I work for an American company that competes with Redflex for this business. I'm not terribly happy that my company has gotten into this arena, but the people involved do seem to be genuinely interested in saving lives. Of course, they're also genuinely interested in making a profit off of the practice, too.

Last year, they were planning to compete for all of these red light enforcement programs that were beginning to roll out around the country. They had put together a pretty good technology, very nice promo materials, and a pretty good price, but in state after state, and city after city, they got beat out of the process by this company no one had heard of called 'Redflex'. Pretty soon, they had wrapped up most of the business. Now, the traffic and enforcement business is so much an old-boy network, it wasn't really surprising that somebody was somehow working an inside angle. I'm not in that division and am only hearing about this stuff second-hand, but I gather that several of our bids were under Redflex, but the programs still went to them.

In any case, I hate the idea of getting a ticket via remote-control. I've managed to avoid it, even though we have no more knowledge about this than the regular public. The group that does the verification (that part is all done by human eyeballs) is behind keycode locked doors, but with interior windows so everybody can be watched. Actually, it's kind of creepy.

And some people have had some success fighting the tickets. I doubt that the American people are going to let this program get very entrenched. It just pisses off too many people.