You know those ubiquitous red-light cameras in DC? Well, they’re good at two things: 1) they turn a hell of a profit, and 2) they erode our civil liberties (Hello? Fourth Amendment?). But despite what the DC gubment says, they absoultely do not prevent accidents.
WaPo:
The District’s red-light cameras have generated more than 500,000 violations and $32 million in fines over the past six years. City officials credit them with making busy roads safer.
But a Washington Post analysis of crash statistics shows that the number of accidents has gone up at intersections with the cameras. The increase is the same or worse than at traffic signals without the devices.
Three outside traffic specialists independently reviewed the data and said they were surprised by the results. Their conclusion: The cameras do not appear to be making any difference in preventing injuries or collisions.“The data are very clear,” said Dick Raub, a traffic consultant and a former senior researcher at Northwestern University’s Center for Public Safety. “They are not performing any better than intersections without cameras.”
(Indignant emphasis mine.)
4 replies on “DC’s Red-Light Cash Cows”
Both Melbourne and Sydney have run into problems in recent years with speed cameras and have periodically had to suspend enforcement upon the detection of faulty cameras. Some links to press articles are below. This kind of thing can’t be tolerated, and even one faulty camera appears to bring the entire system into doubt.
Booze busts (and increasingly drug busts) are rather common here – one often finds “booze buses” on the side of the road stopping people at random and testing them (Lonely Planet Australia warns tourists of this practice). Invasion of privacy? Perhaps, but at the same time, the culture of drinking and driving here is way different than the states. I know some hard-drinking blokes, but none of them mess around when it comes to driving. The likelihood of getting caught is higher, the thresholds lower, and the penalties stricter. Perhaps part of the reason why Australian cities are so “liveable”.
A couple of other comments in response to Newley’s reply. Do cameras make roads safer? I’d say answering this is very difficult – so I wouldn’t jump to any conclusions one way or another. I’m fairly confident that if you gave me an afternoon with the DC data, I could come up with a different (but not necessarily valid) answer. But there’s plenty of literature out there regarding how people respond to risk – almost invariably, people respond to the likelihood of getting caught, not the size of the penalty (e.g., the death penalty is a lousy deterrent of crime). Cameras clearly modify behavior and they pay for themselves, so I’d argue there’s got to be some benefits there even if they can’t be readily detected.
Indeed, such cameras can capture much more information than just whether an offense has been committed. In response to this I can only say the following: A) Once again, your passengers are not a private matter, unless they’re in your trunk, and B) the collection of such information in and of itself doesn’t violate constitutional rights per se, but it does create the potential for ancillary uses of that information which probably should give us pause. Alan Dershowitz did an interview for an Australian news show the other night – he commented that issues of technology, privacy, and information ownership are likely to be major issues for the next generation of Supreme Court justices. With the latest appointments, we probably have even more cause for concern.
Sydney
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,16204811-1242,00.html
Melbourne
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/11/12/1068329631374.html
and
http://www.thecouriermail.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,11557021%5e1702,00.html
Australian Rules Beat Down. I love it! Newls, you just got blog-slapped from halfway around the world. Ouch. Forget the red lights, let’s get a camera on this action. BP: would love to know more about the Melbourne scandal. Anything to do with a ‘booze bust’? Newley and his 4th Amendment would really take umbrage to those. A few years back when driving the family to catch a flight in Brisbane, my father got nabbed by a automated radar machine. He wasn’t happy. Thank goodness for the VB’s.
Ben: I agree that people shouldn’t run red lights. It’s dangerous. And Washington, DC — or any other city — ought to enforce traffic laws and look out for public safety. But my main objection, along fourth amendment lines, is that these cameras capture (and store) not just license plate numbers, but images of cars’ occupants as well as what of time day/night they’re traveling. Meter maids don’t do that. Not even cops do that when they pull someone over (although their in-car cameras might). Yes, people don’t run red lights as much as they used to in DC. But so what? Our roads are actually no safer for it, judging by the recent statistics. (One more thing: there have been several documented cases of traffic light technicians in municipalities around the country rigging traffic lights so that their yellow lights are displayed for shorter periods of time — so that more people are caught running red lights and revnue is increased. That’s just plain wrong.) But, again, I hear you: a law enforcement tool should be judged on its efficiency. No doubt traffic cameras are efficient, and they make a lot of money (which is fine — good, even), but they do not make our roads safer.
Fourth Amendment? Rubbish. An individual driving in his or her car on a public road through a public intersection has no expectation of privacy. No one raises constitutional objections when a meter maid slaps a ticket on his car. The appropriateness of the enforcement method should be judged based upon its merits (i.e., should people who run red lights be penalized) not the efficiency of the enforcement tool. In other words, I don’t see why we’re comfortable with cops in patrol cars pulling over offenders, but balk when the same enforcement action is outsourced to a machine. What with all the concern for racial profiling, etc., I think people would be happy that some aspects of law enforcement are indiscriminate. Provided the system is robust (which, granted, is problematic at times – Melbourne recently had a scandal along these lines), I personally find traffic cameras to be a clever means of addressing a profund failure of policy (i.e., the fact that traditional enforcement measures are woefully inadequate to enforce traffic laws). And even if the accident statistics don’t reflect improvement, the number of individuals running red lights in the district has plummeted since the introduction of cameras. The city certainly makes considerable money off this practice, but so what ? If one uses that as an argument against such systems, then one is effectively arguing that law enforcement should be spotty, half-assed, and ineffectual (i.e., the system is unfair because it works?!?!). If people didn’t run red lights, the city wouldn’t get a dime. People know the consequences of their actions and they have a right to choose – very democratic, I’d say. If we reject that then we just slide further into the “don’t blame me” mentality that is making a mess of our society.