L.A. Shouldn't Mail a $293 Bus-Lane Ticket Until Someone Watches the Whole Video

Metro says an LADOT officer checks camera evidence before tickets go out. One couple's city video stops before their car turns.

Los Angeles shouldn't mail anyone a $293 bus-lane ticket until somebody at the city has watched the camera's video all the way to the end. A clip that stops before the driver's story does is a guess with a fine attached.

Chris Orsi and Sarah Haruko are fighting one of those tickets, Fox 11 reported Thursday. On Sept. 24 they were driving east on Sixth Street downtown, headed for a friend's garage by Spring Street. The couple say getting into it meant pulling into the bus lane for a right turn. Haruko told the station they paused to let people on foot get past the entrance and to wait on the garage door, then turned in as a bus went by on their left.

That Metro bus had a camera aboard, and it filmed their Kia. About a week later, a citation arrived by mail. In the city's own video, the bus rolls past and the clip runs out before the Kia turns, Fox 11 reported. Their own dashcam, the couple says, catches what the city's clip leaves out: within seconds of the bus clearing, the Kia swings into the garage.

I can't tell you whether waiting for pedestrians counts as parking in a bus lane, and their ticket may well survive the appeal. That's my point. The city can't honestly decide either, not from a clip that ends right before the answer.

Metro says that's what the human is for. A traffic officer from LADOT looks over the footage before any citation is mailed, Metro told Fox 11, and the agency's program page says the cameras send each violation to the city for review. If that review happened here, it signed off on a clip that stops short of the turn.

The volume is why that doesn't reassure me. LADOT counted 115,890 citations in 2025 and $19,603,937 in gross revenue, Streetsblog Los Angeles reported from a department memo, and city ticketing didn't start until Feb. 17 that year. That averages out to about 360 tickets a day. That's a lot of footage for anyone to watch closely.

Now look at what a driver who thinks the camera got it wrong has to do. Under LADOT's contest rules, the driver has 21 days from the citation to request an initial review, and LADOT runs it. That's the same department that mailed the ticket. It decides whether there's "sufficient proof" the violation didn't happen, based on what the driver hands over.

Lose that round, and an administrative hearing requires paying the full fine first, unless the driver qualifies as very low-income. A win brings a refund within 30 days. After that comes Superior Court, with a filing fee for each citation. Orsi and Haruko told Fox 11 they filed their contest about five weeks earlier, and that they've been told a ruling could be six to eight months away.

"I feel like they're casting a wide net with their policies, and we all got caught in it, and we have to fend for ourselves," Orsi told the station. The net keeps growing. The April memo laid out plans to put cameras on about 300 more Metro buses, on top of the 100 already equipped, and on the city's DASH buses.

Bus lanes only work if drivers believe they'll pay for blocking them, and careful review costs money. I'm for the lanes, and for the fines when they're earned. But nobody is asking the city to build something new. Metro says the reviewer already exists, and a program that grossed $19.6 million in a partial year can afford one who keeps watching until the car actually does something.

Haruko put the fix in one line to Fox 11: "Involve a human that can look at the whole context of the situation." Metro says the city already has that human. So the rule should be simple: if the video ends before the driver finishes what they were doing, the ticket doesn't go in the mail.

Source: foxla.com, retrieved November 13, 2026. Other sources: metro.net, la.streetsblog.org, ladotparking.org.