Good afternoon, Chairman Schuler and members of the Committee. My name is Duke Ganote, and I am a resident of Dayton (6426 Silver Pheasant Court, Dayton, Ohio 45424-4177. Phone: 937/236-6424). I am a Professional Engineer in the State of Ohio.

For the record, I am an unpaid volunteer of National Motorists Association (NMA), of which I've been a member since about 1983. I have been operating as NMA's Ohio legislative director for over a decade, first testifying before the Transportation and Public Safety committee in 1987 as proponent of increasing the speed limit to 65-mph. I've also been involved with municipalities and townships on traffic issues for about 15 years. The National Motorists Association is a grassroots advocacy group founded in 1982 to represent the rights of motorists. For your information NMA is supported solely by the memberships of individuals, families, and small businesses.

I have great confidence and a deep respect for our system of government and this committee. I come before you today because in my years of representing motorists, I have learned that the public is often misled into complacency by feel-good solutions that in reality do not work. That is why the legislators must study ALL pertinent information and sort out the truth from the myths.

But first let me say that we stand together in our desire to rid the highways of dangerous drivers, whether that is a tired driver falling asleep at the wheel, a driver drugged from a cold medication or a drunk driver. We stand together in wanting to rid the highways of those drivers that threaten the lives of others through their recklessness, such as failure to yield the right-of-way by running redlights.

We object to photo-radar because, among other things:

• Many, if not most, traffic control devices (TCDs) in Ohio, are erected without engineering and traffic justification. Thus, the photo monitoring devices would often enforce unjust laws.
• Traffic enforcement is better if it is immediate, rather than delayed through mail summons. Law enforcement officers review the images long after the alleged offense occurs, and cannot detain impaired motorists. Furthermore, it imposes unreasonable burdens on the defendant. Justice delayed is justice denied.

Note that we are not objecting to improved enforcement per se, but are concerned about potential abuses based on experience elsewhere with such devices.

Abuses of traffic control devices distort the application of the "three E's" of traffic safety:

• Engineering
• Education
• Enforcement

All three have a role in traffic safety. By introducing an unregulated enforcement tool, there is strong potential for misallocation of safety efforts. Photo-devices are easily turned into a revenue-generating device, if they are enforcing unjustified traffic control devices. The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) includes this about traffic signals (my underlining):

1. Excess delay may be caused.
2. Disobedience of the signal indications is encouraged.
3. The use of less adequate routes may be induced in an attempt to avoid such signals.
4. Accident frequency (especially the rear-end type) can be significantly increased."

A series in the Columbus Dispatch, entitled Wheels of Justice documents that:

• "...more than a hundred of Ohio's 942 municipalities rely heavily on ticket revenue ... with residents unable or unwilling to pay any additional taxes, 27 municipalities are filling their coffers through the wallets of out-of-town traffic offenders."
• "..the village of Linndale has ... 220 yards of the interstate... The village annually collects about $57,000 in taxes from its 159 residents and businesses, compared with as much as $388,000 in traffic fines , auditor records show. In 1994, the Ohio General Assembly passed a law sponsored by Rep. Edward F. Kasputis, R-Olmsted Township, aimed at curbing the practice in Linndale. The law bars police from patrolling the interstate for the "primary purpose" of writing speeding tickets when less than a half-mile of interstate passes through the community and it has no access ramp. Linndale police have gotten around the law -- officers continue to patrol the interstate and write tickets -- by claiming that their "primary purpose" is not to write speeding tickets"

Why are these municipalities able to make revenue this way? They are not required to perform traffic and engineering studies. For example, the Revised Code allowing municipalities to post 35-mph speed limits was effective in 1929 - seventy years ago. Road design and vehicles have improved dramatically in 70 years. The Ford Model A was "new car" in 1929. Photographs I've seen of that era show narrow houses built close to two-lane roads. Nevertheless, most municipalities still inflict the same speed limits on the modern vehicles and multi-lane roads of today. It's similar to the injustice which would result by trying to "save the government money" by not conducting censuses and refusing to re-district the Ohio House since 1929. I think it's reasonable to expect traffic studies to be conducted at least every ten years.

Furthermore, there is no accountability to ensure that local authorities comply with the Revised Code. In my dealings with about half-a-dozen townships and a couple of townships over the years, I found exactly one that reviewed my complaint, admitted that a mistake had been made, and made the correction within three months. Most local authorities made corrections to blatant abuses only after years of ongoing effort on my part. One gentleman of my acquaintance spent thousands of dollars in court getting an abuse corrected in his city.

Unreasonably shortening the duration of the yellow-light phase would be a simple matter for local authorities. (Many townships and villages do not have engineering staff, and many municipal officials ignore the recommendations of their engineers about traffic control devices anyhow.) In one case in which I was involved, a four-lane, divided highways running through open fields had a 35-mph limit posted. My studies indicated the average speed of traffic was 47-mph. One of my safety concerns was that the intersection signals had been timed for the "fantasy" speed limit of 35-mph, rather than actual 50-mph travel speeds. Unreasonably shortening the yellow-light phase ensures enough motorists are caught going "though the red light" to turn a profit, even if the red phase is lengthened to reduce accidents.

Without wanting to be an exhausting litany, consider the well-known abuses of Ohio's open-records laws, which rarely involve great amounts of money, just political embarrassment. Now consider the motivation for profitable abuse of Ohio's motor vehicle laws. The mechanisms of traffic signals are not open to public inspection.

Traffic enforcement is better if it is immediate, rather than delayed through mail summons. Law enforcement officers review the images long after the alleged offense occurs, and cannot detain impaired motorists. I've seen videotapes "supporting" photo-monitoring devices showing actions of inattentive drivers running lights. It would be better, even if the offense were monitored through a photo-device (like aerial enforcement or radar or other enforcement tool) to halt the offender immediately. Photo monitoring does not halt the chemically- impaired driver.

Furthermore, it imposes unreasonable burdens on the defendant. The NMA web relates the objections thusly:

• Inadequate notification of defendants
  Most governments using photo enforcement notify defendants via first class mail. There is no reasonable guarantee that the person to whom the letter is addressed will actually get the letter, understand the letter nor know how to properly respond. However, the government makes the assumption that proper notification was achieved and the defendant is willingly ignoring the order to appear or pay. The result can be a warrant issued for the arrest of the person named on the ticket.
• Failure to positively identify the driver of the vehicle
  Frequently, the photo does not adequately identify the driver of the offending vehicle. The owner of the vehicle is mailed the ticket, even though the owner was not driving the vehicle and in some instances may not know who was driving the vehicle. The owner of the vehicle is forced to prove his/her innocence, often by identifying the actual diver who may be a family member, friend or employee.
• Failure to promptly notify defendant
  Defendants may not receive citations until several days, sometimes weeks, after the alleged violation. This makes it extremely difficult to reconstruct the circumstances involved in the supposed violation. There may be circumstances that justified exceeding the speed limit or being in a controlled intersection under a red light. There may have been confounding factors that led to a photo being taken in error. Having traversed a given intersection or roadway dozens of times over a short time frame makes it almost impossible to recall the specific events of a two-week-old trip.
• No certifiable witness to the violation
  A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it may take a thousand words to explain what the picture really means. Even in those instances where a photo enforcement operation is being overseen by a law enforcement officer, it is highly unlikely the officer would have any personal recollection of the supposed violation. For all practical purposes, there is no "accuser" for the defendant to confront, a Constitutional Right. There is no one that can personally testify to the circumstances of the alleged violation. Because a camera unit was operating properly when it was set up does not mean it was operating properly when the picture was taken of any given vehicle.
• System designed to inconvenience motorist
  Under the guise of protecting motorist privacy, the court or private contractor handling defendant notification will not send a copy of the photo of the alleged violation to the vehicle owner. (Many of the photos do not clearly depict the driver, or the driver is not the vehicle owner.) The Vehicle owner is forced to travel to the courthouse to see the photograph, an obvious and deliberate inconvenience to discourage ticket challenges.

Simply put, justice delayed is justice denied..

It appears the "pilot projects" will be carefully selected just to "prove" the value of this technology, which will then be unleashed throughout Ohio. According to the LSC summary of HB 114, only the Dept. of Public Safety ("law enforcement") is involved. There are NO indications of:

• Engineering validation (by the Ohio Dept. of Transportation) that the traffic control devices at the "test" intersection are appropriately erected, calibrated, and maintained; and whether engineering changes might not be more appropriate.
• Photo-monitoring devices being run in an initial non-enforcement period to estimate the "normal" number of red-light runners, to determine the effectiveness of the device.
• Monitoring of traffic patterns: the "number of accidents" might decrease simply due to changes in traffic patterns. For example,
• As motorists learn of the device's presence, they have been known to shift to parallel routes, thus simply changing the accident locations. Naturally, the "test" location shows a deceptively large decrease in accidents, vastly over-estimating the monitoring devices' effectiveness.
• Improvement of an alternative route might have result in a similar change to traffic patterns.
• Traffic patterns can vary greatly by season.
• What part the "education" portion of the "3 E's" is to play.

These "pilot projects" are incapable of demonstrating where this technology ranks in the overall scheme of improving traffic safety; and what sort of controls should be applied to prevent abuses.

We support local government, but we live in a highly mobile society. One Ohio Appellate Court decision says, among other things, "To achieve a reasonably uniform system [of traffic] and prevent the chaos of over six hundred different systems [possibly referencing the number of municipalities in 1962] in a highly mobile society, the Legislature is entitled to establish basic rules and provide an administrative method of varying those rules where conditions justify an exception." [116 App 105, 187 NE(2d) 396 (1962)].

If there is a validated need for additional red-light enforcement, then integrated teams of engineers and law enforcement should be put to work, potentially committing additional state resources (traffic engineering, construction and enforcement) on major traffic hazards across the state, regardless of local jurisdiction. This is a highly mobile society, and "local solutions" often have adverse impacts on ("sub-optimize") the overall traffic system.

The potential misuse of such a "gee-whiz" automated tool is simply too seductive. Too many of the approximately 2,000 local governments (88 counties; 239 cities; 701 villages; and 1,311 townships according to the Secretary of State) in Ohio will find it an irresistible means of turning the traffic stream into a revenue stream. There is no audit of local government conformance to traffic laws.

Finally, again note that we are not objecting to improved enforcement per se. However:

• As an engineer, I am concerned by long history of inappropriate or manipulated traffic control devices
• As a citizen of Ohio, I am concerned about short-changing the rights of citizens for the convenience of government.

Thank you for your time and attention, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee.