Some Florida cities are living off red light cameras

Discussions on this topic generally degenerate into

"If you don't want to pay fines, stop driving through red light" (i.e., cameras are cost-efficient law enforcement)

vs.

"Cities shouldn't use robots to extract huge dollar amounts from their citizens and travelers without having to look them in the eye" (i.e., massive income is prima facie evidence that the decision to install cameras is driven by revenue rather than justice)

There is a simple change we could make that should have broad bi-partisan support that can cleanly make both sides happy: Local governments shouldn't be able to keep the revenue from automated enforcement cameras; instead, it has to be sent to another part of the government (e.g., to charity, or the federal parks department, or basically anywhere that isn't under the control of the city council making the decision). This removes the incentive for cities to treat violators of minor traffic laws like piggie banks, but they are still free to use cameras to economically enforce laws protecting public safety if they deem it prudent. Importantly, it also reduces the appearance of corruption, restoring some faith in local government. We all lose when citizens view the justice system as an extortion racket.

(You could, and in my opinion should, extend this to all fines levied by local governments, but we could start with traffic cameras as a baby step.)

A lot of small towns depend on predatory law enforcement, especially civil forfeiture. With depressed tax revenue they are incentivized to rake people over the coals.

https://cei.org/blog/charlotte-area-police-departments-are-r...

The cities in question are really small towns: West Miami is about 7000 people, per the article. That makes the statistics a little bit less astonishing: these aren't huge towns or cities that are substituting red light tickets for proper local taxes; they're small bedroom communities on busy roads between nearby big cities.

> Doral killed its red light camera program last year, after officials noted that accidents greatly increased at intersections where the cameras operated.

This is crazy, I'm glad they are being required to open up more statistics on these because unpredicted externalities definitely make this go from a seemingly mildly unethical government behavior to a public safety issue. Cities trading revenue for safety seems extremely perilous.

I know someone in South Florida, who, while in a funeral cortege, was directed to go through a photo red light by motorcycle policemen managing traffic. Everybody who went through the red light was issued a ticket. The city learned of the error but instead of rectifying the error at the department, required the mourners to submit forms to have their tickets invalidated.

I would gladly pay tax dollars for engine noise monitors that hand out tickets. I have to imagine it's out there already but if not there's a startup idea.

In New Jersey a great example of this are the mobile DMV units... extremely small towns with no major highways invite the DMV unit in once a month to setup checkpoints to check car inspection stickers on local roads.. which then leads to full blown police stops and tickets for other violations. It's a huge monetary boon for the municipal budget for a town that other wise doesn't have an opportunity to pull cars over. It's all about the money and definitely not about public safety or emissions.

With greater transparency it would be interesting to see if rational behaviour kicked in, reducing fines.

Anecdotally with speed bumps in my area, I've seen that people increasingly aren't being rational recently: five plus years ago the vehicles that would get in trouble were typically company owned/municipal vehicles - the prospect of damage to the vehicle didn't concern those who didn't own the vehicle and thus those were the ones being driven at speeds great enough to cause self-inflicted damage. However in the last few years, it's common to see people frequently trashing their own private cars, with scrapes due to going too fast, which you would imagine they don't want to do but end up doing by accident - the speed bumps are the same, so either the cars got worse somehow or the drivers did (more distracted/less attentive or simply a worse judge of speed/the physical environment)

I've noticed a significant uptick in the number of drivers busting through red lights in my town.

I wish I thought cameras would help

Sounds like a lot of these citations are for "right turn on red", which makes me wonder if some of these intersections could use better traffic lights, such a blinking orange right-turn light during off-peak hours. On the other hand, having a similar "right turn on red" law in California where I drove most of my life, I don't recall ever rolling through these. I might roll through an empty 4-way stop, but never a red light. I would sometimes make a quick and jerky stop-and-go for those right turns, but I have no idea if that's citable. I always tried to let the car 'fall back' from the forward momentum before accelerating.

Red light cameras are good. Minimal bias (fn) compared to an all-too-human police officer.

And it's not like speed traps, where the posted limits are well below the design speed of the road. A red light is a red light!

fn: We can argue the toss around discriminatory placement of cameras e.g. there's probably more of them in neighbourhoods with certain demographics, but there's a simple solution here: every signalised intersection getting a camera, or at least the top half by traffic volume.

The new hotness is speed cameras in school zones.

Article from when they were legalized: https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/2023/06/02/its-great-news-t...

There should be a camera on every intersection

i honestly dont mind red light cameras per say (do think people should have the right to challege them bc technology isnt perfect all the time) but i absolutely loathe speeding cameras

not that i speed much but i have witnessed too many accidents where a person is going the speed limit (maybe 5MPH over) and they quickly slam on the brakes and go 15 MPH under while the car behind them rear ends them

Sleep town needs Waymo

The solution here is to stop at every yellow light. If it's timed very fast, spend the entire red holding down your horn.

Enough people protest predatory lights in this fashion, either it will get fixed or the local police will start shooting people who honk.

I wonder how many people it would take to mark the route through one of these lights as blocked before mapping services route around them.