Local blogger Rajiv Shah, is one of those smart people whose writing I like to pepper this website with, to make a dimwit like myself, look more intelligent.

Shah, who writes the Smart Cameras Blog, has some interesting thoughts on Ald. Burke’s recent proposal to utilize our city’s red light cameras and other surveillance cameras to scan license plates to check if they are insured or not. Then issue an expensive ticket to that uninsured and unfortunate vehicle owner.

Using Traffic Cameras to Enhance Revenue

Insurenet proposes that Chicago could make “well in excess of $100 million. We think at least $200 million.” All they would have to do is use traffic cameras to collect license plate numbers and then match the numbers with those of uninsured motorists. A traffic camera would then read a license plate, if it was uninsured, it would then send a ticket in the mail. To accomplish this, Chicago would also need to compel insurance companies to report the names and license plates of insured motorists into the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (NLETS), the information-sharing network that links federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.

[From Traffic cameras could help wipe out city's projected deficit :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: City Hall]

Does anybody see any problems in this scheme? The readers of the Sun-Times offered quite a few.

1. The numbers don’t seem to add up. Frankly, I couldn’t understand the figures from the newspaper article. But basically, the city would need on the order of 700,000 tickets per year to generate this revenue. That’s a lot of tickets.

2. The levied fines seem disproportional. Fining someone that doesn’t have insurance on the car a $1000? What are the odds that they could either afford to pay or be willing to pay the fine?

This brings me to something called unintended consequences.

People without insurance (they know who they are) will now have a bullseye on their car (aka the license plate). They will have a $1000 incentive to make sure they do not receive a fine. They may try to disguise their plate or avoid traffic cameras. Or they might be willing to go down the slippery slope of illegality by telling the city an incorrect address for their car registration or making sure the license plate on their car isn’t theirs. This is a slope the city doesn’t want people to venture. Once citizens muck with the connection between license plates and their registration, it throws the whole enforcement mechanism for many sorts of issues awry.

I think fines for uninsured motorists are a good use of traffic cameras. But lets use it as a tool to push people to buy insurance and not as a way to unfairly punish people, who will likely become even harder to catch.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  Rajiv Shah is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Part of his research focuses on developments in Chicago’s video surveillance network. He also studies the development of “smart cameras” that utilize additional sensors and/or computer processing techniques. He discusses recent developments in these areas on the Smart Cameras blog. He has also been interviewed numerous times on video surveillance in Chicago as well as the emergence of smart camera systems.