Aug 28 2008
Red Light Cameras Do Not Make You Safer
Say what you will about those ruthless robot red-light cameras that send you $50 traffic tickets with photographic proof that your car ran a red light.
New numbers in Raleigh say that, thanks to red-light cameras installed at 11 bad intersections five years ago, we’re sending fewer people to the hospital these days.
Right-angle “T-bone” crashes have fallen by 83 percent at the intersections since 2003, when Raleigh installed cameras to catch drivers who run red lights there.
Alright, I WILL say what I want about cameras. They DO NOT make you safer. They make you poorer, but not safer. Here’s why:
Everytime a community installs one of these, it can turn around and say, “look at the good job it’s doing; we don’t need an extra police officer there”. So extra police officers, who actually DO make you safer, are not stationed at dangerous intersections. They’re not out there writing tickets. And they sure as hell aren’t taking bad drivers off the road. Show me a camera that takes a bad driver, or drunk driver, off the road, and THEN I’ll tell you that cameras make you safer.
All these pieces of junk are good for is taking money out of your wallet so local governments can waste it on something.
