Texas Poised to Ban All Red Light Cameras | Hacker News Reader

Texas Poised to Ban All Red Light Cameras

reason.com

15 pointsvoldacar12 comments

The red light cameras in Texas are operated by private companies with no enforcement capacity. I got a few of those tickets in Austin, and it was common knowledge that you could safely ignore them.

Lets do this with math (I'm a reformed red-light runner). Say Houston has 100 traffic accidents with red-light cameras (daily), but 130 red-light running accidents without. Say each accident causes $10,000 of property and personal damage (daily). Then you have $300,000 daily carnage prevented by the red-light cameras (in my case I paid $75 at a particular red-light & right-turn likely to cause accidents about 0.1% of the time, when performed by professional a stunt man like myself & 0.100001% of the time by everyone else).

OK, $300,000 daily saved in 'ouchies'. It takes 4,000 red-light citations (paid daily) to be the equal. The particular red-light I ran, by my layman's guesstimate, could ring up 500-700 tickets a day, for those unfamiliar with its wily ways. So it nets $50,000 daily.

OK, so I've never been ticketed as a full-speed-crossing-4-lanes-of active-traffic red-light camera (maybe they have elevated fines?). But a single signal getting $50,000/day seems a bit steep for the supposed harm to be prevented. Here's what the true stats are for Houston accident rates: https://www.pstriallaw.com/car-accidents/facts-and-statistic...

I have no opinions on red light cameras, but you're omitting the cost where you hit and kill my kid. And the part where you're being obedience trained to drive safer elsewhere too.

Well, I'm sensitive to that too, since 5 months ago, an at-fault driver illegally entered an intersection that I had the full green on, and I hit, and rolled her minivan. Total damages was about $45,000, and thank God everyone, including my passenger, walked away with minor bruises (45 MPH relative speeds at impact). So, swap out my initial $10,000, for the $45,000. Everyone's wreck has their own costs... long story short, we throw massive weights around with immense kinetic energies when we push down on that accelerator.

I've added the costs, many of which are the headaches of repair logistics, and the immeasurable pains that occur when someone dies or is injured, and say, I like the Texas red-light cameras.

what’s the argument for allowing people to run red lights?

That'd be the common straw man.

Cameras can't stop people from running red lights.

In most jurisdictions that use them, they don't even count as moving violations for insurance or licensing purposes. The idea is to discourage the crime. There are other ways to discourage the crime, but the cameras seem to have the intended effect.

But pretending that removing them is tantamount to santioning the crime is a little ridiculous.

It's safer than installing a camera. Red-light cameras increase the overall number of crashes for any given intersection, especially rear-end collisions, since people tend to slam their brakes when they notice the camera in order to avoid getting a ticket.

Predictable results, more carnage: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/07/25/as-cities-turn-off-re...

Most of Texas does not have red-light cameras. There are few areas that have them and even then by Texas law in its existence an officer must be present at the time of the citation being issued. It can't be mailed.

Here's an idea: Only use the cameras to compound fault to unthinkable scales in the event of an accident. Triple fines and threaten felony jail time for accidents that can be shown to involve running red lights.

I think, had the premise of traffic cameras been introduced under the pretext of evidence application in cases of true harm and fault, they might have been embraced.

Instead, they've been opportunisticlly exploited to rip people off, and steal money, leading to a proliferation of more cameras stealing more money. And the money pretty much goes where local government payola dictates.

Had traffic cameras only been applied to accidents after the fact, especially when fatalities were involved, they might have been praised for revealing truth.

The lesson: only punish those that inflict harm, and only after the harm is inflicted.

If the harm is too frequent, reconfigure the timing of the lights, or redesign the intersection, so that humans aren't tempted to cause dangerous or conflicting situations.

>A 2016 IIHS study found that the fatal red-light running crash rate in cities that shut off their cameras increased 30 percent relative to similar cities that had not. In cities that had eliminated camera enforcement, the overall fatal crash rate at signalized intersections was 16 percent higher than in cities where the programs were maintained.

These back-to-back sentences from the article sound like they're describing the same situation but with 2 very different numbers— am I misparsing something?

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