Pigs! Useless oiking pigs! Think of all the crimes that go unsolved while the pigs dream up new ways to steal your money.

 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by rstark
[B]
Right now, there is a private company the State hired to take pictures of speeders.

 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by infinitebass
[B]

Ah, thats when you take off the front plate.

 

Traffic DOES seem like it's gotten a lot worse. I hope they get rid of the vans.

 

the only redeeming thing about them, if I'm not mistaken, is that there are no points taken off .. if you get caught, you simply pay the fine..

-simon2000

 

Points or no points, they are being marked as moving violations on the abstract, which will undoubtedly raise your insurance rates.

 

Not here By law, since it can't be proven who was driving at the time, it has NO affect on our abstracts.

 

Yes, I agree with Woodson, photo radar works out rather well in Calgary. The vans are easy to spot and avoid getting caught by and the cops gouge so much money from drivers who are basically comatose at the wheel that they have almost stopped setting speed traps (except in school zones).

An interesting development here in Calgary is that the police are renegotiating their contract and one of the arm-twisting tecniques they're using to get the city to give in quick is that they have hugely cut back on writing tickets of all sorts. For example, in November they wrote only 4000 instead of the typical 13,000/month. The amazing thing they fail to mention is that, contrary to the police chief's constant babbling that photo radar and speeding tickets cut traffic accidents and 'make our streets safer', we had no increase in traffic accidents in November whatsoever. Even with less that 25% of the normal number of tickets being written and the entire public aware that police were no longer enforcing the speed limit. Sorta blows the safety justification right out of the water (but unfortunately not out of our water-on-the-brain city officials).

 

Well, yesterday I made it to work with little drama, and this morning (even though I was in rush hour traffic) things seemed much more relaxed. I suppose it is no coincidence that it happened at the same time as the morning paper headline reads "margin seems to be 6MPH over"

 

Colin,

That really sucks about the vans. Just seems unconstitutional or something.

The funny thing is, the last time I was in Hawaii (Maui), we thought everyone was driving slow. No one was even going the speed limit. I'm actually a bit surprised that Hawaii is taking such an aggressive apprach to speeding. When I was there, we would've been the only ones getting tickets for speeding.