You might not always love the Plain Dealer, and you might not always hate the Plain Dealer. Either way, we all need a major newspaper covering our beat.
You won't get any news from City Hall, even though they have 27(!) departments including 3 dedicated to "Community Relations", "Consumer Affairs" and "TV20".
City Council won't even publish the schedule and agenda for City Council meetings on their website. They have a box called "Events" that do not include any council events.
They have 168 hours to fill every week on a dedicated cable TV channel paid for by us subscribers. Why not fill them with video of the council meetings? Stuff that really matters, that affect every neighborhood in the City, that affect how we live our day-to-day lives, extending down to the level of how we take out our trash. I'd like to see the history and thought process that culminated in the decision to allow our sanitation workers to write us $100 tickets.
Which, BTW, is the same price as a traffic camera ticket. Somehow, I don't think putting a banana peel in the recycle bin falls into the same category as blowing through a red light at 50 MPH. It's astonishing how deeply flawed Cleveland's decision making process has become.
Has anyone in the city administration ever talked about the VADXX plastic-to-oil pressure vessel and its 11 tons per year of particulates they intend to put in Ward 8? The PD did, two months ago. Still no word from the Mayor's office or City Council. http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2013/04/vadxx_energy_plan_to_extablish.html
The good news is that we're still getting the molecule-based newspaper 4 days a week. The better news is that now I access the electron-based Cleveland.com on any of my 4 computers, my android and my iPad...wherever I have internet...anywhere in the world, even when I'm not home. Even better: now I can search for a topic and get a full history of news articles, reports, blogs, everything ever written in the PD about that topic. (at least in Firefox, Cleveland.com's search function doesn't yet support Chrome. I'll never know if it works on Internet Explorer).
So support your local newspaper: it has a much larger impact on our daily lives than any gun legislation. I keep comparing the NRA argument that adversarial governments will always try to take away our weapons: the SMART adversarial governments take away our newspapers long before they go after our weapons.
Support your local newspaper, whether it's the PD or the Beacon Journal.
Full disclosure: I delivered the ABJ when I was a teenager, it paid for my first motorcycle; and I'm a card-carrying member of the NRA with a valid CCW..
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
What to do With Automated Enforcement Traffic Cameras
I'm mad as hell. Cleveland is more than doubling the number of traffic cameras from 29 to 64 units including mobile and trailer-mounted. No one in the city administration has even tried to justify, on an accident prevention or life-saving basis, the installation of an additional 35 cameras.
No attempt has ever been made in Cleveland to quantify the life-saving benefit of the cameras already installed for the past 8 years. The discussions are always about the money, or about reduced tickets, or about "awareness". But it's never about saving lives. Not once in 8 years have we ever read that the traffic camera at Chester and 71st, which generated 23,275 tickets last year ($2.3 MILLION) saved a single life. Or prevented even one accident.
Is it even conceivable that enough accidents and injuries are going to be prevented to justify the additional cost to us residents? How incredibly dangerous are those intersections anyway? If they are so bad, why isn't the City engineering department trying to fix the design that makes them so unsafe?
How many t-bone accidents have occurred at those locations over the past 5 years, and how many will be prevented with the addition of the cameras? How many won't be prevented because someone blowing through an intersection at 55 MPH doesn't give a rat's patootie about traffic cameras?
To my politician and law enforcement friends: PLEASE don't make yourself a liar and claim this is about safety. In the 27 years since the first automated enforcement camera was installed in Texas, there are no independent, repeatable, statistically significant studies done that prove that cameras save lives, reduce accidents, reduce the cost of the accidents or even reduce our insurance premiums. Don't you think that in 27 years of operation there would be enough reliable data that would put this question to rest? Hell, with 27,275 data points at Chester and 71 alone, can't we prove SOMETHING?
Thank goodness our trusted camera vendor is Xerox, a reputable and wealthy firm. Waaait a minute... just five months ago, in December 2012, Xerox admitted that cameras they deployed in Baltimore were producing erroneous (high) speed readings, and that 1 out of every 20 citations issued at some locations were due to errors, including at least one issued to a completely stationary car.
This move to improve the City's finances (remember, that's all they can measure and talk about) is wrong on so many levels. How can creating an adversarial relationship between us citizens and our City managers.be good?
Here's an idea: how about we take that money and dedicate it to fixing our streets? The list of deplorably bad roads in Cleveland is long and distinguished. Try driving up or down Chester along the curb lane in either direction. This is a major east-west 6-lane divided highway with no driveway access. Hold on to your dental work. Or get off I-90 and head east on Superior along the curb lane through the construction zone. Hang on to your right suspension components.
Write to Bill Patmon and tell him you think traffic cameras are the wrong way to improve safe driving habits.
No attempt has ever been made in Cleveland to quantify the life-saving benefit of the cameras already installed for the past 8 years. The discussions are always about the money, or about reduced tickets, or about "awareness". But it's never about saving lives. Not once in 8 years have we ever read that the traffic camera at Chester and 71st, which generated 23,275 tickets last year ($2.3 MILLION) saved a single life. Or prevented even one accident.
Is it even conceivable that enough accidents and injuries are going to be prevented to justify the additional cost to us residents? How incredibly dangerous are those intersections anyway? If they are so bad, why isn't the City engineering department trying to fix the design that makes them so unsafe?
How many t-bone accidents have occurred at those locations over the past 5 years, and how many will be prevented with the addition of the cameras? How many won't be prevented because someone blowing through an intersection at 55 MPH doesn't give a rat's patootie about traffic cameras?
To my politician and law enforcement friends: PLEASE don't make yourself a liar and claim this is about safety. In the 27 years since the first automated enforcement camera was installed in Texas, there are no independent, repeatable, statistically significant studies done that prove that cameras save lives, reduce accidents, reduce the cost of the accidents or even reduce our insurance premiums. Don't you think that in 27 years of operation there would be enough reliable data that would put this question to rest? Hell, with 27,275 data points at Chester and 71 alone, can't we prove SOMETHING?
Thank goodness our trusted camera vendor is Xerox, a reputable and wealthy firm. Waaait a minute... just five months ago, in December 2012, Xerox admitted that cameras they deployed in Baltimore were producing erroneous (high) speed readings, and that 1 out of every 20 citations issued at some locations were due to errors, including at least one issued to a completely stationary car.
This move to improve the City's finances (remember, that's all they can measure and talk about) is wrong on so many levels. How can creating an adversarial relationship between us citizens and our City managers.be good?
Here's an idea: how about we take that money and dedicate it to fixing our streets? The list of deplorably bad roads in Cleveland is long and distinguished. Try driving up or down Chester along the curb lane in either direction. This is a major east-west 6-lane divided highway with no driveway access. Hold on to your dental work. Or get off I-90 and head east on Superior along the curb lane through the construction zone. Hang on to your right suspension components.
Write to Bill Patmon and tell him you think traffic cameras are the wrong way to improve safe driving habits.
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