Red Light Cameras: no benefit?
I’d always thought that red-light cameras were, on the whole, not that bad an idea. Sure, if you run a red-light you still don’t get caught until the ticket and photo arrives in the mail, but that’s offset by the idea that they’re preventative and the threat of getting caught should be strong enough to restrain you from running the red.
CarPundit says that they’re just about to be introduced to Boston and he’s not happy about it. He even says that red light cameras “increase the traffic death rate” which sounds pretty dramatic. I had thought that the results might have been specific to the United States, however there is Australian research showing the same thing: that there is no benefit to red light cameras in reducing accidents. Reading the report on the Australian data (in part commissioned by Vic Roads!) it seems that some sites that had red light cameras installed had a higher number of accidents after the installation, however, many of those sites were low-frequency accident sites meaning that any change in the number of accidents was significant.
