There's no good argument along these lines. The social good of tickets is as a punitive measure to keep order. Tickets as a revenue mechanism is a social ill, full stop: it promotes the creation of bad law and corruption specifically designed to raise revenue. It's the same awfulness which results in speed traps, permanent toll roads, and red light or speeding cameras.
In England speed cameras have gone through a few weird changes. The first is that they must only be put up in accident blackspots. The second, following from the first, is that the cameras must be highly visible.
So now instead of grey cameras installed on many roads helping keep all drivers under the speed limit we have a few very visible cameras in known locations that many drivers can slow down for, but driving fast at all other times.
Frankly, anyone getting caught by a UK camera deserves the fine.
Not all laws that are heavily disliked are bad laws, and not all laws that most people like are good ones.
This leaves all manner of unsafe drivers free to proceed with making illegal and unsafe maneuvers on the road without a snowball's chance in hell of ever being prosecuted for it. In most North American jurisdictions, what do you think the ratio of speeding tickets to tickets for all other traffic offenses is? Do you think someone doing 55 km/h in a 50 km/h zone is more dangerous that the person who always plays chicken with left-turn traffic by blazing through the tail end of yellow lights at intersections? The person who stops traffic to make an illegal left turn in the same place every day? The person who doesn't turn on their lights on the freeway driving 100 km/h at night when it snows?
Especially in the UK.
To my mind, the goal of speed limits is to promote road safety by encouraging drivers to proceed at a safe speed that is suitable for road conditions. This is undermined when authorities build an expressway-style road that you'd find rated for 80+ km/h in a traffic engineering handbook and then set a much lower limit and have it enforced with radar traps. This is about collecting revenue, not promoting safety.
I visited Norway, which has photo radar, but also warns you that you're approaching it. The intention seems to be to get you to slow down rather than to stick you with a ticket. It works and I agree with photo radar when it is used this way.
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 never buy an argument that is so simple. Tickets are a revenue source and that keeps taxes lower on the backs of people who flaunt the law. If the alternative is New York where parking is such a cluster it's an impediment to business, I think I might take the corruption. It's a far more nuanced problem than you're making it.
Political oversight of revenue sources is necessary, yes, but to say they are an unmitigated bad is to be ignorant of most local budget processes.
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.
>Fourth best would be going straight to the general fund.
I'm curious where you think it goes? I have worked at a number of municipalities and all revenue goes to the general fund. During the budget process departments predict expected revenue. This is taken into account when setting the city budget overall (which also takes into account tax revenue and reserves). No money "goes into the department's pockets". They account for it and turn it over to the city's auditor. Those fees go into providing city services, it's not like they are lining someone's pocket.
My issue is the term "full stop". That is not a good way to deal with problem solving in the real world. I have been to municipalities where there is little to no parking enforcement or that have very lax parking laws (ahem, New York) and I don't personally find it pleasant. No system is perfect, they all require political oversight and constant vigilance, but most states have open records laws that allow you (or local press) the audit these processes and the revenue raised. All systems should have recourse in case of design flaw or human flaw. All systems should have the final say rest with citizens through their elected officials.
1) I said nothing about whether parking enforcement should be lax or not: that's an entirely separate question from how it's funded.
2) Municipalities do differ, but the fee associated with a ticket either often ends up divvied up to agencies related to the ticket-issuing. See [1], for instance. (I couldn't find one where that wasn't the case, but I suspect that's probably because of people complaining loudly about this issue, resulting in Google giving a bad sample)
3) The meta-political discussion seems odd to me: no one (here, at least) is saying we should move to an authoritarian regime that institutes all these regulations by fiat. Speaking for myself, I want the public to build democratic governance structures that give officials the correct incentives to maximize social good.
[1] https://exploreb2b.com/articles/where-does-your-traffic-tick...
As to point 2, I am sure there are municipalities that work like that, just that I know of none and that the article is a bit flimsy. I don't disbelieve that what you say occurs does, but I do believe that if there's an issue, it should be uncovered by a careful audit.
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.
You 'flout' the laws and you 'flaunt' your ridiculous good looks.
That's only correct if you believe parking fines are fairly administered.
If not, they are in fact a social ill.
Tickets as a revenue mechanism is a social ill because it's usually a regressive tax in practice. Most people don't seem to have a problem with "luxury tax"-style revenue generation.
Do you have a negative view of "permanent toll roads" because it happens to be regressive since poor people often have to drive, even though it's a more usage-based tax?
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).
They also found that accidents were increased.
http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/Feb/01/san-diego-red-lig...
Most of the folks getting red light tickets are getting them from rolling forwards at 1mph while they look for oncoming traffic, though.
Not only does it create the incentive to shorten the red light, it's practically the only way to make them profitable for cities in many places.
In Northern VA they increased the yellow light time on intersections with red light cameras specifically because they only want to catch "genuine" red light runners.
"Notwithstanding any other provision of law, if a driver of a motorcycle or moped or a bicycle rider approaches an intersection that is controlled by a traffic light, the driver or rider may proceed through the intersection on a steady red light only if the driver or rider (i) comes to a full and complete stop at the intersection for two complete cycles of the traffic light or for two minutes, whichever is shorter, (ii) exercises due care as provided by law, (iii) otherwise treats the traffic control device as a stop sign, (iv) determines that it is safe to proceed, and (v) yields the right of way to the driver of any vehicle approaching on such other highway from either direction. "
I have a similar problem on my motorcycle. There are many lights which are not triggered by my being there. But the camera's always know. I wish they used the same loop / detector!
Maybe cyclists should just be allowed to proceed through a red light since they are unlikely to hurt anyone besides themselves... But the rule does kinda make sense. If there are lights that rely on car sensors then obviously fixing that would be the right thing to do regardless of the law.
TL;DR - One particular city stopped issuing violations when the camera caught someone turning right on red with a 'rolling stop' because those don't really affect accident rate, revenue drops by 90%, the maker of the cameras sues the city. In other words, abject evidence that the makers and marketers of these cameras only care about revenue.
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.
In lots of countries, they do.