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Thanks to the skepticism of the Clearfield County retiree, the Philadelphia Parking Authority has canceled about $440,000 worth of violations issued to drivers who blew through red lights in the city.
In Thursday's column, I reported that Kochkodin, a 59-year-old retired financial consultant from Osceola Mills, had his lawyer son look at the ticket he got for running a red light on March 17 at Mascher Street and Roosevelt Boulevard.
His 2000 Dodge Neon was photographed going through the traffic signal 0.2 seconds after the light turned red. So, technically, he blew the light.
But the cameras are supposed to give everyone 0.3 seconds tolerance before snapping away.
Kochkodin challenged the ticket before a Parking Authority hearing officer on Sept. 10, and quickly beat the violation. But Kochkodin wasn't through. He asked The Inquirer to look into it.
How often were other people caught by a quick-drawing camera, he asked, a question I posed to Parking Authority spokeswoman Linda Miller.
"Very little," she said at first on Wednesday. We went around and around, and by the end of the day, she said she'd learned there were problems at "multiple" cameras, but only for "a couple of days."
"It was more than a couple of days," she said. At one camera, it was more like four to six weeks.
All 52 cameras in the system turned out to have been set wrong for a couple days or more, starting Feb. 15, when engineers working for ATS began to convert the cameras to record the images digitally rather than on film. By May 28, cameras at all 10 intersections had been switched.
Marty O'Rourke, a public relations consultant working for the Parking Authority, said the agency had decided to cancel about 4,400 red-light violations as a result of the faulty settings.
The authority's red-light program manager, Chris Vogler, discovered there were problems in March but accepted the vendor's assurance it was nothing serious.
"We both take the blame on that," O'Rourke said.
"The vendor wouldn't bring it up, knowing they'd be liable," he said. "And if someone in the city knew, they wouldn't say anything because that's $100 a pop."
I can't say that. But I can say that the program's secrecy - Parking Authority officials told me they couldn't even pinpoint the most problematic camera - makes it easy to lose trust in the program.
The way the state legislation was written insulates the Parking Authority from having to release some basic information about the program. Authority officials wouldn't tell me how many violations there have been since their last report to Harrisburg. "The law won't let us," Miller said.
So the $440,000 is the cost of buying the public's confidence.
Critics across the country have questioned red-light camera programs. Some have accused municipalities of making lights change too quickly from yellow to red so they can generate revenue. Some cities pay vendors a percentage of all violations, which creates an incentive for trouble.
None of those programs occur here, says Cathy Rossi, a spokeswoman for AAA Mid-Atlantic. Philadelphia is a model program in many ways, she said. Except when it comes to statistics.
"It just hasn't been open enough," she said. Don't we have a city controller for times like this?
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