speeding tickets issued by the automated system range from $65-85. The city of Des Moines is expected to make at least $100,000 per camera off of the system. However, this number doesn't take into account the amount of people who will refuse to pay their tickets or those who will file appeals because there is no proof that the driver of the car is actually the owner.

The state of Arizona, the first state to implement this kind of system, shut down it's speed camera program last month after nearly 2/3rds of all speeders caught by a similar system never sent the money they had been fined. The state had set up cameras on interstates in addition to residential roads where speeding is likely to occur. Even with the added coverage, the state failed to earn even 1/4th of the $12 million that it was projected to earn in the first year of activity over the entire length of time the program was active.

The state of Minnesota stopped using most of it's red-light cameras (cameras that automatically ticket a driver when their car runs a red light) when a large number of disputes were filed on the grounds that there is no proof that the owner of the car (and the person whose insurance rates the ticket will affect) was the person who committed the traffic violation. In essence, someone could steal your car and go on a high speed joyride through several areas surveyed by these cameras and you'd have a half a dozen tickets in your mailbox and be short a couple hundred dollars in a week or so when the ticket gets sent to you.

Therein lies a third problem with speed cameras: the delay between the time the illegal act is committed and the time the punishment is brought down.

Let's say someone drives through a poorly marked 35 MPH section of road at 50, and has done so consistently on his way home from the graveyard shift at the plant for a few years now. All of a sudden a speed camera is set up on this road without his knowledge. Between the time of the first offense and the time that the notification that he committed an offense has been delivered, he has likely driven through that section of road numerous times. With each ride home from work in that time period, most of his daily pay flies out the window until he receives notification that he had done something wrong.

While sure the couple hundred dollars he'll have to pay will likely get him to change his driving habits, a single $65 fine probably would have sufficed, and if he would have been pulled over and given a ticket, the change could have taken effect immediately and more cheaply for the offender.
The city council of Des Moines' response to these three major problems? “We'll set our profit projections lower”, “deal with the fine within your own home, insurance rates be damned,” and, “...,” respectively.

A total of six states have outright banned speed cameras from their roads: Arizona, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, and West Virginia. However, even as more states and communities are shutting down their cameras, Des Moines and the surrounding area has plans for even more cameras to be put up.
However, after the camera experiment inevitably fails after much controversy there is one golden carrot still hanging in front of law enforcement institutions the world over: Satellite-based speed tracking.