What You Need to Know About Stop Light Camera Tickets

Cameras can be found on traffic lights at intersections all across the Kansas City and St. Louis Metro areas.  Whether you live in Missouri or Kansas, or even a myriad of other neighboring states such as Iowa or Illinois, you need to know if you get one of those tickets in the mail, what you should do.  Is it a moving violation?  How many points?  Can I get out of it?  Does the answer change if I am licensed in Missouri or Kansas?

If you have already been issued a ticket from a Missouri red light camera, but have not yet paid it, we are telling our clients to NOT pay them as of this moment, as the Missouri Court of Appeals has judged the tickets to be unconstitutional as they are currently written.  The cities are scrambling to find a way to satisfy the Court and rewriting their ordinances as millions of dollars are at stake.  At the moment of this writing, they have not figured it out.  It is hard to imagine that they will not figure out some way to get around the U.S and Missouri Constitutions with so such a huge amount of revenue riding on the decision.  We will keep you posted on the latest information.  Potential changes may include making it moving violation (with points), which it hasn't been up to now, and secondly, having the ticket go to the driver of the vehicle instead of the owner.  Both of these are big hurdles to overcome in terms of technology and manpower.

If you are a Kansas driver, you do not need to worry about the cameras on the stoplights as they are not set up to send tickets to drivers and have not yet been approved by the Kansas Legislature.  They do take video, however, and can be subpoenaed for purposes of trying to prove civil liability for car accidents, and are particularly useful for purposes of traffic engineering and traffic flow.