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Daniel Rubin: In the dark over traffic cameras
Mike Kochkodin didn't think his car blew the traffic signal on Roosevelt Boulevard. But a few days after the white light flashed, a $100 ticket arrived by mail at his Central Pennsylvania home.
Contact Daniel Rubin at 215-854-5917 or drubin@phillynews.com.
The way he beat the rap makes me wonder who else has paid unnecessarily for the city's all-too-mysterious red-light cameras.
Kochkodin, 59, is a retired financial services adviser. Early on March 17 he was heading home to Osceola Mills, having visited his lawyer son in Northeast Philadelphia.
This is one of those times when it's handy to have a son who's a lawyer.
The father was sitting in the passenger seat of his 2000 Dodge Neon around 6:15 that morning, his other son, a grad student, at the wheel.
The camera caught them running the red light at the boulevard and Mascher.
When the notice from the Philadelphia Parking Authority came, it gave instructions on how to view the three photos taken of the car: as it approached the intersection, midway through, then afterward as the rear license plate was visible.
The lawyer son, who'd gone to Penn and is also called Mike, noticed some small numbers displayed atop the photographs. He wasn't sure what they meant, so he read some of the fine print on the red-light program's Web site.
Lack of grace
It described how when lights turn red at 10 intersections on the boulevard, sensors in the pavement trigger overhead cameras. But drivers are given a grace period.The cameras are supposed to wait one-third of a second before snapping.
Which made the younger Kochkodin wonder what the "0.2" meant in the first photo.
He drove to the camera program's office on Grant Avenue in the Northeast, and there he learned that the number meant the camera had snapped at 0.2 seconds, instead of at 0.33 seconds.
He scheduled a hearing. That took place Sept. 10 and didn't last long. Case dismissed.
The elder Mike Kochkodin - "I never trusted these cameras from day one," he says - asked the hearing officer what would happen to others who got caught by a too-quick camera.
The officer, Kochkodin said, said he'd toss any others he saw.
Which leads to the question: Just how many people got snapped too soon?
Parking Authority spokeswoman Linda Miller acknowledges that "multiple" cameras had a timing problem in March, but only for "a couple of days." That was after crews set the cameras to operate on digital technology, not 35mm film, she said.
But she said she could not say how many people paid the $100 when they didn't have to.
She couldn't even tell me how many people get tickets for running red lights.
The Pennsylvania legislature wrote the law that way, she explained. Why is that? Privacy, she said. Whose privacy?
A mystery to me
Miller did say that the Parking Authority corrected the problem as soon as it discovered the cameras had been set to snap too soon.I have no reason to believe this is untrue.
But why write a law that guarantees such secrecy?
Shouldn't there be an annual report that lays out how many people are nabbed, how much money that raises, whom that money benefits?
Good luck finding out.
The Philadelphia Daily News got a couple of legislators to spill some numbers last spring. They reported that, in its first three years, the program nabbed 90,000 red-light-runners, generating more than $9.1 million.
Maybe the legislators know how the program is going. But the public doesn't. I drive the boulevard every day, and I'm all for the cameras if they'll make it any safer.
But don't do it in the dark. The red-light camera program needs some decent lighting.
Contact Daniel Rubin at 215-854-5917 or drubin@phillynews.com.