If true, this is a scam that is going to fuel the conspiracy theories of every driver who feels they were fined unfairly for crossing a red light. Police in Italy have arrested the inventor of a smart traffic light system, and are investigating another 108 people, on suspicion of tampering with the software to speed up the transition from amber to to red, netting the local police and others in on the scam millions of dollars of extra fines.
The question is: Is this kind of thing limited only to Italy?
Stefano Arrighetti, 45, an engineering graduate from Genoa who created the “T-Redspeed” system, is under house arrest, and 108 other people are under investigation after it was alleged that his intelligent lights were programmed to turn from amber to red in half the regulation time. The technology, which was adopted all over Italy, employs three cameras designed to assess the three-dimensional placement of vehicles passing a red light and store their number plates on a connected computer system.
Those now under investigation include 63 municipal police commanders, 39 local government officials and the managers of seven private companies.
The fraud, The Independent says, was uncovered by Roberto Franzini, police chief of Lerici, on the Ligurian coast, who – in February 2007 – noticed the abnormal number of fines being issued for jumping red lights. “There were 1,439 for the previous two months,” he said. “It seemed too much: at the most our patrols catch 15 per day.” He went to check the lights and found that they were changing to red after three seconds instead of the five seconds that had been normal.
Unanswered, of course, is why it’s taken two years for the fraud to be stopped and investigated. The inventor’s lawyer has said he is innocent. Mr Arrighetti’s LinkedIn page is here. He is described as the owner of Kria, a Milan-based company which sells the T-Redspeed and other traffic monitoring systems.
Image of Arrighetti from Insight24 webcast
The T-Redspeed system is described in the company literature as “the newest and most innovative digital system for vehicle speed and red light violation detection. Based on special video cameras, it doesn’t require additional sensors (inductive loops, radars or lasers). It measures the speed of the vehicles (instantaneous and average) up to 300 km/h.”
Some forum posters have suggested a system used by British authorities, RedSpeed, is the same, but on first glance it doesn’t look like it. That said, reducing the amber phase seems to be a widespread source of extra revenue: The National Motorists Association of America has found six cities that have shortened the amber phase beyond the legal amount, apparently as a way to increase revenue.
Illustration from Kria brochure (PDF)
Well, this doesn’t really say it all… it is not just a matter of reducing the time from 5 to 3 seconds, but timing WHEN the light will turn red, based on the car spped and then making it IMPOSSIBLE to stop at the light. I saw (5+ years ago) street completely straight, with a traffic light in the middle, no intersection, no crossing for people. The traffic light was constantly green, except when a car was approaching, turning from green to red when the car was practically under the traffic light, and all this was taken on camera and a fine sent to the owner of the car. It was reported on the news, also years ago and in Italy, of this man that received a few dozen of fines, as the system was installed very close to his house (and paperwork in Italy takes long time, thus before he received the first fine he had time to accumulate all the others!)