Conference of Mayors, which coincidentally is headed by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, this week approved a resolution endorsing nationwide adoption of red light cameras.Īnd yet, in addition to the votes in Los Angeles and Houston: "We look at where and how that's happening, and one of the most dangerous (locations) is intersections."Ĭiting reports like that, the U.S. "We still have thousands of people who die," said Adrian Lund, the Insurance Institute's president. cities - 14 of which now deploy cameras - and calculated that had all 99 installed the devices, 815 lives would have been saved from 2004 through 2008. The most recent, published in February by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, crunched 10 years of federal traffic data for the 99 largest U.S. district judge this week ruled that a measure voters approved to shut down the city's more than 70 cameras was invalid on procedural grounds.Ĭould hundreds of lives be saved?More than a dozen large studies over the past decade have concluded that the cameras reduce accidents and injuries. There's a fierce court battle going on in Houston, the nation's fourth-largest city, after a U.S. Paul Kubosh, a lawyer who has led a similar anti-camera fight in Houston, called the camera systems "a scam on the public," because they "are writing tickets that police officers don't write." "You have to give people a fighting chance that you're not going to penalize them for a minor lapse of judgment." "You've got to treat people fairly," said Jay Beeber, executive director of, who has led the campaign to kill the city's red light cameras. that if you add it all up, operating the cameras has cost $1 million to $1.5 million a year more than they've generated in fines, even as "the program has not been able to document conclusively an increase in public safety."Īnother common refrain from critics is that the devices replace a human officer's judgment and discretion with the cold, unforgiving algorithms of a machine. The city gets only a third of the revenue generated by camera citations, many of which go unpaid anyway because judges refuse to enforce them, the city controller's office reported last year. ![]() And while guidelines issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration say revenue is an invalid justification for the use of the eyes in the sky (see box at right), camera-generated citations do spin off a lot of money in many cities - the nearly 400 cameras in Chicago, for example, generated more than $64 million in 2009, the last year for which complete figures were available. Opponents of the cameras often argue that they are really just revenue engines for struggling cities and towns, silently dinging motorists for mostly minor infractions. The company's contract will expire at the end of July if the council can't reach a final agreement to renew it. The private Arizona company that installed the cameras and runs the program mails off $446 tickets to their registered owners. A City Council committee is considering whether to continue the city's camera contract over the objections of the commission, which voted unanimously to remove the camera system, which shoots video of cars running red lights at 32 of the city's thousands of intersections.
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