The Washington Post sees an emerging trend in backlash against traffic violation cameras. Citizens in College Station, Texas, and two Ohio cities voted Tuesday to remove the devices. In College Station, the camera manufacturer and its subcontractors reportedly spent $60,000 campaigning to keep them in place, more than five times the amount raised by the opposition, and lost anyway. Voters in Chillicothe, Ohio, went against the cameras at a rate of 72 percent. Heath, Ohio, also voted down the cameras.
Eleven cities have now voted against the automated enforcement. A handful of cities used them a decade ago. Now they’re in more than 400, spread across two dozen states. “They make too much money for cities to just stop using them,” says Joe Scott, a D.C. entrepreneur who has developed Phantomalert, a downloadable software for GPS units and an app for smart phones that is updated by subscribers who spot new cameras sprouting up.