Have you gotten a traffic ticket in the mail from a red-light camera yet?
At first, you go into denial.
How could it be? I don’t do that!
Then the letter gives you a Web site to visit where you can watch the video of your vehicle rolling through the intersection.
That’s $75 bucks, pal.
Some call this the latest municipal racket.
What bothers Watchdog Nation is that this is the latest government responsibility outsourced to private companies. If you have a problem with your ticket, such as a billing issue, and you call your city, often enough you get directed to the private company.
Maybe your credit card was charged twice because you pushed the payment button twice on the company’s Web site. Or in several cases, as I’ve found, the camera company’s Web site doesn’t record your payment correctly.
As first reported in the Dave Lieber column in the Oct. 18, 2009 Fort Worth Star-Telegram, that’s what happened to Thom Lake and Kristin Engels.
Both admit their guilt. How could they not? Video taken by the camera proves it beyond a reasonable doubt. The issue here is what came next.
Lake paid the fine along with a $4 service charge. When he found out he had been double-charged, he called the city and was told to print and send in a refund form from the city Web site. He did, and he got his $75 back. So far, so good.
But there was a second $4 service charge. He wanted that refunded, too. He called the city but was told to call the vendor, American Traffic Solutions, in Arizona. He left three voice mail messages before he heard back.
The rep wouldn’t budge on a refund until Lake threatened to protest at a City Council meeting.
Almost two months after paying online, he received his $4 refund from ATS in a FedEx envelope. His city, Fort Worth, Texas, “didn’t make too much of an effort to help me out,” Lake says. “I’m the one that had to make the long-distance calls to chase it down. Nobody was rude, but nobody made the effort.
“I had to push it. A lot of people would just blow it off, and that’s where they would generate more money because of people that don’t have time to pursue this.”
Fort Worth city traffic engineer Randy Burkett says: “Sometimes when a person makes a payment, they hit the payment twice. We’re trying to work with our vendor to make it more user-friendly so that we can reduce these additional costs to everyone.”
Karen Edwards-Fisher, traffic enforcement coordinator, says she can mail a refund a week after she receives the refund form. But only the vendor can refund service charges.
Josh Weiss, spokesman for American Traffic Solutions, says the problem occurs when the payment Web site “may take a little bit to refresh and get confirmation.”
“Starting this summer, they have a new screen that pops up in Fort Worth,” he said. “It cautions against somebody accidentally doing that kind of double payment.”
The new screen alerts a user that a payment was recently made and asks whether the user wants to continue.
Weiss says the best way to get the $4 refund is to dispute the charge with the credit card company. During the investigation, ATS will see the double payment and agree to a quick adjustment.
Fort Worth reports that it collected $1.2 million in fines last year. After expenses, $220,000 went to the state. The city used a similar amount to pay for repairs of traffic devices and the installation of temporary sidewalks to schools.
In a nearby city, North Richland Hills, Texas, Kristin Engels struggled with the Web site for Redflex Traffic Systems, also based in Arizona. The site, her husband Robert said, “would error out without giving any confirmation information. This was done a total of five times before she was able to get a confirmation number.”
When the family called North Richland Hills for four refunds totaling $300, they were told to call Redflex.
Redflex gave three refunds, but the fourth took a month longer.
“Redflex kept insisting that I provide evidence that I overpaid,” Robert Engel says. “It seemed odd. They didn’t have a record, but I had a record. I had to keep nagging them to follow up. It was annoying to me. I would call them almost on a daily basis. It took me pestering them quite a bit to get it resolved.”
Redflex spokeswoman Shoba Vaitheeswaran says: “We apologize if that’s the case. We try our best. …There’s a high volume of calls that come in.”
Forth Worth is about ten times larger than its neighbor North Richland Hills, but the latter, which has red-light cameras at many intersections along one of its major north-south arteries, reports that $1 million was collected in the past 12 months. That’s the same amount collected by its neighbor, Fort Worth, the 17th largest city in the nation.
In Texas, after the vendor is paid its cut, half of the remainder goes to the state and the rest can be used for city traffic improvements.
Do you have a red-light camera horror story?
Please use the comments to let me know.
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Watchdog tip: The best way to avoid a red-light camera on a right-turn-on-red, which is the way most people get them, is to come to a complete stop before turning. And make sure the front of your vehicle is behind the white cross bar at the intersection.
If the camera photographs and videotapes your vehicle in the intersection, a police officer who reviews the data before approving citations will see that you stopped. You shouldn’t get a ticket.
And of course, when paying online, hit the enter key just once.
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Last laugh: While researching this, the funniest thing that I found is this blog post about how American Traffic Solutions CEO James Tuton was booed by his fellow citizens at an awards banquet when they figured out who he was.
