At first I thought the two tickets were on the same trip, but I hadn't noticed that the dates were different. It turns out they were at nearly the same time on two consecutive days, so it looked like it was two tickets on the same trip, just a few minutes apart, but in actuality the second one came 24 hours and a few minutes later. Still though, had we known about the first offense, the reminder would have worked, we would have been more attentive to speed and not gotten the second ticket. After all, they're claiming to do this for safety reasons and to get people to be more attentive to these things, the first one would have done the job. I am not too optimistic that they'll see it my way, but I plan to try anyway. $250 is a lot of money but that's nothing compared to what insurance hikes can cost.

It's still not clear to me whether the insurance companies have access to these files. The city says "No record of this violation will be sent to your insurance company or the division of motor vehicles." Most people assume that means the insurance company can't find out. But I don't see that. What I see is that they don't report it to the insurance company. Nowhere do they actually claim that the insurance company can't get the info by some other means. As the city calls it a "nusiance ordinance violation" technically it's not a conviction of a traffic crime, so maybe the insurance companies can't call it a conviction. Though it's then just a matter of time before they redefine what it takes to get an insurance hike, all they have to do is decide that vehicle-related nuisance violation constitute dangerous driving habits, and there we go.

As for the entrapment defense, it won't be that easy. The city, on their web site does mention that they enforce speed with the cameras. However, in all the news, including TV and Newspaper, they refer to them almost exclusively as "red light cameras". Since that was their original intent that's how they got named. Then the city, without much fanfare, added the speed capability and nobody updated the terminology. That's what I figure anyway. I searched the newspaper database and a few articles mention speed enforcement, though they still call them by the same "red light" name in every article I found. Perhaps I could have known, but not by watching or reading the news, I would have had to search the city web page to know it. And that's really why I posted it here, so that people might find out now the easy way, instead of the hard way like I did.