Red light cameras are a slam dunk safety measure. They reduce fatal collisions by 50%, and there aren't really other tools to prevent people from brazenly running red lights. We should be scaling these widely. (from a presentation at Seattle City Council this morning)
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OH, and how many cameras? Where? When? What are the retention policies? Who will audit the data?
The built environment and traffic calming is more effective if done well.
There aren't good traffic calming alternatives to red light cameras.
But all for wanting them to be properly set up and managed with protections.
Saka says these are one of many proven safety countermeasures — true! https://highways.dot.gov/safety/proven-safety-countermeasures
"A 2017 study in the Journal of Safety Research found that cameras reduce fatal crashes at intersections by 14 percent and that removing the cameras made fatal crashes increase by a similar amount."
Basically saying that t-bone crashes decreased, rear-ends increased, as expected. And we can't say for sure if that's good or bad because the sample size of the study is too small and the data is kinda sketchy.
I haven't seen any evidence that Seattle has set up our program in a predatory way.