Letters

It is painfully obvious to most serious observers that ATS and the city officials are terrified of allowing the citizens to vote freely on the use of traffic cameras. 

The cameras have lost in all 11 such public votes that I know of; they get rejected in fair votes.
The statement in the lawsuit quoted in your recent article flies in the face of the basic principle that we should have a government "... of the people, by the people, and for the people ..."

"Proposed Mukilteo Initiative 2 would improperly interfere with the exercise of a power delegated by state law to a local legislative authority," the lawsuit reads.

Safety is counter-productive to the business plans of ATS and the other camera vendors. 

If cameras actually worked to drastically reduce or virtually eliminate violations and any resulting crashes from those violations, then they would not produce enough citations to even pay their basic costs of operation. 

Cameras only produce significant revenue and profits for the vendors and the governments that employ them when the engineering factors are ignorantly or deliberately set in ways that degrade safety. 

If the engineering is done to maximize safety, then the cameras will normally not produce enough violations to even pay their basic costs of operation.

In many cities that have used cameras and later corrected the engineering errors that caused high violation rates that made the areas attractive to the camera vendors, the violation rates have dropped so far that the cameras become non-viable financially and were subsequently removed.

I hope the paper will take a strong and formal editorial stance that the public vote should take place in response to the public request.

James C. Walker
JCW Consulting
Member, National Motorists Association, www.motorists.org
Ann Arbor, MI