Hate Parking Tickets? Fixed Fights Them In Court For You

Most of the folks getting red light tickets are getting them from rolling forwards at 1mph while they look for oncoming traffic, though.

This will go far more towards curtailing people running red lights than the existing "pay $100 and go consequence-free" system.

If red light cameras were there for safety, they would ding your driving record, not just be monetary fines.

http://www.motorists.org/red-light-cameras/yellow-lights

This in turn has actually increased accidents. http://www.motorists.org/red-light-cameras/studies

(i'm citing this mainly for the links, they are clearly a biased site).

Here are reasons that (if true) make a lot of sense. It sounds like where you live, the laws around them are very reasonable; for many people that's not the case.

I don't have sources for these claims, I'm only repeating what I've heard/read, since you asked. I don't have real feelings about them either way, as we don't have them where I live.

- Red-light cameras actually increase accidents and injuries. More people slam on the breaks to avoid tripping them, instead of being slightly past the stop bar or entering when the light is yellow.

- When they are hidden (as many are), they do not effectively slow people down; they don't make the roads safer.

- As conditioning for future behavior, they are ineffective; studies show that when the punishment is after the misbehavior, the mind doesn't link the two together as well.

Disclaimer: I don't live in Seattle any longer so the situation I am about to describe may have changed in recent years (but I doubt it).

Story: There's a 5-way intersection near the University of Washington campus. The city put up cameras and started collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in fines. Problem: city ordinance stated something like any ticket resulting from a photo must come from a camera mounted at a 90 degree angle to the street. Notice the bit about it being a 5-way intersection? None of the roads came together at a 90 degree angle. Point was, the city continued to violate their own ordinance for years because that single intersection was a cash cow - the whole system was automated so the pictures were taken, cars identified, tickets mailed. THAT is why there is so much outrage about cameras in the US - it's the Man kicking us around.

I've been given tickets for parking illegally when I was parked in my own residential parking lot, while displaying the required parking tag on my dash. It was done deliberately in the off chance that I might be too lazy to fight it. It's that kind of blatant disregard for the spirit of the law that they are arguing against, not tickets being a source of revenue in the more general sense. Granted, I'm not them, so maybe they were - but that was what my impression was from their comment.

These tickets disproportionately target the poor, who have the hardest time paying them on short notice, leading to additional fines that accumulate and build on each other. So officials are incentivized to either game the system by doling out tickets more than is socially productive or by targeting people who are most likely to pay back the most in fines.

The revenue has to go somewhere, but it absolutely should not go into the pockets of the agency issuing the fines. Where should it go? Best case would be to reimburse the people harmed by the social ill that's being fined: that level of targeting is hard, leaning toward impossible. Next best is to give everyone an equal share of the fines: this is also difficult, and overly costly for what would amount to a couple bucks. Third best would be to have it go into the government's general fund, to the exclusion of the agency issuing the fines. Fourth best would be going straight to the general fund.

Second worst is giving it to the agency issuing the tickets, which is where we're at now. Worst of all would be allowing the officers issuing the fine to pocket it themselves, which leads to the lowest levels of ability to audit and the most perverse and misaligned incentives.

That's only correct if you believe parking fines are fairly administered.

If not, they are in fact a social ill.

You 'flout' the laws and you 'flaunt' your ridiculous good looks.

She tells me that if you actually could prove they didn't give enough notice, there is a $1000 fine for the construction company.

Are you saying it is impossible to escape their devious plans, because I have managed to avoid a parking or speeding fine for the last 20 years, simply by following the rules.

In the case of parking violations, it could go towards directly subsidizing the cost of legal parking -- building new structures, etc. That way, you're not creating a perverse incentive of people directly benefitting from the fines they issue.

I've always wondered how differently municipalities would behave were the fines forbidden from funding operations. For example, what if all fines had to be paid to a trust, and only the interest from the trust may be used for capital projects? Then only taxes could be used to pay for operations. At the federal level this change wouldn't make a big difference, but at the local level it would affect 50% of some budgets.

I imagine a lot of what seems like frivolous ticketing would shift towards something else.

Edit: @stinkytaco -- Agreed. Maybe frivolous tickets would be replaced with frivolous taxes? The money does have to come from somewhere, and I agree that the vast majority of civil servants are just enforcing otherwise reasonable laws :) Still a fun thought experiment.

I frankly see no problem with citizens benefiting from people who don't think parking laws should apply to them through the increased services and lower taxes gained by parking revenue.

I assume they've looked at legal ethics decisions before they opened for business. But who knows, start ups sometimes cut legal corners.

My fiance got a ticket on Muni that was clearly in error (her Clipper Card record showed her tagging 9 minutes prior to the ticket being issued). We followed the instructions for submitting a protest, and never heard back. After some back and forth, it seemed like the protest process was just /dev/null-ed, so we paid up just to make the problem go away.

My take-away was that if you wanted to actually fight a citation you'd have to take them to court. As I understand it, fare evasion was a criminal offense until a few years ago, when they decriminalized it in favor of the new citation system, in order to save money on court costs.