Video Patrol of Car-Pool Lanes Gets Tryout in O.C.

It could be the traffic cop of the future.

Across the country, from the Washington beltway to the streets of Pasadena, transportation officials are turning to the camera to crack down on motorists guilty of everything from speeding to running stop lights.

Now the concept could be coming to California in an even bigger way. Authorities at the California Department of Transportation and the California Highway Patrol are looking at using video cameras to nab motorists who violate car-pool-lane rules on freeways up and down the state.

The new video technology, which features cameras as tiny as a lipstick tube and super-slow-motion replay machines, has already had a dry run on the Artesia and Simi Valley freeways in Los Angeles County and was tested again last Thursday in Orange County along the Costa Mesa Freeway’s car-pool lanes.

For the CHP, the idea has particular allure. If the video technique proves feasible, it could help shrink violation rates in car-pool lanes and relieve officers of the dangerous task of pulling scofflaws across three or four lanes of freeway traffic to issue a ticket.

“We’re interested in testing any kind of technique that could help out,” said Lt. Shawn Watts of the CHP’s transportation planning unit in Sacramento. “This looks pretty good because it would possibly save a lot of officer time, reduce their exposure to traffic out there and hopefully catch more violators.”

While transportation officials agree that the idea shows promise, obstacles remain. Technological hurdles must be overcome, and logistical changes might be necessary before tickets could be delivered to motorists via the mail.

But the biggest roadblock, experts say, may be legal. As they have in other parts of the country, some residents and civil liberty groups may conjure Orwellian images of “Big Brother,” saying the cameras infringe on the privacy of motorists.

“Speaking for myself, the Big Brother aspect of it is a little disturbing,” said Bill Ward, a leader of Drivers for Highway Safety, a small Orange County-based group opposed to car-pool lanes. “I think they’ll have some problems getting it to stand up in court . . . I just don’t see this going very far.”

Transportation officials, however, insist that the benefits of such an approach would far outweigh the risks.

“I think those kinds of arguments, the Big Brother thing, can be overcome and has to be overcome,” said Steve Albert, a Texas-based expert on the use of video cameras for monitoring traffic. “It (currently) just takes too many man-hours to enforce these facilities. It’s too costly. Like every other technological advancement, it will come in time.”

Most authorities in California estimate it could be as long as five years before the video cameras could become a fixture along car-pool lanes in the state. A host of difficulties must first be addressed.

Initial tests, which are being conducted as part of a larger study of car-pool enforcement, have been hampered by the tedious task of positioning cameras just right so they can peer down into a car to spot the less-obvious passenger--a baby on board or someone lying down on the back seat. Tinted windows, sun glare, morning mist on the windshield and other environmental factors could also obscure the camera’s view.

Assuming those sorts of troubles can be ironed out, state authorities would still have to deal with the problem of angry motorists, who might reject the idea of receiving a ticket through the mail. Laws would probably have to be adjusted so the burden of a ticket falls on the owner of a vehicle instead of the driver, a regulation that might irk any parent whose teen-ager got caught by the camera driving solo down the car-pool lane in the family car.

Even the issue of who monitors the cameras and videotape could prove vexing. Though some cities have hired outside firms to pluck violators from the pictures and search the records for vehicle owners, California authorities envision a system that would probably employ sworn peace officers to determine who has broken the law.

Whatever is decided, the concept promises to engender a fair amount of debate. Surveys conducted as part of the car-pool violation study found motorists “equally divided” over camera-patrolled car-pool lanes, according to John Billheimer, vice president of Systan Inc., a Los Altos-based transportation planning firm doing the study for Caltrans.

Despite that reaction, the concept has been in use for years in other parts of the world. West Germany has had an active “photo-radar” program for about two decades, and the technique is used to nab speeders elsewhere in Europe, Asia and South America.

Photo-radar, which combines still photographs with radar to determine a motorist’s speed, has only recently made an appearance in the United States. Although some residents quickly dubbed it “robocop,” the technique has been used successfully in Paradise Valley, Ariz., since 1987. Pasadena began issuing citations with the same Swiss-made device in June, 1988.

Since then, more than 14,000 speeding tickets have been issued in Pasadena for motorists caught by the photo-radar, according to Sgt. Gene Gray of the Pasadena police. Nearly 300 people fought their tickets, but the city prevailed in 90% of those cases, he said.

Still, there have been problems. Pasadena recently tried enlisting a similar device that would photograph motorists who run red lights, but the machine proved largely ineffective. The same device was installed at several intersections in New York that have been plagued with accidents involving cars hitting pedestrians.

Then there are the troubles in Texas. A small suburban community outside Houston adopted photo-radar a few years ago, but discontinued use of the device after about six months. Though the official excuses were legal problems and public discontent, transportation planners say privately that it had more to do with sex, lies and photographs.

As the story goes, a prominent Texas politician was caught by the machine speeding along in his car with a woman who was not his wife. When the photograph was routinely mailed to his house along with a ticket, the politician’s spouse caught a glimpse and hit the roof. The official then worked behind the scenes to get the plug pulled on the photo-radar.

Despite such potential pitfalls, the concept is being eyed for Washington, D.C. Officials with the Virginia State Police are investigating the use of photo-radar or video cameras to ticket speeders along the 60 miles of freeway circling the capital.

In California, authorities are focusing for now on using such high-tech ploys simply to uphold the law of the car-pool lane. While state officials are quick to emphasize that the concept is still in the raw testing stages, they have a hard time hiding their optimism.

“As far as the safety issues, I think it could be a great tool,” said Scott McGowen, an assistant transportation engineer with Caltrans in Sacramento. “We’ll have to look into the costs some more, and maintenance of such a system. But this could help with many problems we have now, like the way these traffic stops disrupt the flow in other lanes.”

One day last week, McGowen and other state officials huddled with technological experts atop an overpass on the Costa Mesa Freeway to watch a demonstration of the videotape system at work.

Hunkered in a van crammed with TV screens, Ken Taylor of ADT Inc., a Woodland Hills firm that designs and builds video systems for everything from aircraft simulators to hospitals, squinted at the pictures being fed by three cameras. One screen showed cars roaring head-on down the freeway, another displayed license plates of passing vehicles in the car-pool lane and a third showed a side view of cars roaring by.

“We’ve tried all types of cameras, all sorts of angles,” Taylor said.

The cameras in use on this day, he noted, were not the micro-sized models that may come in handy along tight stretches of highway. And these cameras and videotape machines were not even the best. Such super-sophisticated devices, which provide a more detailed picture, cost about $30,000 for just a videotape recorder alone, compared to $6,000 for the one in use Thursday, Taylor said.

When a visitor pointed to an approaching car that seemed to have just a single occupant, Taylor shifted in his seat, ready for action. His fingers danced across the controls of the videotape machine after the car whizzed by, rewinding the film until a side view of the car stood frozen on the screen.

“Ah ha!” Taylor chirped, pointing to the screen. “You think that’s a violator? Look at that baby in the back seat.”

Those are just the sorts of results transportation officials like to see.

“I think we’re in the new age,” said McGowen of Caltrans. “Anything we can look at that’s high tech, we have to. This may not be the way to go, but we have to explore everything.”