Never mind the preponderance of research that shows installing cameras at intersections to catch red-light runners does not promote intersection safety, the City of Pittsburgh is moving ahead with its program beginning this summer.
In a $14 million, five-year deal, the city will partner with Verra Mobility of Arizona to, initially, begin red-light enforcement by camera at six “high-crash” intersections.
Those would be Saw Mill Run Boulevard and Woodruff Street; the West End Bridge and Route 65; General Robinson and Anderson streets on the North Shore; Fifth and Negley avenues and North Dallas and Penn avenues in Point Breeze and Browns Hill Road and Park View Boulevard in Squirrel Hill.
As this scrivener noted last August, Pittsburgh officials insist the cameras will reduce dangerous driving and curb fatal crashes. And they still do. But it’s simply not true.
A 2008 study published in the University of South Florida’s “Public Health Review” concluded that red-light cameras made intersections less safe than doing nothing at all.
The study’s lead author – Barbara Langland-Orban, chair of health policy and management at the USF College of Public Health – says “rigorous studies clearly show red-light cameras don’t work.”
“Instead, they increase crashes and injuries as drivers attempt to abruptly stop at camera intersections,” she said.
In fact, the researchers concluded that red-light running crashes were declining without the use of cameras and that comprehensive studies from North Carolina, Virginia and Ontario (conducted by the Virginia Transportation Research Council) found that red-light cameras were significantly associated with increases in crashes, as well as crashes involving injuries.
Furthermore, studies that claim otherwise, the USF study’s lead author found, contained “research design flaws” and were funded by conflicted parties.
The bottom line is that credible research into the efficacy of red-light cameras shows they are inefficacious.
And then there’s this, as Reason magazine noted nearly 20 years ago:
“One particularly perverse problem the study didn’t address is the temptation among some city governments to actually shorten yellow lights at camera-monitored intersections to increase revenue, despite well-documented research showing that shortening yellows is pretty much guaranteed to cause more accidents.”
And as the magazine also notes, those University of South Florida researchers “did find that red light cameras are little more than revenue generators.”
In 2018, Scientific American magazine noted that a study of three large Texas cities over a 12-year period – and hundreds of thousands of accidents – “found no evidence that red light cameras improve public safety.”
“They don’t reduce the total number of vehicle accidents, the total number of individuals injured in accidents or the total number of incapacitating injuries that involve ambulance transport to a hospital,” the Texas study concluded.
While the evidence does show that while side-impact crashes were reduced at intersections with red-light cameras, rear-end crashes increased (and above the rate of side-impact crash reductions) as drivers fearing violations suddenly stopped.
But let’s not allow the facts to get in the way of implementing an indefensibly flawed public policy, right?
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
