PERRY: Freaky liberal loathing for Aurora’s new radar love

Somewhere between encouraging Aurora motorists to run over children in the streets as they make their way to and from school, and executing soccer moms who blast through schools zones at 27 mph, a reasonable balance exists between safety and reality.

That balance, and most likely reality, seems to evade city hall.

Once again, bleeding heart, commie, pinko liberals like me are in the position of begging conservative types on the Aurora City Council to back off the Big-Brother-government-backed-nannyism-Obamanation-police-state-tactics when it comes to Aurora traffic enforcement. I hate it when that happens.

This newspaper and a few on city council have long been rallying against Aurora’s love affair with red-light-rip-off cameras scattered across the city’s more treacherous intersections. A majority of city lawmakers and Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates swear these abominations make city intersections safer — and, coincidentally, a few million dollars a year. I, and a couple of Aurora city council oddballs, say it’s a load of crap, and that they do very little to countervail poor traffic designs at places like East Alameda Avenue and South Abilene Street. Instead, they create their own hazards because people drive like crazed Parisians to avoid getting their pictures snapped at an inopportune moment.

Police insist the systems reduce the number of weasels sneaking through deep-orange and flaming red lights. They insist that red-light reprobates are a serious problem, so they need to take serious action against them. It’s not such a serious problem, however, that they would ever start posting cops at these intersections, which we all know sets all drivers on their best behavior and even reduces offensive stop-light nose picking. No, that would be expensive and result in just a trickle of revenue.

Which brings us to speeding in school zones. Suddenly, we have a problem. And the answer? Covert radar vans that could be headed to a school near you. They’re popular in some metro cities. They look like a U.S. Postal Service van or sometimes just like any other soccer-mombile. But inside is a hidden radar gun and camera that slyly snaps pictures of speeding cars. Those who supposedly motor too fast past these contraptions get their picture in the mail, often with their mouths open, and an invitation to send a hundred bucks or so to the city’s traffic court. You get to keep your picture.

I can’t tell you where across the metro area these things are because they don’t make much of an impression. I can, however, tell you exactly where Aurora cops have set up speed traps. Cop cars and radar guns drawn incite instant hand and sphincter constriction, just like Pavlov’s bell going off at 300 decibels. You know where the speed traps have been, usually for years after. Just as impressive are those annoying flashing billboards that tell you and everyone around you “YOUR SPEED” and go into a yellow-flashing paroxysm if you’re driving just 1 mile per hour over the limit. Not only can I testify how effective these things are at slowing drivers, so can the experts. Study after study show they are as or more effective than anything else, including speed bumps, stationed police cars or sneaky radar vans. The only thing more effective are Florida commuters in a snow storm.

And radar vans? Cities like Baltimore are actually dumping them because they’re nothing but trouble. They have serious error rates. Xerox State and Local Solutions — the same company Aurora hires to run its photo-red-light program and is only too happy to hawk its radar-van service — got the boot from Baltimore a few years ago. It became clear that the error rate for some vans was better than 5 percent. These things can easily snap 50 or more pictures a day of alleged scofflaws. If they’re stationed at 100 Aurora schools, that’s 5,000 tickets a day. A 5 percent error rate means 250 tickets bogus tickets a day. The breaking point in Baltimore came when the owner of a car stopped at a red light got a speeding ticket from one of these vans.

Aurora can avoid all that and make school zones safer. The priority of these surreptitious-ticket-generating companies is their bottom lines — not your kids’ safety. If safety is paramount and flashing billboards promote that cheaply and effectively, it shouldn’t be too hard for an incorrigible progressive to show local conservatives how to avoid some liberal pitfalls, should it?

Reach Editor Dave Perry at 303-750-7555 or dperry@aurorasentinel.com