Some Florida cities are living off red light cameras
wlrn.org
wlrn.org
"If you don't want to pay fines, stop driving through red light" (i.e., cameras are cost-efficient law enforcement)
vs.
"Cities shouldn't use robots to extract huge dollar amounts from their citizens and travelers without having to look them in the eye" (i.e., massive income is prima facie evidence that the decision to install cameras is driven by revenue rather than justice)
There is a simple change we could make that should have broad bi-partisan support that can cleanly make both sides happy: Local governments shouldn't be able to keep the revenue from automated enforcement cameras; instead, it has to be sent to another part of the government (e.g., to charity, or the federal parks department, or basically anywhere that isn't under the control of the city council making the decision). This removes the incentive for cities to treat violators of minor traffic laws like piggie banks, but they are still free to use cameras to economically enforce laws protecting public safety if they deem it prudent. Importantly, it also reduces the appearance of corruption, restoring some faith in local government. We all lose when citizens view the justice system as an extortion racket.
(You could, and in my opinion should, extend this to all fines levied by local governments, but we could start with traffic cameras as a baby step.)
Imagine if we had a problem where a bunch of people were burglarizing houses, so we decided to declare specific enforcement zones where the cops were really on top of preventing burglaries. Would people be less likely to burgle, or would they just do their burglaries elsewhere?
Instead, town-wide, it should be made known with prominent signs that traffic enforcement is in use, and ideally the cameras should move around, so that people can't simply adjust their behavior to compensate. In other words, your idea, but put that sign on every intersection.
That’s exactly what I’ve witnessed in places that have cameras, regardless of if there are signs.
This is why there’s a red light?
I also remember some states tackled some of it by saying you couldn't get a speeding ticket for just 0-5 mph or maybe 0-9 mph over.
I assume it’s just psychology and people want to feel like they’re getting away with something but this is just the same effect as increasing the speed limit.
But it makes me wonder if the point is to have lower posted limits and therefore lower above-the-limit-but-legally cruising speeds. It’s very ass backwards but I’ll take whatever works.
Often yes. (I can't easily dig up broad data, but there are certainly individual examples where this is the case.)
My proposal still helps here though. These cities are willing to pay a bunch to the vendors because the remainder of revenue that they keep is "free". (It seems the cities often sign a sweetheart deal where the cities have their admin costs recouped first and then the vendors keep the vast majority of the revenue thereafter.) But if the cities can't keep any money, they don't have much incentive to send all this money to the vendors; it just pisses off their citizens.
But I also think "hell freezes over" is way more likely event
Maybe. There is precedent for state governments constraining their local governments. I think automated traffic cameras are a promising place where this might happen again because (1) they are still relatively new, so people are less likely to fall into status quo bias ("we've always had X, so it must be good/necessary/inevitable"); and (2) traffic cameras are uniquely irritating and salient to the average citizen in a way that, say, NIMBY regulations are not.
You could send it to the federal reserve balance sheet, or withdraw the funds and shred the cash. Or maybe apply it to the national debt since it’s so massive nobody would feel any benefit from the fine. Whatever, I don’t care.
But no benefit should befall anyone - the only goal should be to prevent bad behavior.
The goal should be safety and that’s it. Not a quick buck for local governments and traffic camera vendors.
What if we refund the money to everyone, but only those who didn't get a ticket in the past year? Creates even more incentives to drive safely.
...as one who doesn't run red lights and hates profiteering governments -- I'm not opposed :D
I had two ideas in this regard.
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All fines (and proceeds from auctioning off seized assets) collected by all levels of government should be broken down into two categories:
- Traffic
- Criminal
If you have a drivers license and make it a whole calendar year without getting a traffic citation, you should get an equal slice of the traffic citation money from the feds and the city/county/state that has jurisdiction over the address on your DL.
If you have government ID and make it a whole calendar year without getting cited/arrested (let alone convicted), you should get an equal slice of the criminal seizure/fine money from the feds and the city/county/state that has jurisdiction over the address on your ID.
The funding for the distribution infrastructure should NOT come from the fines/citations/seizures.
In short, redistribute the fine money from those who broke the law to those who didn't (or at least didn't get caught).
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The other far simpler option is that all fines/penalties automatically get applied to paying down debt owed by the collecting government.
If somehow a government has no debt (shocked face here) it would kicked upward to pay down debt at a higher level (e.g. city has no debt, so it gets sent to the state...and if somehow the state has no debt, it goes to the US Treasury's donation office).
Wouldn’t this just encourage law enforcement to cite everyone for every little infraction?
> In short, redistribute the fine money from those who broke the law to those who didn't (or at least didn't get caught).
Everyone breaks law the eventually. The article mentions the “Miami right” as an example.
> The other far simpler option is that all fines/penalties automatically get applied to paying down debt owed by the collecting government.
So the government can purposefully take on more debt and then find infractions to pay it off?
Hmm, potentially...if they thought that would secure a much larger slice for themselves by knocking people out of the running...so maybe they'd have to be ineligible. However, in most cases that would require citing a hell of a lot of people (Jacksonville, FL has ~3000 cops for ~1.2m people, so they'd have to each cite several locals a day all 365 days of the year to make a dent in who's getting any money)
Since some criminals would be non-locals, you could also hand out the fines equally to all locals regardless of whether they got busted for anything or not.
> Everyone breaks law the eventually. The article mentions the “Miami right” as an example.
Yes, there is a randomness to it all (breaking the law vs breaking and getting caught) but I'm not going to try to compensate for or control it.
> So the government can purposefully take on more debt and then find infractions to pay it off?
Yeah, I realized this oversight 5 minutes after I clicked submit. However, perhaps it could be pooled and redistributed equally to pay down equal amounts of debt for all the governments in a region.
The point is that fines/seizures should not be a line item in a government budget EVER because then somehow the government will become dependent on criminal activity to an extent and go looking for it just for the money. It should be a completely unexpected windfall and thus either returned to the people or used to pay down debt. That's my hope, the details could probably take months to hammer out.
How about in the tiny cities discussed in the article that have the current problem?
It’s also easy to make it a year without an infraction: just don’t drive. Use Uber or get a friend/family to drive you. This gets easier in the cities. I know several people who have drivers licenses that never drive because they don’t have to. Do they deserve money at the end of the cycle?
I like the idea. It sounds similar to these charge-and-refund systems:
* Canada's carbon tax. This adds a fee to fuels per ton (so the more you purchase, the more tax you pay). Every resident gets the same monetary amount of refund per year.
* Quadratic voting. You pay n^2 dollars to have n votes. All the collected money is divided equally and refunded to every citizen at the end.
https://cei.org/blog/charlotte-area-police-departments-are-r...
(From one perspective, these kind of cameras prevent corruption: automated enforcement means fewer bored local cops trying to steal your money or pin whatever crime they can think of on you as you drive.)
I think it’s deeply uncharitable to frame it as “rolling over” on crime. That’s the same manipulative rhetoric proponents use to argue for gunshot detection systems. Safety and privacy are the dueling interests - not anti-crime and pro-crime.
[0] Along with studies that found red light cameras increased accidents. I’ve seen studies in both directions, though.
(I believe strongly in personal privacy, and I don't buy the argument that red light cameras are a meaningful erosion thereof. Driving is a privilege that's extended with the expectation of safe behavior, which is why you're required to drive in a publicly identifiable vehicle with a government-issued license on your person. With that being said, I would happily support any local legislation that limits unconditional data collection from red-light cameras.)
My intended point isn't that red light cameras can't be done right, but that in reality, the incentives result in them not being done so. It's a near endless game of whack-a-mole to force their implementation ethically.
There are some other threads here talking about changing where fines go that could get things on the right track, but there are some many other avenues pointed out in my comments and others that are potential for abuse.
Really?
Perhaps a citation?
I do not believe it
So the story is complicated: red light cameras seem to have a positive effect on the serious accident rate, but a negative effect on the overall rate. Municipalities could probably improve this by both doing a better job of signaling upcoming yellows and by redesigning roads to match the marked limit, rather than encouraging intuitive higher-speed driving. Personally however, I would take more fender-benders over more fatalities any day of the week.
[1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/red-light-cameras...
Linked to in TFAYDR
If a municipality ever gives shorter times for lights with cameras the answer is very clear: it is about revenue not safety. There is no safety related justification that would ever say “the timing of a light is tied to income production”
It's entrapment playing games with the timing to get more money from people, cameras or not.
The whole point that people are bringing up is that there are a large number of documented examples of municipalities explicitly giving intersections with red light cameras significantly lower orange light times than all surrounding non-camera’s intersections. More over these municipalities have a documented increase in collisions, but collisions don’t cost the municipality anything, they just add a greater tax (through increased premiums) to all the people living in them.
I believe the correct course of action is cameras - red light, and speed, applied universally - however in the US where blatant corruption is legal it’s not reasonable to say “don’t break the law if you don’t want fines”, especially when again the whole reason this is up for debate is that timings for red light cameras are significantly shorter than non camera intersections. Eg what is legal in one intersection is illegal on the next and your only way to know is whether you get a fine in the mail.
This all ignores the part where fine based penalties for a crime simply renders crime legal for the wealthy. Again, if the intent is to ensure safety there would not be a subset of society for whom the law functionally does not apply, but the intent is very clearly revenue.
Immediately decided they'd probably just arrest me on some bullshit upon arriving and if not in a town of 100 or whatever there was no use arguing so I just paid.
The map of the town was like one Podunk neighborhood plus like a 100 ft stretch of state highway gerrymandered in for ticket revenue.
Those aren't really contradictory. You can be a "small bedroom community" but still be "substituting red light tickets for proper local taxes".
A town of 7000 people issued 3000 citations in a year, but the town itself has a major road in it connection other larger towns.
Even given that, it isn't the largest source of income for the city (property taxes are #1).
There's an easy way that the average person can fix this problem: stop driving through red lights.
That's hard to do safely when they shorten the yellow-light time so that you have no warning that the light will turn red.
The what?
I'm with you. Make it impossible by replacing them with roundabouts and traffic circles.
Can't drive through the red light if there isn't one taps forehead
https://apnews.com/domestic-news-domestic-news-general-news-...
This is crazy, I'm glad they are being required to open up more statistics on these because unpredicted externalities definitely make this go from a seemingly mildly unethical government behavior to a public safety issue. Cities trading revenue for safety seems extremely perilous.
If that is indeed true, what’s the needed replacement ratio to make it worth it?
[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/05/us/colears-hook-park-nyc-truc...
I agree; there is absolutely selective and biased placement in many municipalities. That's another good reason to put red-light cameras on every light, and to turn traffic violations into a sliding scale based on income, car value, and other factors (like the car's weight, as a good proxy for the damage it can do to pedestrians or other drivers).
1. Mobile DMV units checks to see if your car inspection sticker is expired. It has nothing to do with DUI or DUI prevention.
2. Monmouth Junction is actually not a town but a census designated place in South Brunswick Township, a rather large municipality by NJ standards.
3. What on earth would a DMV inspection do to prevent someone who's license is already suspended from driving? Clearly they don't care and are going to keep driving anyway.
There was another article suggesting that this driver was also driving without a mounted plate, which I assume would similarly have been caught. But I take your point for other cases, if they aren't checking licenses.
Regarding the emissions checkpoints, I wonder if they still pull over EVs and give them tickets for other violations. Since NJ only does emissions inspections, EVs don't require inspections at all, so maybe it's harder to justify the stop in the first place?
Anecdotally with speed bumps in my area, I've seen that people increasingly aren't being rational recently: five plus years ago the vehicles that would get in trouble were typically company owned/municipal vehicles - the prospect of damage to the vehicle didn't concern those who didn't own the vehicle and thus those were the ones being driven at speeds great enough to cause self-inflicted damage. However in the last few years, it's common to see people frequently trashing their own private cars, with scrapes due to going too fast, which you would imagine they don't want to do but end up doing by accident - the speed bumps are the same, so either the cars got worse somehow or the drivers did (more distracted/less attentive or simply a worse judge of speed/the physical environment)
I wish I thought cameras would help
And it's not like speed traps, where the posted limits are well below the design speed of the road. A red light is a red light!
fn: We can argue the toss around discriminatory placement of cameras e.g. there's probably more of them in neighbourhoods with certain demographics, but there's a simple solution here: every signalised intersection getting a camera, or at least the top half by traffic volume.
I think the thing I get hung up on is that I don't know if we know they actually work. Intuitively, sure, makes sense, but maybe they are just costing drivers money but not making things safer.
America is the land of the lawsuit right? Surely someone - or the state legislature - could take action on safety grounds alone to ensure a reasonable minimum duration (adjusted for the speed limit) for a yellow light.
Article from when they were legalized: https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/2023/06/02/its-great-news-t...
not that i speed much but i have witnessed too many accidents where a person is going the speed limit (maybe 5MPH over) and they quickly slam on the brakes and go 15 MPH under while the car behind them rear ends them
Enough people protest predatory lights in this fashion, either it will get fixed or the local police will start shooting people who honk.
I wonder how many people it would take to mark the route through one of these lights as blocked before mapping services route around them.
I don't know if it is any more, but as I understand it, the white dashed lines in the road would become solid a certain distance away from the light. That distance was roughly calibrated to being the distance it would take for the average vehicle doing the speed limit to come to a stop safely.
I was taught that if the light turned yellow and you were beyond the solid lines, you should come to a stop, but if you were inside the solid lines, you should proceed as if it were green[1]. This worked for a long time. Decades, before moving to a new area. I noticed that the newer area had stop light cameras, but I also quickly noticed that the lines didn't sync up to the lights. Perhaps there had been no effort to make them. Perhaps that was an older convention no longer followed. I don't know. But I miss having a reference for which way to handle coin-tosses without having to first become intimately familiar with the light's timing.
[1] - unless of course someone in front of you were trying to stop