Coming to an intersection near you, the nemesis of evil-doers and ass-like drivers everywhere—the Red Light Camera—wants to take on Massachusetts’ driving anarchy. Drivinglikeass.com thinks it hasn’t got a prayer.

On the issue of red light cameras (RLC), the opposing teams line up like this: For? Insurance companies and highway safety organizations, a few revenue-strapped municipalities, and camera system vendors. Against? Just about everybody else.
Source: Howstuffworks.com

Nonetheless, State Rep Kevin Honan of Brighton has introduced two bills that would allow cities and towns in Massachusetts (H.3512) and Boston and Cambridge (H.3513) to deploy “traffic control signal violation monitoring system devices as a means of promoting traffic safety.” At first blush, this sounds like a real winner: using technology to nab traffic scofflaws, anywhere, 24-7. But, once again, technology and logic will remain powerless against the innate obduracy of driving like ass.

THE CHALLENGE
The FHWA’s “Stop Red Light Running Partnership Survey” says that two in three Americans see other drivers run red lights almost every day, although that data is skewed since, clearly and understandably, most Americans don’t live in Boston. Nationwide, RLCs are at work in 24 states, at last count, with Maryland/DC, California, and Texas leading the list with most installed.

At present, Saugus is the only municipality in Massachusetts using RLCs. Several others have proposed and evaluated their use with some approving (Springfield, Lawrence) and others dismissing (Swampscott). And, despite Rep. Honan’s best efforts, Boston has never gotten on the RLC bandwagon even though one of the state’s first installations was a 1996 trial in Allston near Boston University which, during its 31 hour test, saw 138 violations. (Massachusetts, in fact, was the site of the country’s first automated monitoring system, reports the National Conference of State Legislatures: a 1910 device known as the photo speed recorder which used a camera synchronized with a stopwatch to photograph speeding vehicles. “The speed was calculated using mathematics based on the reduction in size of the motor vehicle in the photo. The photo was used in court as evidence and was held admissible by the Massachusetts Supreme Court.”)

Why the hell not? Making a U-turn on red (source: Mark C. Ide/Worcester T &G)

The stumbling block for RLCs in Massachusetts as well as in other states has been the problem of assigning “unsafe driver” points to red light runners caught on camera. Points for accidents or violations are assessed to drivers and result in insurance surcharges to those individuals. But, because RLCs can only identify the vehicle running a light, legal defenses have been raised in which motorists claim it was “someone else” driving that car that day and why should he or she be penalized for that? Consequently, in order to approve RLC use state-wide, Massachusetts must change applicable laws to exempt RLC violations from surchargeable incidents.

WE’VE GOT GOOD NEWS… AND SOME BAD NEWS
The RLC and its basic, technological premise— remote, electronic photographic monitoring of our citizenry—is a libertarian’s nightmare and all manner of “driver’s interest” groups have lined up against it. Their arguments rest, generally, on a series of claims that RLCs are:

• A conspiracy of highway safety institutes and the insurance companies that fund them. Many states permit “points” to be assessed for violations caught on RLCs resulting in higher insurance premiums.
• A conspiracy of unwitting (or otherwise) municipalities, who see a substantial revenue opportunity in RLCs, and RLC equipment vendors who are loathe to disabuse the towns of that notion. (An evaluation of RLCs by Swampscott, MA, calculated annual revenue per intersection of $123,000, after factoring revenue sharing (25%) with the vendor and a projected 50% collection rate.)
• A lame attempt by states and municipalities to get the camel’s nose into the tent of electronic speed surveillance (“mission creep”).
• Prone to a long list of technological shortcomings that threaten to capture the law-abiding along with the guilty (they aren’t calibrated properly, they are out of focus, they only catch BMW’s, etc.).

They also claim they don’t work, which, in fact, they don’t. Well, they sorta work: RLCs do reduce right-angle crashes, which are the primary collisions resulting from red-light running. The FHWA's Safety Evaluation of RLCs found a 25% reduction in right-angle collisions and a 16% reduction in injury right-angle collisions.

Unfortunately, the same study reported a 15% increase in rear end crashes and a 24% increase in rear-end injury crashes. While the study didn’t speculate as to the cause of these increases, behavioral theory tells us that drivers, who know they are about to do something wrong for which they can actually be caught, will refrain from that act. In the case of RLC’s, that means slamming on the brakes with such ferocity that your maps, your cell phone, your groceries, your kids, and that venti iced Latte you just bought all fly to the front of the car, wedging themselves in somewhere near the footwell heater vents. It also means that the driver behind you, who is hoping you will go for it anyway, has his foot on the accelerator and, before you can say “one car length for every 10 miles per hour”, runs himself up your tail pipe or worse.

The evidence is pretty clear and convincingly uniform. The Virginia Transportation Research Council released a study in 2005 (and another in 2007) finding that the "net effect" of red-light cameras was more injuries: accidents caused by drivers running red lights dropped by 24 %to 33 %, but rear-end crashes increased between 50 percent and 71 percent at these same intersections. But, hey! Virginia went ahead anyway and passed legislation approving their RLC use in certain communities.

And a 2005 news report in Portland, OR, four years after the installation of RLCs showed a 140% increase in rear-end collisions. But, hey! Police and city officials thought the program was a success because it was bringing in approximately $4.3 million annually.

BESIDES, SOMEONE WOULD PROBABLY STEAL THEM FIRST
This brings us back to Massachusetts and the inevitable failure of RLCs—if adopted—to whip even a modicum of red light respect into the state’s drivers. Here’s what the research tells us.

1. The previous entry on following distance (Following Distance: How Close Is Not Close Enough) posited that following distance in Boston is described by the Stepponit—Ghetovmyass formula which reveals a direct, negative correlation between the Aggravation Coefficient and Passenger Pressure but which remains unaffected by other external conditions such as road conditions, traffic volume, and—it is presumed—by the presence of enforcement mechanisms, e.g., RLCs.
2. Further, studies of Boston driving given support to the little understood Floorit Function which posits that following distance (d) becomes asymptotic to zero as time following a change from green to yellow (t) increases. This behavior permits the maximum number of cars to cross an intersection (or make a left turn on a left turn lead signal) without creating a break into which the cross- or oncoming traffic can enter. (This is not unlike the behavior in which drivers can exceed the posted speed limits with impunity when the number of other cars also speeding is greater than three.) With only inches between cars, RLCs are unable to capture individual license plates.

But, there is good news in all this. Even though it can be demonstrated that RLCs will fail miserably in Boston should they be implemented, the resulting increase in rear-end collisions, so widely observed elsewhere, is unlikely to be seen. This phenomenon is explained, once again, by the Stepponit-Ghetovmyass formula which predicts that drivers will continue to maintain mathematically described following distances irrespective of all other factors. Hence, the incidence of rear-end collisions can be expected to remain constant. As it would seem, science protects fools, innocent children, and those driving like ass.