Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is removing some of the money-making traffic cameras from the city’s intersections. But, as David Kidwell of the Chicago Tribune writes, the mayor has:
… denied the moves were designed to help him in his intensifying election battle with challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia.
So it is purest coincidence that:
The announcement comes just days after Garcia, who faces Emanuel in the April 7 runoff election, promised an end to the program altogether, calling it Emanuel’s “red light rip-off.”
The cameras have long been unpopular and the claims for their utility as safety devices were pretty thoroughly debunked when a:
… scientific study of the program concluded that the cameras offered no benefit at those intersections. The report also suggested those intersections might even be more dangerous because of an increase in rear-end crashes attributed to the cameras.
The cameras are, however, great at raising revenue from the helpless Chicago citizens they routinely entrap, with a recent Tribune investigation revealing that:
… Emanuel’s administration quietly lowered the threshold for issuing red light tickets last year, tagging drivers for an additional 77,000 citations despite the fact that yellow light times in those cases were below the federal minimum of 3 seconds. Emanuel suspended that practice following Tribune inquiries but declined to refund drivers the nearly $8 million in revenue captured by the six-month change in ticketing standards.
But installing the cameras was not about confiscating money; nor was taking them down about politics.
Right.
