Hopefully, many of those who have supported this idiotic idea will be the first to get the postcards. Based on people I have talked to about this, probably 90% of our fellow citizens will learn about the cameras when they get their first card in the mail.

I still wonder if drivers will be able to pull out across an intersection after the light has changed with any more confidence that they will not be T-boned because of the protection provided by the cameras. As for me, I will continue my usual procedure of checking to see if the intersection has cleared before I pull out.

Will the photos be available to litigators in accidents? Will the photos be available to the public to see which ones were thrown out, like perhaps those of influential public figures and their friends and relatives?

How will accountability of the funds be handled? Will the expenditures be clearly shown to improve the safety of the intersections, or will they be used for new office carpeting?

In the news in the past week was a small town north of Nashville that got around 30% of its revenue from tickets. If I recall the article correctly, it had also been placed on AAA's list of most stringent enforcement areas in the whole country.

The real underlying issue is the use (or abuse) of law enforcement as a means of generating revenue for local districts. This process has been going on in Europe for some time. The result is that the public has learned to disrespect most highway regulations such as speed limits, parking restrictions etc. because they believe that many of those regulations have been crafted not to improve road safety but simply to generate revenues. In parts of North West Germany a loophole in the highway regulations many years ago gave local districts the ability to introduce speed limits on sections of autobahn that passed through their territory. The rest of the autobahn would have no speed limits, but the local district would put in a 130 km/h limit and then hang speed cameras under bridges to catch offenders and give them a choking fit when they opened their mail at breakfast. I lived in Brussels at the time and the locals actually drew the locations of the speed zones on the map for me when I went on a weekend trip to Koln and Dusseldorf -they lived in another country 200 miles away but everybody knew all about it and they clearly regarded it as a dysfunctional joke.

We should not conflate law enforcement with creating revenues. The law should be inviolate and not influenced by financial considerations (and yes, I am aware of now stunningly naive I may sound. I plead guilty by reason of idealism).

In the end, this will be a big embarrassment and a testimonial not only to their cynicism, but to the incompetence of the decision makers as well.

For what it's worth, on two occasions recently I have come within inches of plowing into the back end of cars whose drivers slammed the brakes on at the Cedar Bluff and Peters Road intersection the instant the light turned yellow. They are spooked already.