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Study: Red Light Cameras Don't Improve Safety
An anonymous reader writes: Ars Technica summaries a study by the Chicago Tribune (paywalled) that found red light cameras do not improve driver safety. "[W]hile right angle crash incidents have been reduced, rear-end crashes that resulted in injuries went up 22 percent." Chicago officials recently claimed that the cameras led to a 47% reduction "T-bone" injury crashes, using that statistic as evidence that the program is worthwhile. But the study's authors, who "accounted for declining accident rates in recent years as well as other confounding factors, found cameras reduced right-angle crashes that caused injuries by just 15 percent."
They also noted that the city chose to install many cameras at intersections where crashes were rare to begin with. Chicago has raised roughly $500 million from red light camera tickets since 2002. "[O]fficials recently admitted to the city inspector general that they had quietly dropped the threshold for what constitutes a red light camera ticket, allowing the tickets even when cameras showed a yellow light time just under the three-second federal minimum standard. That shift earlier this year snared 77,000 more drivers and $7.7 million in ticket revenue before the city agreed to change the threshold back.
They also noted that the city chose to install many cameras at intersections where crashes were rare to begin with. Chicago has raised roughly $500 million from red light camera tickets since 2002. "[O]fficials recently admitted to the city inspector general that they had quietly dropped the threshold for what constitutes a red light camera ticket, allowing the tickets even when cameras showed a yellow light time just under the three-second federal minimum standard. That shift earlier this year snared 77,000 more drivers and $7.7 million in ticket revenue before the city agreed to change the threshold back.
the institute of No Shiat Sherlock. It was always about the revenue, safety was a smokescreen swallowed by the gullible.
We had them installed in Los Angeles despite no one wanting them outside of the city council.
They then installed them in places that didn't actually have accidents such as busy though safe intersections.
The result was actually an increase in accidents because everyone had to start driving dangerously to avoid the cameras.
This was brought to the attention of the city council and they basically ignored it. The accidents were higher. People were unhappy with them. We had one christmas where some group of people wearing santa outfits put big colorfully wrapped cardboard boxes over the speed cameras that said "merry christmas". No one liked these things.
Then after the systems had been in place for awhile and they did a finacial audit... they found the cameras weren't actually making any money because most of the tickets were getting thrown out of court by judges that also didn't like them.
THEN the city council took them down... roughly about a week after that was revealed the cameras were disconnected or gone.
Which really highlights from several angles what this was always about.
Money.
Safety has nothing to do with it. Nothing what so ever. It was money - period. That is all these things are about or have ever been about. Cash. End of story.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I live in San Diego, some of the time, and similar results were posted here, too. The increase in rear-end collisions from people slamming on the brakes negates any benefit from reduced T-bones.
San Diego also reduced yellow light times, sometimes to below the legal limit, in order to boost revenue.
A judge looked at the program in 2001, said, "That's bullshit", and banned it for a year, and then the government finally ended it on its own in 2013.
If they really wanted to make money, they should have put the Red Light Cameras in the Red Light District.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
You mean the Ohio with the Republican Governor and the Republican dominated legislature? Good to know.
Ordinarily the left-of-centers around here have no trouble making the connection between higher government revenue and greater public safety. All they're doing in Chicago is providing themselves the means to fund their Government [1] by punishing law breakers. Beyond that they are discouraging the use of climate wrecking automobiles. Seems like a win all the way around.
Anyhow, if you really want to kill off these cameras in Chicago the answer is obvious; attribute the operation of the cameras to racism. Work up the charts and graphs that "prove" the fines are disproportionately on blacks, expose camera contractors as a parade of whitees and Sharpton will have the matter sorted in no time.
Anyhow Chicago, enjoy your statist hell. You deserve it.
[1] no sunshine, the half billion from the story is net to the city; the contractors aren't stealing it all.
At the start of this year Long Island's Nassau county installed school speed zone cameras. Doing 22 mph in a 20 meant a ticket. All the claims by the politicians about "think of the children's safety" was bullshit. Most areas that they were installed in had no history of accidents involving schoolkids. The main reason was the millions in revenue they were licking their chops over. The local public went ballistic (some people were receiving multiple $80 tickets in a short span of time), and there were many demonstrations against them that was aired on the local news station. Promises of larger signs, flashing lights when active were made (people were being ticketed at times when schools were closed and even on weekends). Finally now they're all being taken down, most tickets were negated and refunded, and all the cost to install and remove them are costing local taxpayers. Neighboring Suffolk County announced that they won't be going ahead next year with a similar program, mainly due to all the negative public reaction.
I don't care if you hit a brick wall. if you get rear ended, the guy was too close to begin with. That's what the insurance companies say, and I agree.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The original red-light camera trial was in Scottsdale Arizona. The city farmed out the study to a university research group, and the cameras were installed at a random selection of the worst red-light-accident [1] intersections. The trial was publicized and ran for several years. The timing of the lights was not changed.
The conclusion of the trial was that the cameras reduced both accidents and injuries. Scottsdale then ran the cameras for years with general public approval, in part because the city has some pretty rational traffic ordinances (like raising the speed limit if most people are going faster anyway) and an open set of books on the program.
The cities that treat red-light violations as a revenue source and especially those that cut yellow times to increase red violations have only themselves to blame for poisoning public opinion. If anything, cameras should be paired with longer yellow times.
Scottsdale is strange that way. They also did studies that showed that traffic flows better and reduces accidents by having left turn after green rather than before. Those results have been mostly ignored by other cities.
PS: I've seen some of the footage from the cameras, by the way -- one truly amazing one of a guy who totally spaced and drove right through an intersection well after cross-traffic was flowing but amazingly managed to miss all of it. Hard to believe.
[1] Skip the joke. It's ancient.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
People have been trying to make driving safer.
Driving is now safer.
Laws to make driving safer were therefore hysterical and stupid.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
ABS, crumple zones, airbags, traction control, and high-strength steel had far more to do with reducing highway fatalities than lawmakers could ever hope to achieve.
They always seem to put speed traps where it's easy to catch speeders versus where speed control would improve safety, such as places with high levels of speed related accidents.
The latter are often difficult to place speed traps or don't offer good cover for squad cars and the former are often places where it's easy to go faster or where the speed limits are artificially low.
"[W]hile right angle crash incidents have been reduced, rear-end crashes that resulted in injuries went up 22 percent." Chicago officials recently claimed that the cameras led to a 47% reduction "T-bone" injury crashes, using that statistic as evidence that the program is worthwhile. But the study's authors, who "accounted for declining accident rates in recent years as well as other confounding factors, found cameras reduced right-angle crashes that caused injuries by just 15 percent."
So the article says rear-end went up 22% and T-bone went down 47%. You have to be suspicious whenever you see a news article that says x went down by y%.
per cent of what? What were the base numbers?
Here's some example situations to show why I say that.
suppose before red light camera we had 100 rear-end crashes and 10,000 t-bone crashes at the intersection (all with injuries)
suppose after red light, we have 122 rear-end crashes and 5,300 t-bone crashes. That's 22% rear-end up and 47% t-bone down
But, the total number of injuries dropped 4,678. That's good isn't it? Redlight cameras must be great!
Or, suppose this:
before red-light camera, 10,000 rear-end and 100 t-bone w/injury
after red-light camera: 12,200 rear-end and 53 t-bone w/injury again, 22% increase in rear-end and 46% decrease in t-bone.
so we had an increase of 2,153 injuries total. Oh my, red-light cameras are killers, aren't they?
I used a wide disparity in the numbers to make my point: you cannot make a useful comparison between percent changes in numbers of two different measurements without knowing the base numbers. That is covered in your freshman "Lying with Statistics 101" class.
So, I read the article in the Tribune (it's free if you give them your email address and live out-of-zone)
If you read the Tribune article (and the accompanied "How the Red Light Camera Study was Done" you may come away with a quite different view than the slashdot summary or the ArsTechnica summary. The Tribune article is not as ridiculous as the slashdot summary.
The article does indeed have some raw numbers:
Quoted from the Tribune:
"In raw numbers at the 90 intersections included in the study, the researchers concluded the cameras prevented as many as 76 right-angle crashes and caused about 54 more rear-end injury crashes. The study said that without the red light cameras about 501 angle crashes would have occurred and only 425 were reported. It also said that there were 296 rear-end injury crashes, and there would have been only 242 had the cameras never been installed."
I've been driving for a few decades and have seen many serious injuries and fatalities, but not a single serious injury or corpse in a rear-end crash.
If you give me a choice between trading 76 t-bones crashes for 54 rear-end crashes, I'd take those numbers. As many other posters have observed, t-bone crashes are much more likely to result in serious injuries and deaths than rear-enders.
The two Tribune articles also covers some of the crookedness associated with Chicago's use of the cameras. They are both a good read and covers a lot of why you should be careful about these numbers and problems associated with the data.