Posts
Comments
That’s not how traffic rules work, and for good reason. You can’t predict whether you’ll become part of a queue at the next traffic light, or whether a bus will come up behind that queue. In addition, a camera on a bus might only be able to see the license plate on the last car in the queue, when cars in front are equally culpable.
I think the camera bill is a bad idea for several reasons.
The bus lane implementations around here were done really badly. Many of them created traffic jams that didn’t use to exist. Before the bus lane, there was no delay for the bus.
In addition, the scheduled service in many of these lanes is so sparse that even if every bus were crush loaded, the bus lane could carry a fraction as many people as a lane full of single-occupant cars. A real bus lane like the one approaching the Lincoln Tunnel in New Jersey serves more than a hundred thousand people every morning.
The bus lanes around here are often marked really badly, with very few signs in a very small font, and pavement markings that aren’t maintained as they fade or the road is patched.
And some of the bus lanes don’t even have any buses using them! The city and state striped a lot of bus lanes for the October 2022 Orange Line shuttle, but didn’t bother to remove them. Why should people get camera tickets when the people making the rules are this sloppy?