At the end of the month the questions to the trafic officers is not how many lives have you saved, it's how much revenue have you collected. The light and camera project was built with a plan to first, pay for itself, and then make a ton of money. Police chief Cathy Lanier is whining because her revenue is down.
Something which can sometimes turn around and bite the cities that use red-light cameras in the financial butt.
Many cities, including large cities like Washington, DC, pay for red-light cameras by splitting the funds generated from tickets with the companies that manufacture the equipment. The companies install the cameras at their own expense, then those companies get 50% of the money that comes in from traffic tickets.
As you can imagine, that gives the companies, and the city, financial incentive to generate as many tickets as possible. Many cities do this by decreasing the amount of time the yellow light shows, in order to ticket more people.
Federal law says that a yellow light must show for at least 3 seconds. In the past few years, several cities have been caught decreasing the amount of time the yellow light shows to less than what Federal law requires, all to increase revenue; some cities in Tennessee, for example, make
half their total operating budget from red-light tickets.
There are currently class-action lawsuits pending
in twenty US cities for distributing fake traffic tickets by tampering with the way that traffic signals show a yellow light, tampering with traffic cameras, or both. Earlier this year,
Minnesota was ordered to refund $2.6 million dollars' worth of tickets issued by red-light cameras, and pay for any increased car insurance that resulted from the tickets, because the red-light camera system violated state law and also violated the Constitutional right to due process.
So when someone says that the purpose of red-light cameras is to "save lives," I think that can be taken with a huge grain of salt...
