Man oh man, it’s a good time to live in Rochester. In the event that the rise in Internet access costs forces you out of the house and into the real world more often, now you can look forward to lining the city coffers via more tickets for running red lights.

Rochester has announced plans to install red-light cameras around the city in the name of safety. What they don’t tell you though, is that this has way more to do with revenue generation than safety. In fact, not only do studies support that simply increasing the yellow light time and the time of all-red lights in intersections is a more effective deterrent of accidents, many communities have been flagged as actually decreasing yellow light time in an effort to increase violations and hence revenue from their red-light cameras.

Maybe what’s most appalling about both the Road Runner rate change and the red-light camera proposal is that the local newspaper is running articles that basically regurgitate the company/government spewed blather. In the Road Runner case, they did opt to publish some dissenting opinions from readers who posted to their website, but where is the other side of this story? Where is the actual investigative reporting? Isn’t that why newspapers are saying that the public still needs them? Because they are the sirens of objective analysis? Because without them we will not get both sides of the story? The claim is that we can’t reasonably leave this job to amateur bloggers as they are incapable. So please, feel free to show us how incapable we are.