The Texas city of Sugar Land is the latest community to find itself
divided by the red light cameras that line municipal coffers even as
they anger the driving public.A citizens group led by a retired police
captain filed a petition of nearly 3,000 signatures to have the cameras'
continued use put on the November ballot. But in a surprise move, the
council cited technicalities to toss out the petition, leaving residents
seeing red and vowing to keep fighting city hall.Curvace, a research
group from Switzerland, is the latest to announce a compound eye
invention with its Curved Artificial Compound Eye prototype, made up of a
strip of small spy hidden camera.“Those
technicalities are petty and dubious," Helwig Van Der Grinten, founder
of the Houston Coalition Against Red Light Cameras, told FoxNews.Van Der
Grinten said he submitted the petition to Sugar Land city officials in
April, but the petition was deemed invalid last week because it did not
include names and addresses of the five-member committee of petitioners,
was not accompanied by an affidavit and was not submitted within five
days of the initial petition date.
“We have attorneys examining
the legality of the city's stand on this," Van Der Grinten said. "In the
meantime, I am putting the word out to the people of Sugar Land that
they should contact their council members to request that they go ahead
and put the question on the ballot on their own authority.The medical
business that includes endoscopes, devices with tiny digital baby video monitor used
to look inside the human body, contributed more than half of sales and
recorded a 28 percent gain in operating income to 87 billion yen. They
have the authority to do that.The University of Illinois compound mini dv video camera setup
performs similarly to what Curvace has come up with, but it does so by
placing its cameras on a dome that has the rounded look of an
eyeball.".“Those technicalities are petty and dubious. We have attorneys
examining the legality of the city's stand on this."Van Der Grinten,
73, said local lawmakers are “turning a deaf ear" to the people of Sugar
Land, an affluent and growing suburb of Houston with roughly 80,000
residents. Van Der Grinten, who said he has never received one of the
$75 tickets, said his issue with the cameras is safety. Cameras mounted
on or near the traffic lights snap photos of cars -- and license plates
-- the instant the light turns red. If the car is in the intersection, a
ticket goes out to whomever the car is registered to.
“The
cameras, as they're operating, turn the traffic light into a guessing
game because when the light turns yellow, the driver is forced into a
snap decision," he said. “And if he or she guesses wrong and goes
through the light, they get a ticket. If they stop, it increases the
risk of being rear-ended.Both systems aim to do the same thing — mimic
the vision of a fly, which relies on compound eyes to track minuscule
movements with a wider field-of-view and deeper depth of field than the
human eye, or moden single underwater digital camera setups,
can even attempt to reach."Doug Adolph, a city spokesman, told FoxNews.
that the cameras -- which were installed in 2008 and are currently at
just four intersections in city limits – have reduced accidents by 58
percent since that time. In 2011 and 2012, cameras were removed at two
intersections after compliance levels improved by almost 60 percent, he
said.“We believe that it's an effective and efficient use of technology
to make our intersections safer," said Adolph, adding that it also
allows police officers to focus on other crimes like burglaries and
other property crime.Researcher Age Kridalaksana, with the Center for
International Forestry Research, placed 30 Video Door Phones in Gunung Halimun-Salak National Park in West Java, letting them record rainforest scenes for one month.
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