The Dallas News reports that the Live Large, Think Big city is dealing with another consequences of red light cameras: they work. "We did not anticipate having such success so early with the number of people not running red lights," said Zaida Basora, Dallas' assistant director of public works and transportation. "If you have success in safety, you don't have a lot of success in revenue. The other side is the people will go back to what they were doing before without the cameras." Since installing the cameras, Dallas estimates gross revenue from red light cameras dropped from $14m to $4m. The kicker? Dallas signed a contract guaranteeing the system's operators $3800 per camera per month. Dallas is now planning on scaling back to just 100 cameras (that's $380k per month to the sys admin). Last month, Dallas faced accusations of race-biased camera placement. So is the shut down a financial issue or just an out for last month's problems? One wonders which cameras were switched off.. but it's probably both.
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Funny how they bought into the ‘revenue’ end of the deal, without considering the positive safety effect.
I wonder which aspect that the salesman was stressing to the city leaders?
How much did rear-end collisions increase at each of these locations?
If I ran an auto insurance company, I would seriously look at raising the rates of those that live in an area with red light cameras.
Red light cameras are a solution in search of a problem. I didn’t think that running red lights was a problem on-par with, let’s say, drinking and driving. Surely, not enough of a problem to warrant the cost of surveillance.
-ted
I think they can recoup the costs if the just eliminate that pesk yellow light.
Uh oh – NOW what??
That pesky public isn’t running enough red lights but we still owe for the cameras!
As most everybody figured out at the beginning this was ALWAYS about r-e-v-e-n-u-e.
How do I become a red light camera provider for a large urban area? This beats working for a living, you can sit back and wait for the check. Once ina while repair vandalism damage to a camera or install a new one and your set.
GS,
You bring up a good point. Has there been a lot of vandalism that we are not hearing about?
Honestly, we are talking about Texas here. I am quite sure that if they put one of these in Lufkin (or other more rural local) it would get shot within a few days for the first violations hitting the mail boxes, if not before.
I haven’t been accused by one of these little toll booths, but I am thinking that a new shot gun would be a good antidote for my anger if I were.
The artcle in the Dallas Morning News is very good. Good that they quoted National Motorists Association as well as a local opponent.
It is interesting that Dallas didn’t shorten the yellow light, which is what usually happens, in order to boost revenue.
Each camera would have to ticket 50 people a month for Dallas to break even. That and the fact that they are not breaking even suggests that there is very little red light running in Dallas.
The Dallas News reports that the Live Large, Think Big city is dealing with another consequences of red light cameras: they work.
Minor detail here; the paper is called The Dallas Morning News. Dallas News is just their URL.
Back to the story, I think it is hilarious that the cameras are apparently not going to pay for themselves. Hopefully, they won’t cause many more rear-end collisions…