The Road to Hell Is Paved...

The revenue generation machines come down -

Dozens of photo-enforcement cameras on freeways throughout the state are coming down this week.

A total of 76 cameras will cease operation on Thursday.

The photo-enforcement program, which was meant to catch speeders on Arizona's freeways, has been controversial from the beginning. The cameras first went up nearly two years ago.

Remember this when some politicrat tries to edumutate you that his new whatchamajig will be The Next Best Thing and will Solve All Our Woes! But first we must ask the question, why are the cameras coming down?

While the cameras have done a good job at snapping speeders, drivers have been ignoring the tickets.

According to the Department of Public Safety, the cameras led to more than 700,000 tickets in the first year of operation. Many of those people, however, never paid the fines.

Some say that's because the tickets were mailed, making them easy to ignore.

Any driver who ignored a photo-enforcement ticket was supposed to have been served. One problem was that process servers were inundated and simply couldn't get to everybody. If a person was not served, his or her ticket became invalid after three months.

 Not to mention the whole legality of a citation generating machine - How does the machine work? At what point does it capture the license plate? Who was driving the car? The list goes on and on. But here's the best reason to get rid of them.

The speeding tickets should have generated about $90 million in the first year of the program. About one-third of that was actually collected.

 Oh, the safety revenue initiative didn't generate enough revenue. Big surprise there.