By RICK BELL -- Calgary Sun  

Break out the mini violins. It's now official. Big Brother and his radar love is on the skids. And it took Ed Stelmach, this province's road king, a good old common-sense Ukrainian farm boy, to put the brakes on this shameless plundering of the public. Wham! Come April Fool's Day next year, no more photo radar on the Deerfoot. Bam! The same applies to Stoney Trail. Slam! The police will have to post signs anywhere the cameras are clicking. Shazam! Photo radar will only be in spots where speed has caused accidents and in places like school zones and playground zones. No one is shedding a tear over this wrist slap. The cops got exactly what was coming to them.

Let's look at the history.

The province doesn't have photo radar on the highways. Calgary brought it in because the authorities in this town said it would help them cut down on speeding. But give them an inch and they'll take a mile. So it was with photo radar. You see, the bosses of this city were never all that interested in speeding. No, they found the bend in the road, the slope of the hill, the spot where the speed limit changes quickly, the patch of open highway and the bridge to hide behind. 

Click! Click! Click! The cameras snapped and the cash registers opened. Not because there was more or less speeding than in all the places around the world without photo radar. But it was a foolproof scam, a minimum of effort, a maximum of profit. 

The cops could take pictures. People would get their ticket a few weeks later. They would huff and puff, they would not remember a thing about it, but they would not fight the charge.

Photo radar tickets carry no demerits so they aren't much of a deterrent. You don't get marks against your licence. The cheque would be in the mail and no one's the wiser.

Oh, the badge carriers will bluster and baffle. The cop brass still attempt, without a smirk, to tell us photo radar is only used where it's needed. But nobody believes it.

The peeking Polaroids generate dough. Millions. The cops want the cash, need the cash, they have grown oh-so-very fond of the cash. And the number of tickets goes up.

If photo radar worked, and it was a deterrent, there'd be less and less tickets sent out, wouldn't there?

But there are more.
My pal Charlie Pester of Pointts, this city's most famed ticket-fighter and an ex-cop, has fought 10,000 traffic tickets for his clients. "When they brought it in, they did it under the guise that photo radar would do all these great things. "But it didn't decrease speeding. Numbers are actually going up. And what does the camera really do?  "If you go over the limit and kill somebody a block down the road after you get your picture taken, photo radar really does squat. "But for money? On the Deerfoot, you can bang off 50, 60, 100 or more tickets in an hour."

Exactly.
And so I leave you, with coffee still in the cup and the remarkable rhetorical ruminations on photo radar by my all-time favourite police chief, Christine Silverberg. "One of the things I think we're very good at is shown through the level of analysis of data, the significant data of our impact through a multi-pronged strategy of enforcement, education and engineering."

Huh.