I just received a ticket in the mail, claiming that I need to pay $108 to the City of Beverly Hills (Missouri) Police Department for not stopping completely when making a right turn on red. Not only do I dispute that I didn't stop completely, but the photos didn't even capture my face; they can't prove I was driving at the time. And anyways, according to this article, camera tickets in St. Louis are a SCAM and they can often be trashed!! What a joke. The City of St. Louis receives tons of money from these tickets every year because nobody will fight them. Well, I'm not about to be the next sucker on their list.

Screw that.

So glad these were deemed unconstitutional in Minnesota.

Woot for states' rights. I sure wish Missouri would get wise, though. There's cameras at every freaking major intersection around here. I have half a mind to start damaging them somehow and make the city spend time and money to fix them and see how much they enjoy doing it.

I'm not completely opposed to the idea of red light cameras, but I hear some jurisdictions have been shortening yellow lights to increase infractions, increase revenues, and make the intersection less safe than it was before the camera.

Hurting people so the city can get more ticket revenues? Now that's some real bullshit.

Whenever I hear "Revenue" mentioned in any breath while talking about money and government, it really lights a fuse for me. Government does not have revenue, they are not there for that! These governments claim that these traffic lights are for our safety. Anybody who believes that is completely delusional.

No kidding. My check is supposed to be made payable to the "City of Beverly Hills Photo Enforcement Program", yet the address is to some PO box in Cincinnati, Ohio. Not gonna happen. They won't get a cent from me. I'm not about to hand over $108 of my money to some private camera company in Ohio! They've gotta be out of their minds.

I'm in South Florida, and at a lot of the intersections, there are these large metal posts that are being built that are probably two feet in diameter, and have another post protruding from it with the traffic lights connected to them. I'm sure the reason for this is that every freaking traffic light was thown to hell during each hurricane we seemed to have every year for four years. We were all out of commission for about a month at one point. The thing is, there is a camera pointing in all four directions on every single one of these. My buddy and I are seriously thinking about taking some paint guns or bb guns and nailing the crap out of them in the middle of the night. They're not fooling anybody. Look at England with their cameras on every street corner. They claim it's about catching terrorsist after the fact, and the public safety. Isn't it rather convenient that people are getting citations for letting their dogs take a shit on the sidewalk or whatnot?

This is what you get from a decentralised government system and a hate for raising taxes. You get traffic cameras by every local tom dick and harry law enforcement agency in every town small enough to have only one tom, one dick and one harry in the entire town.

What do you think taxes are? They're government revenue.

I'm not sure what your point is, other than to start an argument. The point of what I am saying is that government far overspends and overreaches on anything it should have ever been intended to do. They can't cover these expenses, so they find these back door taxes such as these traffic lights.