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San Diego Drops Red-Light Cameras
gannebraemorr writes "U-T San Diego reports that the city has become 'the latest in a cadre of California cities turning their backs on red-light cameras — aloof intersection sentries that have prompted $490 tickets to be mailed to 20,000 motorists per year' there. 'Mayor Bob Filner announced his decision to take down the city's 21 cameras at a news conference set at the most prolific intersection for the tickets, North Harbor Drive and West Grape Street, near San Diego International Airport. A crew went to work immediately taking down "photo enforced" signs throughout the city. "Seems to me that such a program can only be justified if there are demonstrable facts that prove that they raise the safety awareness and decrease accidents in our city," Filner said of the cameras. "The data, in fact, does not really prove it."' I have to say I'm a bit surprised that my city is voluntarily shedding potentially $9.8M in revenue after objectively evaluating a program. I wonder how much a system would cost that could switch my light from green to red if it detected a vehicle approaching from a red-lit direction at dangerous speeds. Can you think of an other alternative uses for these cameras?"
" I wonder how much a system would cost that could switch my light from green to red if it detected a vehicle approaching from a red-lit direction at dangerous speeds. Can you think of an other alternative uses for these cameras?"
Hey, I will go for that and just keep my pedal to the metal...unless you do the same and then we are in deep too doo.
Not sure where the 9.8 Million figure came from, the actual story says they took in 1.2 Million in 2011. But after paying out to the camera company and the cost of for cops (who in today's whacky world generally make low 6 figures), the city only cleared 200,000$
My guess is that the only people that actually "make out" are the camera companies.
The real question is: Do red light cameras discourage running reds?
I don't know.
I've never got a "red light camera" ticket, because I don't run red lights, or speed through school zones.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
wonder how much a system would cost that could switch my light from green to red if it detected a vehicle approaching from a red-lit direction at dangerous speeds. Can you think of an other alternative uses for these cameras?"
Such a proposed system would quicly train motorists to rush red lights even more than they already do, because they could supposedly depend on the system stopping motorists coming the other way. Problem is, if a red light isn't stopping a guy running a red light in one diection, what's going to stop a like minded driver in the other direction?
The cost wold probably be not a lot more than about 1000 deaths a year, based on http://abcnews.go.com/Travel/story?id=118914&page=1 but it would have the bonus of selectively knocking off the idiots that think it's ok to run red lights, as more safety concious drivers will be safely stopped.
Dollars wise? probably not too much given the hardware is already mostly in place.
That would mess a lot of things up. Contrary to popular belief most civil engineers aren't dumb, they've done fluid modeling and simulations (you know, science) to determine how long each light needs to be red and at what intervals. If you accelerate one part of the system you might disrupt the flow of traffic miles down the road. In my area some traffic lights are disabled past 7pm to improve traffic flow at non peak hours because the lighter traffic past 7 allows some optimizations.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
Contrary to popular belief most civil engineers aren't dumb
I must live in the city that hired the rest of them:
Light cycles are very long here, regardless of the time of day. If you miss that green, you'll be sitting there for 2 or 3 minutes, even if you are the only car on the road. (Unless you just drive through the red.)
There are loops in the road to detect cars from less travelled roads, and they'll trigger a change in the light. There are also buttons to detect pedestrians, but they don't advance the cycle, they just give a walk signal. Eventually. The pedestrian buttons are also the only way to detect a bike, though it's illegal to ride your bike onto the sidewalk to press them.
You snark, but there is a lot of good reasons to support toll roads (tiered pricing). Toll roads actually reduce congestion by getting people who value time more than money to pay up, which frees up the city road for everyone else. Price discrimination may suck for ISPs but it's known to be effective, albeit unpopular, on highways.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
In 25 years of watching these systems try to replace traffic cops, I've yet to read any independent data on whether there's a net increase in safety in using speed and red-light cameras.
There are those who are pro-camera, who usually turn out to be affiliated with the makers of these systems, and those who are against, usually the expert witness traffic engineers who testify against municipalities in cases of those involved in rear-end accidents with the people who stopped for a changing light.
That said, I think they're probably useful in intersections that already have a high accident rate within the intersection itself, but as a pervasive means of generating revenue, I think their net effectiveness and their profitability for local governments may be outweighed by the liabilities of enforcement - such as increasingly necessitating a summons-server in the process - and collateral accidents that occur because people may be distracted or alter their behavior to avoid a ticket.
Likewise, cops going after DUIs in a fashion that renders the officer little more than a citation-machine doesn't seem like a good revenue model either - ie: targeting late-night drivers with "loose license-plates" rather than those who in broad daylight cause multiple-vehicle pileups; the largest number of easy convictions aren't always the ones that benefits society most.
It is a violation of my civil rights to obey red lights.
You have no right to drive a car on public roads. That's why you need to be licensed to do it. When you don't obey the laws your license should be revoked.
And it is a violation of my civil rights to be filmed in public.
There is no right to privacy when you are in public.
And it is a violation of my civil rights for the government to spy on my private affairs (I'm just driving my car, which I -own!).
Driving on a public road isn't a private affair.
See a problem?
The problem is you.
Running red lights isn't actually a problem. The traffic light goes yellow and then it goes red. Depending on how drivers in your part of the world behave, people will pass the lights up to x seconds after the light goes yellow. That number x is different in different places, but it can be measured.
What's dangerous is not running a red light, what's dangerous is passing the light when cars from the other direction are already entering the crossing. So what matters is not the time between yellow and red, what matters is the time between yellow on my side and green on the other side.
I know of a lawyer who beat a photo-cop speeding ticket in this way:
1. He was driving in his wife's car and was perhaps a little over the limit, and the machine flagged him.
2. His wife received the ticket in the mail.
3. Under local law, since she owned the car, but was not the one in the photo, it falls on her to identify the driver of the car at the time, so that he may be cited.
4. This, of course, meant that the lawyer's wife was being compelled to testify against her husband, which is illegal.
5. The lawyer simply told her to ignore it (like thousands of other people do), as there would need to be a summons served to her.
6. No summons was ever served, and the citation was dropped.
The issue for many people is not really money. Yes, criminals can and should pay a larger percentage of the taxes. However, there are two other factors. First is the contract. It seems to many that due to the costs, these camera companies are bounty hunters and therefore the revenue stream to the city is not what is expected. Second is the idea of the surveillance culture. I personally don't want to live in a city in which there is so much fear and mistrust that we must spy on each other all the time.
All in all not news and not interesting. I suppose the next headline will be that San Diego elects a gay mayor, if it every gets around to doing so.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Here in Calgary, the cameras have two purposes. The first is a normal red light camera, the second is for speed on green. Basically, it's just like multinova except it's right at the intersections. So if you speed through the green light you will get the ticket.
I wish we could get rid of the red light piece of it, but keep the speed camera. I figure that stopping people from speeding through intersections is a lot more useful than catching speeders along long stretches of road where there wasn't going to be an accident anyway.
Law enforcement should not be a profit centre. If you give people a financial incentive to find people guilty, then they will focus on trying to find people guilty rather than to stop the harm that the law was supposed to prevent.
Habitually running red lights definitely puts other peoples' lives and property at risk.
It depends. If you habitually run a red light at 2 AM every other morning because there's never any traffic then, and you can see the headlights of any vehicle coming, the only people's lives you put at risk are those who drive without headlights in the middle of the night.
I think that if we are to start fining people more, let's start with:
- Tailgaters. Including those who hit you from behind if you stop on a yellow light.
- People blocking intersections.
- Doubly so for people who make a right turn on red and blocks the intersection. Someone on your left actually stopped on a green light to not block the intersection, and you turn right on red to do so instead? Immediate loss of license is not too hard for this egotistical disregard for both the law and other drivers.
- People who don't accelerate up to speed on the on-ramp before merging onto highways.
- People who turn onto roads without stepping on it to match the speed to other cars as quickly as fucking possible. I've seen plenty of accidents due to this - including a fatality, where a driver swerved to avoid hitting the crawler, and killed a pedestrian.
- People who habitually rest the foot on their brakes whenever cresting a hilltop. This is likely the #1 cause of stop-and-go traffic, with rubberneckers being #2.
- People who don't yield to right when there is no marking or signals of who has right of way.
.
I wouldn't mind if there was a mandatory driving test every three years. And real driver's ed, not the farce we have here in the US, which includes neither slick driving and avoidance, night driving, nor what to do in case of accidents.
Obviously they weren't getting the revenue to make it pay off. Courts are not free. No doubt city workers were tired of it too.
Safety does not even enter into it.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Yep, that's the way it's done.
As to the claim "The data, in fact, does not really prove it."', I find that hard to believe without some extraordinary evidence. I don't see any evidence in TFA, just some local politician making good on a populist pledge. As for tourists, I received a traffic fine from the UK after getting back home to Oz after a holiday. I paid it because I had fucked up and it was the RigthThingToDo(TM), not because of the risk of being turned back at Heathrow for outstanding fines next time I visit.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Running a red light is indicative of not having enough time to notice that the light is changing. By extending the amount of time the yellow signal is on, the more likely a speeder will notice the light is changing.
Problem #1: Yellow light lengths are actually determined by the posted speed. They are supposed to be calibrated to allow for this. In fact, this is exactly how cities got busted with this program, by manipulating the yellow light times to be shorter, thus increasing revenue, but technically making the roads less safe than they were before (which obviously they didn't care about).
Problem #2: The assumption that a speeder will not put their foot through the floor if yellow light times are increased because they now know they have more time to "make it" is a rather large (and probably inaccurate) assumption, thus making the situation likely worse and less safe.
Problem #3: The assumption that people run red lights because they don't have enough time to react seems to be not true for the 99.9999% of drivers on the road every day who don't run red lights, probably because they're actually paying attention. Sorry, but the statistics against this are staggering, so there's little chance in arguing that one.
I call bullshit
Lights would be far more efficient if they would simply put the detectors further from the lights so they determine how many cars are approaching from all directions. Currently the detectors are right next to the lights. All over my town (SoCal) I watch vehicles traveling in waves, and each wave gets a red light because a single vehicle beat the wave to the detector. It appears to be the most inefficient way to allow cross traffic for a modern society with computing capabilities. It looks like the same algorithm used in the seventies and only slightly more efficient as a light on a timer.
The problem is not the civil engineers (at least probably not). It is probably the fact that the political appointees over ruled the traffic experts for some political reason. What makes this especially difficult is that you can't just fix it by making it so the political appointees can't over rule the subject matter "experts" because than you have no way to hold those subject matter "experts" accountable. Either the political appointees (the people who answer to the people who answer to the voters) can fire the subject matter experts (and if they can do that, they make it be known that if the subject matter experts don't do it their way they will be fired) or the subject matter experts are not accountable to anybody.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Yeah. You do. First Amendment guarantees you the freedom of association. Freedom of association requires the freedom to travel. And traveling, in many parts of the United States, means the freedom to drive.
Changes nothing. Voting is a right, but comes with certain requirements - that you be a citizen, that you be at least 18 years old, and not be a felon. Gun ownership is a right, but you have to get a restricted license before you can purchase a machine gun.