One dark and freakishly stormy night several years ago in San Diego, my car stalled at a flooded intersection. As I pushed the car out of the intersection, lightning was going off all around like flash bulbs. I felt lucky to be able to restart the engine and drive safely home.
Recently, the State of California sent me my tax refund, and curiously, some $328 had been deducted from it. After quite a bit of research, I found the missing amount was courtesy of a traffic court in San Diego, which asserted that I had an unpaid ticket from years earlier. I contend I was never notified of it and unaware of committing a violation. But it apparently stemmed from that freak thunderstorm. To condense a longer story: one of those flashes apparently was a camera’s flash — from a red light camera.
Why this came up so much later, I’ll never know. But there was no contesting the issue, even though I was never shown the photographic “proof” upon which the citation was based. So much for due process. And that’s enough of a reason for me to think that red light cameras are a scam.
Call me sour grapes, but I’m know I’m not alone.
In 2001, a San Diego judge threw out 292 red-light tickets in one celebrated case. Judge Ronald Styn found that the city had given too much law enforcement authority to an outside company, Lockheed Martin IMS, which was hired to operate the cameras:
Arthur F. Tait III, part of a legal team that represented 292 drivers, argued that the arrangement, in which the contractor received $70 from each $271 fine, was creating an incentive for the company to ‘’prosecute for profit.'’
‘’The contractor was able to charge innocent people with criminal conduct to raise revenue,'’ Mr. Tait said.
Hugh Burns, a spokesman for Lockheed Martin, said that the system in San Diego had been operated according to police instructions.
The San Diego judge also found that the company installing the red light cameras had tinkered with (by shortening) the duration of the yellow lights, to make them impossibly quick, so more people would be caught running the red; more money for the camera operator and the municipality.
But after all that, San Diego quickly reinstated its red light cameras and transferred the contract to run them to Affiliated Computer Services, which, as of 2005, was the
largest red-light camera service provider in the country.
Recently, The Los Angeles Times reported that red light cameras don’t even work as intended — up to 80 percent of the time. The reason? The cameras tend to catch people instead who are turning right on red:
“I’ve never . . . seen any studies that suggest red light cameras would be a good safety intervention to reduce right-turning accidents,” said Mark Burkey, a researcher at North Carolina A&T State University who has studied photo enforcement collision patterns.
Some cities with photo enforcement opt not to target right turns. Others limit camera use for those citations.
“We’re kind of very leery about right turns. . . . They’re not really unsafe per se,” said Pasadena’s senior traffic engineer, Norman Baculinao. Only one of that city’s seven camera-equipped intersection approaches is set up to monitor right-turn violations, he said.
“This is intended to be a traffic safety program. People who make right turns generally are going at a low speed,” and resulting accidents tend to be a “sideswipe at most,” he said.
Just how many things wrong with it does an idea have to be before it is considered discredited?
Perhaps a better way to reduce red light running lies in improving the design of the intersection. Studies have shown that extending the duration of the yellow light by just two seconds has significantly decreased the number of red light violations. In Dallas, longer yellows and signs warning motorists of red light cameras have helped reduce the violations so dramatically that the cameras are no longer generating the revenue needed to keep them in operation.
Proponents of red light cameras can always cite figures about how red light cameras have reduced fatalities by some percentage or other. In 2005, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said that 1,000 people are killed each year in red-light violations. But there are also studies that suggest accident rates actually increase at intersections with red-light cameras, especially the rear-end collision variety, as people jam on their brakes to make abrupt stops.
According to Pat Bedard, editor at large for Car and Driver, in his September 2002 column:
In Charlotte, North Carolina, station WBTV had this to say, “Three years, 125,000 tickets, and $6 million in fines later, the number of accidents at intersections in Charlotte has gone down less than one percent. And the number of rear-end accidents, which are much more common, has gone up 15 percent.”
In Greensboro, the News & Record reports, “There has not been a drop in the number of accidents caused by red-light violations citywide since the first cameras were installed in February 2001. There were 95 such accidents in Greensboro in 2001, the same number as 2000. And at the 18 intersections with cameras, the number of wrecks cause by red-light running has doubled.”
If safety is really the issue, fix the lights first. But in fixing the yellow lights, nobody makes any money. So, instead, the expensive red light systems are installed — along with a bureaucracy to maintain and prosecute them.
Is the goal to fix the danger of red light running, or merely photograph it?
Related:
Your City Needs You to Blow Through Red Lights
Lights, Camera, Traffic Ticket
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