
Texas Poised to Ban All Red Light Cameras - voldacar
https://reason.com/2019/05/20/texas-poised-to-ban-all-red-light-cameras/
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intopieces
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.

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powerbroker
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...](https://www.pstriallaw.com/car-accidents/facts-and-statistics/)

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Waterluvian
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.

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powerbroker
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.

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powerbroker
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.

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

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stonogo
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.

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jchrisa
Predictable results, more carnage: [https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/07/25/as-
cities-turn-off-re...](https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/07/25/as-cities-turn-
off-red-light-cameras-red-light-runners-claim-more-lives/)

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better-solution
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.

