Consider this scenario: It’s 1:00 a.m. and you’re driving back home from a long night of studying or working, and all you want to do is go home and sleep. You reach an intersection where you need to turn right. As you come up to the intersection, the light turns red, and since it’s far from rush hour, there is no incoming traffic. You decide to slow down and check for other cars, before turning — without coming to a complete stop. Flash! A couple weeks later, you receive a ticket in the mail, which says that you ran a red-light and that you could do nothing about it, just pay the $158 fine and move on since it would cost a lot more to fight it.
How would you feel in this scenario? In most areas, red-light cameras do not reduce the amount of accidents that occur at an intersection. Although most government-funded reports will claim otherwise, independent studies show that, although cameras tend to reduce right angle collisions, they increase the number of rear-end collisions. In many cases, these numbers end up balancing each other out.
David Goldstein, a reporter for independent TV station KCAL in Los Angeles, uncovered the truth about the city’s red-light cameras. City officials said that the cameras reduced accidents by 34 percent. When Goldstein asked the Los Angeles Police Department for the actual numbers sheet, they refused and said that local television stations should be advocating the use of the cameras for public safety.
Goldstein paid $500 to file a public records request. It showed that after installing 32 cameras, 20 of them showed an increase of accidents, three remained the same and nine decreased the amount of accidents, over a six-month period.
Sherman Ellison, a Los Angeles- based attorney, told the National Motorists Association that red-light cameras heighten drivers’ anxieties. “People see the light flash and they slam on their brakes. That’s just human nature. As a result, more accidents, more rear end accidents.”
In 2005, the Federal Highway Administration conducted a study across seven different jurisdictions in the U.S. “to estimate the crash and associated economic effects of RLC systems”. Their final numbers revealed that after camera systems were installed, right angle crashes were reduced from 1,542 to 1,163, for a total of 379 less right angle crashes within six months. However, the study also revealed that rear-end crashes increased from 2,521 to 2,896, for a total of 374 more rear-end crashes. Added together, there was a total of five less accidents. Is that really worth the cost that goes into the systems?
The fact that this study revealed that the red-light cameras only accounted for five less accidents is ridiculous. The red-light cameras that governments are installing are being used to increase revenue, through citation payments, rather than increase public safety.
Every time a government decides to install these cameras, they do so with a private company that is responsible for the installation and the maintenance of the systems. The goal of these private companies is the same as any other business: to make as much money as possible.
As of September 2011, 693 local governments actively use red-light cameras. Each contract is different between the camera vendor and the local municipality. Some contracts have a clause that states the government and the vendor will split all profits 50-50; some are “cost-neutral”, meaning that the vendor won’t get paid unless they met a quota for a certain amount of citations handed out.
Some companies have contracts regulating the amount of citations that governments need to issue in order to raise the amount of revenue. For example, there are camera vendors who say that if the city’s traffic engineers make the yellow lights longer, then the government will be fined for reducing the amount of possible citations.
In Maryland’s Anne Arundel County, the red-light camera program that has been using five cameras over the course of five years has raised a total ticket revenue of $2.85 million and has resulted in an increase of accidents.
Can someone please tell me again how exactly red-light cameras make it safer to be on the road?
