Posted on: Monday, May 13, 2002
EDITORIAL
There are no tears for demise of the van cam
It's astounding how industrious that widely detested traffic camera enforcement program was during its shortlived stint on O'ahu.
From Jan. 2 to April 5, the Dallas-based Affiliated Computer Services, which operated the van cams, nabbed close to 19,000 speeders. That averages out to more than 6,000 tickets a month, or some 200 a day.
After issuing about 3,600 citations in January and the same number in February, the van cams jacked up their output to 9,668 citations in March and 2,097 tickets in just the first five days of April.
What caused the sudden rise in speeding, or were there just more van cams on the prowl? Either way, the increase is baffling.
With penalties starting at $27 per ticket plus $5 for every mile over the speed limit, the program could have been a cash cow for the state.
Penalizing speeders in Hawai'i is lucrative work if you can get it right, but the state Department of Transportation, the Judiciary and ACS just couldn't get on the same page.
First, judges threw out van cam tickets because they failed to say the camera operators were certified to run the equipment. They also dismissed tickets for motorists who did not exceed their 10- mph-over-the-limit threshold.
Despite the threshold, ACS kept spewing out tickets for petty speeders while the DOT kept busy defending the program and trying to downplay the flaws.
As for the city prosecutor's office, it quit pursuing van cam cases after a district judge ruled that the state could not legally "presume" a registered owner of a cited vehicle was also the driver.
Finally, as the Legislature prepared to repeal the law that created the program — under mounting pressure from the public — Gov. Ben Cayetano ordered its execution.
Don't ask us to mourn the death of the van cam program. It was spectacularly inept from the get-go, and suspiciously zealous in its waning days. Ironically, the most notable legacy of the effort to slow down drivers is that it prompted the state to raise the speed limit on some freeway sections from 55 to 60 mph.
