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Denver Must Prove Red-Light Cameras Improve Safety
An anonymous reader writes "An audit of accidents at Denver intersections where red light cameras were installed versus increasing the length of the yellow light shows little difference in the results. In a case of putting the public ahead of the corporation, the Denver auditor is recommending canceling the red light camera program unless the city can prove a public-safety benefit." I hope that private citizens offering analysis or recommendations are treated fairly.
Notice how no one went to jail for any of that. It's almost as if corruption were permitted in the US.
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Folks would brake suddenly when they saw the camera causing the vehicle behind them to rear-end them.
Nothing the driver in front of you does should result in you crashing into him. That is why there is a two second rule for following, and laws against tailgating. Ive had someone yell at me because they hit me when I slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting a line of cars. Guess what, she lost that battle when they admitted I was in front of them, and she admitted that she only had half a second to respond.
You should never be so close to the car in front of you that this happens. If you are, you absolutely are at fault.
When it comes to safety, we should never play the blame game. It does not matter who is at fault, what matters is people being safe. The fact is that we need to do what we can to ensure safety. People will do what people always do -- that is they will do stuipd and dangerous things. I work in industrial automation designing machines. Whenever we design something, we do our best to think of every stuipd thing that the machine operator will try to do. We look at ways they might try to reach into a machine to grab a part, or places where they may try to get too close to a moving machine and every other idiotic thing they try to do.. Then we try to come up with some way to ensure that they can't do those things or at least that the machine will shut off if they do. Yes, it is stupid for them to do these things, yes it may be their "fault" if they get injured, but the fact is that people do these things anyways and we have a responsibility to try and ensure that they keep safe. I never want to see anyone get injured on a machine that I designed. This situation with traffic cameras is no different. People should not be following the car in front of them too closely, but they do. If using cameras causes people to rear end eachother more often (regardless of who is at fault), then we should not be using them.
If braking didn't involve inertia and human reaction time, you'd be right. A light needs to be yellow long enough for the driver to see it, decide if they can safely stop before entering the intersection, and then do so. If the yellow is shorter than that, even a perfect driver will inevitably "run the red" from time to time. Shorten it enough and even an automated driver with perfect reaction would run the light from time to time based solely on statistics and the laws of physics.
Consider a 1 microsecond yellow and it flickers when you are 1 foot from the line doing 45 MPH.
This is well understood by traffic engineers and so there are guidelines for the minimum safe length of a yellow. Cities with red light cameras almost always end up with yellows shorter than that.