Originally Posted by
3alarmer
...quietly, and with multiple e-mails to city council people in office at the time. Also a couple of carefully worded FOIA requests over to the cop shop. There was never any official acknowledgement of an end to these bicycle enforcement periods, but I know they stopped. I think that it just looked easier to stop the ********, than to deal with all the harassment they were receiving about the ********. And nobody likes responding to detailed FOIA requests. Those always get referred to the city legal counsel, and those guys are never looking for more work.
Thanks, what were the FOIA requests for specifically? You have to know that the document exists first, and then you have to know the type of information on the document right?
Originally Posted by
3alarmer
...most certainly this varies by locality, but generally traffic violation fines do not go directly to city general funds, to be used for whatever. You can Google this yourself with some phrase like "how does My City use traffic fine revenues ?" See this, and this one. This report by the California State Auditor's office, back in 2018, has had some positive effects in reducing the abuses that did exist in various jurisdictions here in California. But no place is perfect.
In the links I didn't see anything that said the city isn't making money shaking down cyclists. $300 for 15 minutes of "work" is $1200 per hour. Five cops shaking down 4 cyclists an hour for 8 hours a day over 2 weeks is $672,000. And they seem to say that whenever the city wants to fund something but can't do it through taxes, they just add a new fee onto the fine. This fee allows them to slosh money from one part of the budget to another
Originally Posted by
Darth Lefty
I certainly don’t think any city is making any worthwhile amount of money on traffic tickets for bikes. I also doubt anything happening anywhere in CA happens on the same scale as NYC. But cities do sometimes decide to be buttheads. Maybe sometimes justifiable. There was Carlsbad that had a panic attack about e-bikes a few months ago.
We also have the most homeless here in CA and bikes are part of the profile. Maybe they used the traffic offense to pull you and when it turned out you were inoffensive they thought they had to make it look worthwhile. You watch cop reality shows and cops are nonstop pulling over sleazy looking people on thin premises to run their ID for missed court date warrants and search them for tiny bits of drugs
In this area there are millions of bikes, hundreds of miles of bikeable roads (bike lanes, wide shoulders, and dedicated bike/pedestrian paths), and too many stop signs -- all over Stanford campus, Silicon Valley, dozens of schools. The drivers here are bike friendly, but the laws are not. NYC is famously corrupt, there was that good whistleblower cop that took the video of his supervisor telling them their ticket quota for that day. I was on a Scott disc brake road bike in clean Pearl Izumi spandex kit on a weekend afternoon ride, no backpack or bags -- definitely not suspicious