It's a great revenue generator for the local PDs. Lots of one-off traffic laws that people passing through won't (and really, can't) know about.
21461. (a) It is unlawful for a driver of a vehicle to fail to obey a sign or signal defined as regulatory in the federal Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, or a Department of Transportation approved supplement to that manual of a regulatory nature erected or maintained to enhance traffic safety and operations or to indicate and carry out the provisions of this code or a local traffic ordinance or resolution adopted pursuant to a local traffic ordinance, or to fail to obey a device erected or maintained by lawful authority of a public body or official.
If they have to 'err on the side of caution', then the residents win, despite having no legal right.
At the very least, it might be paying for itself....
I don't know why you'd think it couldn't be greater than the cost, either. It takes, what, five minutes to write a ticket, which might average $100? That's $1,200/hour of revenue. No way the officer costs that much, even including benefits and equipment. Most people just pay tickets, they don't contest them, so court costs will be small.
California even has a law preventing cities from creating these kinds of local vehicle code laws that could generate local revenue.
The 'unofficial' policy of parking enforcement here is to ticket everything you see, regardless of whether or not the car is actually in violation of something.
They know it's far cheaper for drivers to just pay the fines than it is to fight the tickets. Arguing a parking ticket can literally take several entire days. Forget just contesting them in writing, the written appeals are automatically denied every single time. I don't even think anyone reads them, there's probably just some flunky at a desk who opens them and immediately sends them back with a pre-printed denial letter.
It's what I'm doing in Chicago, and it's actually not as much money as you'd think it is. Don't get me wrong, it's still a lot and is about as predatory as it gets, but it's not in the billions, compared to many other things.
Of the parsable ones I have, the total since 2009 up until March of this year, there's been a total of $764,775,070 marked as "paid". Tickets marked with a bankruptcy flag has added up to 18,433,390.0.
Wanted to finish up some code to get better output, but I have to run.
Of course I just paid it.
i've heard about a couple of apps for this sort of thing, e.g. http://www.parksafela.com
That said, 5 minutes per ticket pretty much requires offenders to present themselves in a nice, orderly line. A more normal scenario where the officer has to cruise around, pull someone over, get out, talk to the person ("no no, I'm not passing through, my sick uncle lives over there"), write the ticket and get back in the patrol car, I'd guess closer to 15 minutes as a lower bound.
Also, doesn't Waze have a feature where you can warn other driver against this kind of thing? That would further reduce the ticket-rate.
Officers get exactly that when they set up shop in a place where they know there are going to be plenty of violators. Highway 66 inside of the DC beltway is HOV during rush hour. The police will just sit at the end of the on ramp and write tickets for everyone trying to cheat HOV or with expired tags or inspection. Makes for a great haul, especially because HOV tickets are $125 for the first offense, $250 for the second, $500 for the third, and $1000 for the fourth.
No real reason to make a DUI checkpoint in the end of a cul-de-sac, is there?
economies of scale!
> "But the plans were on display..."
> "On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."
> "That's the display department."
> "With a flashlight."
> "Ah, well the lights had probably gone."
> "So had the stairs."
> "But look, you found the notice didn't you?"
> "Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'"
But most places display it prominently, and people just don't care. For every case like yours, there are a hundred places with obvious signs like "No turn on red" where people still turn on red.
You could blame me for this, or we could ponder the implications of the different probabilities of various sign types being obeyed, and whether high rates of disobedience might indicate fairness issues that should be carefully managed.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that a law which is frequently broken may be a bad law, but "reading and obeying traffic signs" is not a particularly high bar to clear. If such signs get ignored, it's because the average driver is horrendous at driving. The only solutions to that are vastly better driver training and testing than we have now, or autonomous cars.
I'm not sure there is a high rate of disobedience here, though. The article seems to be talking about places where such laws don't exist, although the residents may try to change that.
I suppose they can't crowdsource that information or people would lie.
There must be a system for getting traffic information from municipalities to the road databases. Apple Maps told me there was no way to drive home a couple days ago, on examination the street in front of my house was marked as closed for the day, they were paving. That is essentially a zero traffic street in a grid area but bisected by rail road tracks without a crossing, so no one uses it except the people who live on it.
Improperly posted signage is generally a defense against an offense of disobeying a sign.