ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[danbrotherston]

What I think should happen is that every driver who does this gets ticketed. Leaving aside a more serious (as in, not a joke, the way our licensing currently is) enforcement scheme, they could probably ticket 2-3 dangerous drivers a day, at that rate, we'd have a real enforcement mechanism on our hands...

Makes sense. They have video of the offence, so ticketing the vehicle owner shouldn’t be a problem.

And I am utterly uninterested in the whole “but who was driving?” argument. OK, either report that the vehicle was stolen at the time, or recover the fine from the driver. Vehicle owners have to be responsible for the authorized operation of their vehicles. Same comment applies to red-light cameras, speed cameras, and any other automated enforcement mechanism.

One strange thing I noticed: the footage in the video is of very low quality. Yet run-of-the-mill surveillance cameras provide HD colour footage. Did they deliberately reduce the quality for some reason? I can see why they might blur license plates or other identifying marks, but reducing the quality of the entire clip seems like a strange decision.

I agree (and in the UK they can fine the owner if the driver refuses to identify the owner), but it would take a change to provincial law in order to hold owners responsible in the manner you identify. Red-light cameras (and speed cameras, and parking tickets) are an explicit carve-out rather than a broadly permissive law. I don't even think the carveout is broad enough to ticket illegal turns only red light violations.

But given that it's something the province must do I understand that GRT/Region/etc. cannot do themselves. But there is nothing to stop WRPS from contacting the driver and requesting that they identify who was driving at the time, nothing besides WRPS disinterest in enforcing the rules of the road.

Yeah, I also noticed the quality is very low. I expect this is nothing more than bureaucratic bullshit leading to garbage cameras being used. There is no motivation to spring for better cameras. It is a shame because WRPS could more easily hold people accountable for their dangerous driving...oh, here's a picture of the registered vehicle owner, and here's a high quality HD image of the driver who cut off the LRT, compare the two.

FWIW....dash cams in general are pretty trash. A base model GO Pro will capture a significantly better image for around the same cost as a mid-range dash cam, but have none of the "dashcam" features. It's nothing short of a failure of capitalism causing this--there's like two manufacturers of dashcam chips and sensors and rolling your own camera is difficult, so every dashcam just grabs one of these off the shelf components, and they're both trash.