I guess this is just one more reason not to loan your car to crazy UncleAl for a spin around East Brunswick. Last week, East Brunswick police announced that a camera has been installed at the intersection of Route 18 and Tices Lane to catch motorists who run the red light there.
Right now, there’s a 30-day warning period during which scofflaws will get a letter telling them they’ve been busted, and that they’ll get an $85 ticket if they are caught doing it after the grace period is over. After the warning phase, the ticket will be issued to the registered owner of vehicles that “proceed” against the red light, whether or not he or she was driving at the time of the infraction. Therefore, if you loan the minivan to Uncle Al to make a bagel run and he gets a ticket (which gets lost in the mail, or you forget to pay), you could theoretically wind up losing your own driver’s license.
Ain’t justice grand? I’m not saying increased traffic enforcement on Route 18 is a bad idea. It’s just that I have a few questions.
First, why have a warning period? Running a red light is either illegal, or it’s not, and it seems a little silly to go to all the trouble of sending red light runners a message telling them they’ve got 30 days to knock it off.
Second, it might not hurt to be a little more specific about what constitutes a violation, since simply telling someone they can get an $85 ticket if they “proceed” against a red light probably isn’t giving them enough information. What does that mean, anyway? Does it mean they’ll get a ticket if they enter the intersection after the yellow comes on and try to get through before it turns red? If that’s what it means, why not say so in plain language?
And finally, are they going to send a photograph of the violation, like they do on the Turnpike and the Garden State? And if so, how much is that photograph going to show? If it just shows the license plate, that’s one thing. But if it shows more, like who is driving in the vehicle and who is a passenger, that’s another kettle of fish. If a ticket comes in the mail showing you running a red light on Route 18 at a time when you were supposed to be in Sea Bright listening to Aunt Sadie sing in the church choir, and it shows your passenger is not your wife, but some sweet thing wearing a Hooters T-shirt (the restaurant is right down the road, after all), an $85 traffic ticket might be the least of your worries.
Back when I was the editor of a daily newspaper, we were always worried about bloopers, typos and other dumb stuff getting into the paper. But we were particularly worried about the sports pages, because sports writers often filed their stories after late games when the copy editors were tired and in a hurry to put the paper to bed.
That’s how I woke up one morning to find the lead story on the front page of the sports section that opened with this eye-popping sentence, “With the power of a charging breast, the Freeport Pretzels (that was the name of the high school team, no joke) surged to an early lead in the championship game against…”
That was almost as good as the supermarket ad that had run recently offering “barbecued children” for 49 cents a pound, but that sort of gaffe was more common on the sports pages (the same writer had recently described a shifting wind pattern that fouled a point-after kick as an “alternating fluid flow,” so everybody knew he needed watching). Not much has improved in the intervening years, and I still see more errors in sports sections than in most other parts of the paper.
But there may be a revolutionary change in the works. According to a story I read recently on the NPR website, there’s a new computer software program in development where you put in data, it processes that data and spits out a story.
Apparently, it can eventually be used to write any kind of newspaper story, but right now it’s most advanced when it comes to writing sports.
In fact, in a recent test by the sports website Deadspin, an editor took the salient facts from a particularly badly written sports story, fed them into the computer, let the software work its magic, and the result was not only a story everyone agreed was a marked improvement (and one that could run in almost any newspaper), but the headline was better as well.
I’m sure cost-cutting newspaper publishers around the globe are watching the evolution of this news-writing software with interest. But it gives guys like me with ink in their veins a case of the heebie-jeebies, since the knowledge that reporter robots will likely eventually replace us is not exactly comforting. And nobody at the newspaper will be safe, even editorial writers and columnists (regular readers might remember that last year I wrote about a program that writes Dave Barry-styled humor columns based on specific data the user types in, and those computer software-generated columns were funny).
But here’s my question: If reporters are replaced by robots, who will people call to complain about being misquoted or taken out of context? Or about having a liberal bias?
My short nugget in last week’s column about squirrels in the attic of my garage generated plenty of reader response, including one guy who counseled me to buy a shotgun. But my favorite was from Karen, who said she’d had luck by placing a boom box in her attic, and playing it loud for an hour. “The critters left and did not return,” she wrote.
That sounds good, and I’ll give it a try (Heads up, neighbors!). The only question now is the choice of music. Do you think “Muskrat Love” by the Captain and Tennille would get their attention?
Gregory Bean is the former executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers. You can reach him at [email protected].