by Matt Florell
This is an analysis of the City of St. Petersburg's red
light camera program and the second year report that was released by the City.
There are many references to the City's report in this analysis, and it is
located here for you to download and look at as you read through the analysis,
http://www.stpetepolls.org/rlc/StPete_20140116_RedLightCamera_Update_report_year2.pdf
http://www.stpetepolls.org/rlc/StPete_20140116_RedLightCamera_Update_report_year2.pdf
If you were just to read the summary of the second year
red light camera report, you might think that adding red light cameras was a
panacea to traffic safety. The results of which were a massive reduction in
crashes, and catching tens of thousands of dangerous drivers traveling on our
City's roads. What you would start to notice if you continued to read past the
first few pages and into the rest of the report, is that this is a much more
complex topic than the summary leads on. It is true that crashes have gone down
at red light camera intersections, but just barely(-2.6%), and crashes are
still higher than the year before the cameras were installed. Also, the
comparison intersections without cameras have had a much greater reduction in
crashes(-9.1%) than the camera intersections themselves did. If you look at the
crash rate change, the difference is even greater, with the camera intersection
crash rate drop at -2.6% and the non-camera intersection crash rate over ten
times greater at -28.9%. The intersections without cameras are getting much
safer, while the camera intersections have barely changed.
The rosy declarations of massive drops in "red
light related" crashes mentioned in the summary, in reality, are mostly
offset by the near-doubling of rear end crashes and the large increase in angle
crashes at the red light camera intersections. It's almost like squeezing a
balloon on one side only to see the other side bulge outward. The crash rate is
not significantly going down, it's just changing the classification of crashes
from "red light related" to other types of crashes. One reason for
this is that when you have cameras monitoring an intersection, you can use them
to investigate what really happened in a crash. After reading through hundreds
of police crash reports from the second year of the program, I did notice
several instances where a crash that a witness would claim was a red light
running crash, was in fact a failure to yield crash. What surprised me