Prince George’s County elected officials should be ashamed of themselves for continuing to use speed cameras to fleece citizens with inaccurate citations issued from malfunctining cameras. I’ve gotten, and successfully fought, three in Bowie, Maryland after showing the cameras were malfunctioning. But how many other people just paid the citations regardless of their innocence?
And it’s not just Bowie. Looking at recent Washington Times articles, it was noted that the
“Prince George’s County town of Cheverly sent a letter in July to speed-camera vendor Optotraffic, informing the company that one of its cameras had caught a bicycle going 57 mph — just 26 mph off the world record for a flat surface.” Further, “internal documents from the town of Cheverly that described ongoing reliability problems with the automated ticketing machines. “Not only are the cameras still not functioning properly, they are now producing violations for invisible vehicles going 76 miles per hour (violation #79) and bicycles going 38 and 57 miles per hour (violation #2790 & #2783),” Town Administrator David Warrington wrote in a July 26 letter to Optotraffic, the operator of the dodgy equipment.
To make matters worse, Maryland’s Court of Special Appeals just ruled that a class action should be dismissed because the plaintiffs who have paid should have sought redress in traffic court. Who has time to take off work, lose wages, drive to Court, and pay to park to fight a measley $40.00 ticket. The CSA ruling is a rubber stamp on a system that makes it more expensive to fight an erroneous ticket than to just pay the legal “blackmail” the speed camera citation represents.
There is a question of fundamental fairness here and Prince George’s County elected officials should be ashamed of themselves. Perhaps the voters should get behind anybody who promises to stop legally ripping off their fellow citizens.
