By Calvin Palmer
An Italian engineer, who invented intelligent traffic lights that detect cars which go through a red light, is under house arrest after it emerged the lights had been fixed to catch drivers who were not, in fact, breaking the law.
Stefano Arrighetti, 45, an engineering graduate from Genoa, created the “T-Redspeed” system, a configuration of three cameras designed to assess the three-dimensional placement of vehicles passing a red light and store their number plates on a connected computer system.
But now it is alleged that the systems were fixed – with the connivance of their inventor – so that instead of staying on amber for the regulation five or six seconds, the lights changed to red in half that time.
It is said that more than one million Italian drivers driving across intersections on the amber light were unjustly snared on red, and landed with flat fines of €150 ($192, £130).
A further 108 people are under investigation, including 63 municipal police commanders and 39 local government officials as well as the managers of seven private companies.
Prosecutors in Verona maintain that Mr Arrighetti committed fraud when he supplied his devices to public administrations around Italy because he declared that they had been ratified by the Ministry of Transport. In fact, while the cameras had been ratified, the computer hardware that registered offences had not been.
Arrighetti’s lawyer, Rosario Minniti, maintained that he was blameless in the affair. Well he would, wouldn’t he?
“Arrighetti is a genius whom the whole world envies,” Minniti said. “And he does not deserve these accusations ? They are accusing him of fraud in the supply of goods to public entities but he never had any connection to the local administrations.”
During the two years it was in use, the T-Redspeed system became loathed by motorists and adored by local governments, which raked in increased revenues from the fines, up to 300 per cent more than places that did not use the system.
A report from the police in Milan claims that 300 municipalities and a handful of private companies took a share of the bounty.
The fraud was uncovered by Roberto Franzini, police chief of Lerici, on the Ligurian coast. In February 2007, he noticed the abnormal number of fines being issued for jumping red lights.
“There were 1,439 for the previous two months,” Franzini said. “It seemed too much: at the most our patrols catch 15 per day.”
He went to check the lights and found that they were changing to red after three seconds instead of the five seconds that had been normal.
Now towns and cities across Italy face the nightmare of processing hundreds of thousands of claims for reimbursement from drivers who say they were victims of the scam.
Franzini said: “Safety controls cannot be transformed into a form of taxation.”
How sweet and innocent, although I do admire his honesty, for which motorists everywhere must be thankful. Those in Houston would dearly love Franzini aboard the city’s police department.
Houston Police Department has been accused of trying to influence the outcome of a city-commissioned study into traffic-light cameras by changing how crashes at intersections with red-light cameras were counted, according to documents included in a lawsuit.
The police department’s request was refused by the study’s authors, however, who concluded the number of accidents at 50 intersections with the cameras had increased, not decreased as city officials expected, documents say.
Attorneys fighting to end Houston’s two-year-old red-light camera program seized on the documents as evidence the study was tainted by a purposefully skewed methodology.
Lawyer Randall Kallinen said: “As in other cities, the red-light camera system in Houston is increasing accidents. This is very dangerous for the public, and we must end the red-light camera experiment.”
City officials and Rice University political science Professor Robert Stein, one of the study’s main authors, contend the Houston Police Department’s requests were part of an ordinary back-and-forth about how best to examine the efficacy of red-light cameras and not a conspiracy to deliver false data.
Stein acknowledged that the cameras are not working in Houston as well as he believes they have been shown to work in other cities and said the city and critics should be more concerned about why.
“Why are these crashes going up at these intersections?” Stein said. “Nobody really cares to get at the truth here. Cars are being damaged, people are being injured and a handful of people are dying.”
Red-light cameras have been controversial in Houston since they were installed in September 2006. Critics say the primary purpose of the cameras is generating revenue, not reducing accidents.
Mayor Bill White has argued that the cameras have made Houston safer, noting that red-light running citywide has gone down 40 percent since the cameras were installed.
The devices photograph license plates of drivers who run red lights, and a city contractor sends the registered owners $75 tickets in the mail.
Seventy cameras installed at 50 intersections have produced more than 400,000 civil citations and more than $21 million in revenue.
[Based on reports by The Independent and Houston Chronicle.]
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