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Tom’s late for work! Sure, he probably shouldn’t have stopped for that latte,
but hey - it’s Pumpkin Spice season! So he’ll just have to make up some time along the way or the
boss will chew him out again. And sure enough, the light’s turning yellow as he’s approaching. Well,
there aren’t any cops around, so he’ll just squeeze through. He probably made it! Mostly.
And sure enough, no one’s around to stop him. He heads on to work,
and doesn’t give it another second thought.
That is, until a few months later when he receives a letter from the city - containing
a traffic ticket for almost $500! Guess he wasn’t that close, and the red light cameras got him.
Jack’s also late for work. Yeah, he shouldn’t have stopped for that McRib, but he’s sure the
boss will understand if he’s only late by a minute or two. Better safe than sorry,
so when he sees a red light he stops, makes sure that it’s clear, and turns when he’s
allowed to. Jack knows the traffic laws, and is rather proud of his clean traffic record.
At least he was - because a few months later, he also gets a letter in the
mail containing a $500 traffic ticket, claiming he made an illegal turn on red!
And so Tom and Jack head to Los Angeles traffic court to either pay their fine or try to defend
themselves - and they’re not alone. It’s going to be a long day, because traffic court is full,
and many of their fellow drivers are all victims of the same Red Light cameras.
At least they were. Because much to the relief of countless Los Angeles drivers,
red light cameras are a thing of the past for quite some time - and the reason why is a lot
more complicated than just people not wanting to pay their tickets.
So what are these plagues of drivers everywhere? They’re surveillance devices that are aimed
at an intersection and are programmed to automatically go off when a vehicle enters
the intersection after the light’s turned red. They’re not running all the time,
but run on a timer and can activate in seconds to capture the crooks’s license plate data. That
information is then sent back to the traffic enforcement division, which matches the license
plate to the driver and sends them a ticket for the appropriate amount. If the driver can’t be
identified - like if the car’s been stolen, or sold off-book - a notice of violation will
be issued against the car and may show up on the record of the car if it’s stopped again.
Big Brother is watching…but why?
Well, for one thing, traffic enforcement isn’t easy. There’s a reason it’s shorthand
for the worst possible duty a rookie cop can be assigned to. All you do is stop annoyed drivers,
read them the riot act, and hand them tickets - while hoping they don’t decide to speed off
and force you into a car chase. The red light cameras take care of one of the
most common traffic offenses besides speeding - running a red light. By automating the system,
it frees up officers to do more important work, while ensuring that the tickets provide a steady
stream of revenue for the local police department, as long as people keep running red lights.
And their defenders and opponents have been fighting for a long time.
Supporters of red light cameras say that they help create safer roads - after all, we all
know everyone slows down and minds the traffic laws a little more when they see an officer.
But officers can’t be everywhere, and if people know a little robocop is at every intersection,
it might result in the same impact. At least it definitely will once they get a ticket or
two from pushing their luck. They also point to studies that show an overall
reduction in crashes when a red light camera is present, although that doesn’t always apply.
Because there’s one big exception.
Opponents of red light cameras say that the devices do their job of making people stop at
lights - but that can be a double-edged sword. People see a red-light camera, slam on the
brakes - and maybe the person behind them can’t stop in time and we have a rear-end collision! In
most cases, the person in the back of a rear-end collision is the culprit, but short stops make it
near-impossible to prevent in some cases. While there were fewer injuries in these short-range
rear-end collisions than in the intersection crashes that were more common, this pattern
still led many towns to increase the length of the yellow light to give people time to stop.
At least we know that if a machine is in charge, things will be fair…right?
We’ve all had that ticket we think was just completely unfair. Maybe your speed hit 60.1
and a cop immediately darted out from behind a bush to ticket you. Maybe you were the one
hit in the fender-bender, but the other driver had a really good sob story and could cry on
command. In both cases, you were at the mercy of a specific officer’s judgment - but in the
case of a red-light camera, it’s just the cold facts recorded by the camera. That sounds good
on paper - but as HAL 9000 proved, you can’t always trust a computer to have good judgment.
While these cameras aren’t going rogue, they also can’t be entirely trusted.
Red light cameras have led to a marked increase in tickets being contested, with people either
claiming that it was impossible for them to stop on time - or that they didn’t fail to stop at all!
Many people just choose to pay the ticket and avoid the day in court, which is no doubt what
the city is hoping for, and many who do show up in court just plead guilty. But people who contest
the ticket often hope for the camera to prove the point - and not infrequently, it does! Some of the
most common causes for faulty red light camera hits include people triggering the sensor by a
hair while stopping, or making a legal turn on red that the camera registers as crossing a red light.
This became a big problem in California.
In many places, red light cameras were largely designed as a deterrent
to hit people with minor fines and hope they’ll do better. But in California,
the state was cracking down - and fines could rise to as much as $500. What’s more,
it was one of the only municipalities to potentially add demerit points onto
licenses that could eventually result in the license being suspended. This
meant that people would have to attend traffic school in order to remove their points - which
could add to the cost. A hefty price to pay for a camera’s potentially faulty judgment.
And what’s more, you didn’t even have to be driving!
If the camera can’t make a positive identification, the ticket will be
assigned to the vehicle and the owner will be sent what was nicknamed a “snitch ticket”. This
requests identifying information about the driver in order to issue a ticket - but there’s often no
way to prove who’s guilty. Imagine you lent your brother-in-law the car so he could get to work,
and he runs a red light, and you get the ticket for it! Your only option is to
try to get him to confess, and he immediately goes “I don’t know what you’re talking about,
bro. I’m a good driver.” while chugging an energy drink. You’re out of options,
and you might wind up paying the ticket for his bad behavior!
But there’s one twist to this.
If you get a ticket, it’s on your record and you have to pay it or risk having a
warrant out for your arrest. But in the case of these notices, they’re not actually
legally enforceable. They’ve been issued by a traffic enforcement agency, not a court,
and the owner of the vehicle can’t actually be compelled to response. That means the ticket
means little more than a warning not to let the driver take your car again! However, a genuine
ticket will be linked to a specific court and serve as a notice to appear. Which means that
whether you get a ticket or a warning might depend entirely on whether the camera gets a good angle.
That doesn’t seem particularly fair - and in 2011, Los Angeles agreed.
After months of intense debate, the Los Angeles City Council met and voted 13-0 to
end the program, bringing an end to people being hauled into court months later for offenses they
might not even have remembered. What led to the shutdown? Was it the privacy concerns?
Issues with false positives? Was the bad press not worth the financial benefit?
No, in the end, the true reason was…it just wasn’t working!
The red light cameras were flagging a lot of people, but it wasn’t providing enough firm
identifications. That meant the city was sending out a lot of those notifications
and not enough tickets. Additionally, the county’s superior court had denied requests
to step up enforcement, which meant that paying these fines had essentially become
voluntary. And very few people were going to choose to pay the heftiest red-light camera
fine in the country once they realized that it was largely a toothless system.
And what’s more, the system wasn’t even catching what it had hoped to!
Red-light cameras are designed to catch dangerous moving violations, particularly people who speed
through a red light and potentially plow into someone crossing legally through the intersection
or a pedestrian crossing with the light. Well, the LA system did issue over 180,000 tickets - but
the vast majority of them were for legal right turns! This usually happens at a slower speed,
being less dangerous, and led to many complaints of legal turns being flagged. Additionally,
the 32 red light cameras weren’t even at the city’s most dangerous intersection - they were
doled out as patronage, with one going to the home district of each council member!
So in the end, it just wasn’t worth it.
In 2011, the municipality decided to even out the enforcement - by
not issuing any further sanctions against motorists who declined to
appear in court or pay their tickets. This meant that no matter whether you
were caught on camera fair and square or had an explanation for how it wasn’t your fault,
a red-light camera ticket amounted to nothing more than a sternly worded warning. And naturally,
most people took those sternly-worded warnings and deposited them squarely in their bins.
Many on the council felt that enforcement should be stepped up,
but when they couldn’t get support for that, there was only one thing left to do.
And so, on July 31st, 2011, most of the red light cameras went dark for the final time.
And that left some people in an odd situation. They had already been issued tickets in the
dying days of the program - often for offenses committed months before - and now they had to
figure out whether to still pay them or not. Most people would say that’s a sucker’s game,
but some people still wanted to keep their record clean. The program reportedly cost
over a million dollars in maintenance costs to operate, but even at its height less than
two-thirds of the citations were being paid. And when the program shut down, over 50,000 citations
were still outstanding. What’s more, a few red-light cameras remain in some key locations,
still issuing citations - and people are still confused whether they have to pay the fine or not.
So did the failure in Los Angeles ultimately doom the program as a whole?
While the program hasn’t completely fallen out of favor, it’s decreased significantly
from its previously high approval rating, and many cities have either done away with
them or instituted a grace period to avoid false reports. And in New Jersey,
they passed a law banning the state Motor Vehicle Commission from passing on license
plate and driver information to other states based on a red-light camera summon. The tide
seems to be tilting against these automated methods of traffic enforcement - which means
some states think it might be time to pull some more police officers onto the front
lines and get back to the old methods of traffic enforcement. And that means plenty of overtime.
Humans one, machines zero.
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Watch “What You Should Not Do If You Are Stopped By A
Cop” for more traffic stop tips, or check out this video instead!