Raise your hand if you’ve been caught on camera running a red light (I am raising my hand). Depending upon how often you get caught by red light cameras and how much you have to pay per ticket, this $200 “Red Light Camera Detector” may end up saving you some money and insurance headaches in the long run.
The system has a built-in GPS chip that “compares your automobile’s bearings with an internal database of 6,000 red light and speed camera locations in the U.S. and Canada.” What’s more, the display shows your current position on a street map and “alerts you to the presence of red light cameras with visual and audible cues.”
Though this device walks like a GPS system and talks like a GPS system, it does not function as a GPS system. That is, there’s no turn-by-turn directions or points of interest or anything like that. On behalf of everyone reading this, why not just add in those features and call it a day? It might help justify the $200 price tag.
Up-to-date data can be transferred to the device via USB. The first year of updates is free, while subsequent years will set you back $20 apiece.
The Red Light Camera Detector [Hammacher Schlemmer]
Or you could just not run red lights… that seems a lot easier :-/
As someone whose first car (my grandmother’s absolutely CHERRY Park Avenue) was completely jacked up by an idiot who ran a red light, I agree.
But Ben… that would be the logical thing to do. Nobody is capable of logical thinking anymore.
Holy hell, why not just follow the law and not run the red lights. What effing MORONS!!!!!
If you live in California, or ever visit, beware of “Snitch Tickets,” fake/phishing red light camera tickets designed to bluff the registered owner into ID’ing the actual driver of the car. (40+ California cities use them.) Snitch Tickets were invented because California is one of the states where camera tickets are “driver responsibility” rather than “owner responsibility.” Putting it diplomatically, Snitch Tickets are simply a clever investigatory tool. They aren’t filed at court (like a real ticket would be), so they don’t say “Notice to Appear,” don’t have the court’s address, and say (on the back, in small letters), “Do not contact the court.” Since they have NOT been filed at court, they have no legal weight. You can ignore a Snitch Ticket. If in doubt, Google the term.
Before you rely on a database of 6,000 locations you might want to ask where the vendor licensed the database from. There are lots of database thieves who have built derivative databases off http://photoenforced.com (an open database) without permission. If this source was cut off from them you would be in big trouble getting updates. There are false locations in the database purposely to catch crooks.