Red Light Cameras

[baz1985]

hello all. im perplexed as to how red light cameras work. Surely in heavy traffic like the M67 and M60 roudabout if you pass a light at green but do not pass the junction entirely due to traffic and the light turns red you dont get an NIP or do you?. ive looked on national safety scameras website and searched google for the greater manchester partnership and can't find it. does it exist?

[gh0st]

I think they only go off if you are going over a certain speed.

[james24]

often wondered that myself

[Teppic]

I thought they weresupposed to become active approx. 2 seconds after the traffic light goes red, but there seems to be some anecdotal evidence that they are now becoming active on amber...

Lots more people are amber gamblers than red-light jumpers, y'see... more money in it

[redboy]

Here the official line from the Northants Police
"The cameras all have bright yellow fronts, so are clearly visible, and will take two photos of the rear of every vehicle that jumps a red light. Offenders will receive a Fixed Penalty Notice in the post, incurring a £60 fine and three penalty points on their driving licence"

Heres the site with the full blurb....
www.northants.police.uk/safetycamera/news113.htm

[chief-0369]

if a red light camera catches someone and the lights are amber, it would be impossible to secure a conviction as the "i couldnt stop in time without causing an accident" defence could be used

Im not saying that some forces dont set them to amber, knowing that most wont fight it and will just pay up though.

[cptsideways]

It takes one picture as you cross the line & set the sensor off (lines in road) & a second picture about 2 seconds later.

Obviously if you have crossed the junction in that time you'll be done as they'll see thats the case. If you are sat at the junction entrance in a pall of smoke & skid marks then you should get away with it. Reverse if necessary.

Always a good place to test the reaction time of the people following you up the ass.

[puggit]

You can also get done for speeding through a red-light camera as a colleague here can testify (A417/A419 Swindon).

[tonyrec]

Teppic said:

I thought they weresupposed to become active approx. 2 seconds after the traffic light goes red, but there seems to be some anecdotal evidence that they are now becoming active on amber... Lots more people are amber gamblers than red-light jumpers, y'see... more money in it

They are active as soon as the light turns to Red.
If they were travelling at 70mph...after 2 secs they would be gone and the picture would be of the road surface only.

These cameras i certainly agree with, no ifs, bits or maybes

[count duckula]

Can they do you for speeding even if your lights are green ? Or do they only record the speed of cars that jump the lights ??

Malc

[tonyrec]

Purely cars that jump the lights

[chief-0369]

they use inductive loops which are not accurate enough to provide a speed measurement that would stand up in court.

one is placed before the stopline, one after. if you trigger both within a short space of time after it goes red. flash flash.

we havnt got any where I work (yet) so I not sure of much else. we may have a design guide that i can dig out at lunch though

[XM5ER]

baz1985 said:

national safety scameras website and searched google for the greater manchester partnership and can't find it. does it exist?

I cant find who looks after Manchesters scameras either, despite the fact that they were talking about forming a partnership not so long ago

Has anybody else noticed a marked increase in red light jumpers in the last few weeks?

[puggit]

In my previous job I saw quite a few red light tickets which had a speed measurement

Mainly Essex Plod I think (pre-partnership days)

[chief-0369]

not sure then, inductive loops can give a speed measurement, its just I dont think they are accurate enough to stand up in court. maybe some cameras have speed measurement as well.

I couldnt find a design guide but Ill look elsewhere later.

[Tafia]

tonyrec said:

Teppic said: I thought they weresupposed to become active approx. 2 seconds after the traffic light goes red, but there seems to be some anecdotal evidence that they are now becoming active on amber... Lots more people are amber gamblers than red-light jumpers, y'see... more money in it They are active as soon as the light turns to Red. If they were travelling at 70mph...after 2 secs they would be gone and the picture would be of the road surface only. These cameras i certainly agree with, no ifs, bits or maybes

Tony,

Here is a but........the gist is that some authorities in the US and perhaps here have been caught out shortening the amber times in order to make money. To make junctions safer would require amber times to be increased but these blighters were shortening them.

Below is a piece taken from:
www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/079bkyhi.asp

Please note there are five parts to the report.


New York became the first city in this country to permanently operate red light cameras in 1993. Since then, the argument against them has been a fairly obvious one. Typically, some local columnist storms the barricades clutching his dog-eared Orwell or Huxley, screeching about an erosion of liberties, the government threatening our privacy, and on and on. To which one can almost feel readers stifling a collective yawn.

Even if Americans should be concerned about the death-by-a-thousand-cuts privacy is suffering with spooky surveillance technologies like biometric face scanning, most long ago resigned themselves to being surveilled every time they gas their cars or buy Slim Jims at 7-Eleven. To some, automated enforcement technology is just a natural progression.

But recently the debate has shifted to address less abstract issues such as: Does the technology even work? Does it reduce accidents and safety risks, or cause more of its own? Are cities overstating a threat, overselling a technology, and undercutting more important safety countermeasures to gouge revenues out of their citizens?

Rep. Dick Armey's answer to those questions was made abundantly clear in his recent report, titled--with jackhammer subtlety--"The Red Light Camera Scam."

Released last May, the report was met with ridicule by editorialists, many of whom suffer from the Armey Effect, dictating that if the relatively unpopular congressman is against something, they should be for it.

What stretched the credulity of most critics was the implied assertion that cities were reducing their yellow-light intervals in order to entrap motorists with red light cameras--or "scameras," as detractors now call them. "You're full of it, sir," was one of the punditocracy's gentler admonitions.

But while critics were busy dismantling the most incendiary and least supportable charge in Armey's report, they missed a much more important point. Cities don't need to reduce yellow-light times to generate revenue, they merely have to plant cameras at intersections where short amber times foster red-light running. It's a more subtle assertion, but one that Armey's chief researcher, Richard Diamond, scrupulously documents.

Study after study has shown that increasing yellow light intervals (the least expensive, if not most profitable, engineering fix) reduces the likelihood of motorist indecision in what engineers call "the dilemma zone"--the second or so it takes to react when encountering a changing light.

Historically, amber times have been set between three and six seconds, depending on a host of variables from the posted speed at an intersection to the grade of its approach.

The formula for these standards comes from a hodgepodge of recommendations by the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) and the Federal Highway Administration's "Manual on Traffic Control Devices." To give just an inkling of how things have changed over the years, in the mid '70s, the Institute of Transportation Engineers recommended a yellow time long enough to factor in reaction time plus stopping time plus "clearance time," or the time it takes to get through an intersection.

But by the late '90s, that standard had been steadily eroded by altogether shaving off clearance time, lowering yellow light intervals by as much as a third, which often leaves the motorist stranded in the dilemma zone. To make matters worse, the ITE, which in 1985 was still recommending yellow lights be lengthened to help clear intersections, now, with the advent of red light cameras, offers that "enforcement can be used instead."

The real-world translation here is that according to 1976 practices, an 80-foot-wide intersection with a 35 mph approach on a 2.6 percent downhill grade would warrant a five-second yellow light interval. But according to 1999 formulas, it is considered acceptable to allot the same intersection a 4 second interval. A second might not seem like much. Consider, however, that even automated-enforcement cheerleader Richard Retting of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety concedes that yellow-light increases decrease the chance of red-light running incidents. Likewise, Retting's studies show that of drivers classified as "red light runners," 80 percent enter an intersection less than a second after a yellow signal has turned red.

The ITE recommendations, of course, weren't carved in stone at Mt. Sinai. Rather, they're published in scarcely read traffic manuals. But increasing yellow-light intervals at problem intersections is certainly easier, if not more profitable, than starting red light camera programs. Extending yellow times has proven successful, even if cities don't publicize it. In San Diego, where even the police chief was caught admitting that at many red-light-camera intersections, accidents have increased, the nation's bloodiest skirmish over red-light cameras has played itself out in court, revealing all sorts of city/contractor chicanery. There, lawyers representing motorists found the city planting a red-light camera at an intersection where no accidents had occurred for years. But that didn't stop the camera from generating 2,000 citations per month, until engineers realized the yellow light was more than a second too short. When they increased it, the number of citations dropped to fewer than 300 per month.

Local police departments that employ automated technology, of course, perpetually stress that their sole concern is reducing accidents. It's curious, then, what happens when you start checking just what steps they have taken to do so. When I asked the District of Columbia's Department of Public Works for a list of yellow-light times at camera intersections, almost all reported a 4-second interval. But ITE standards permit extending yellow lights up to 6 seconds. Keeping in mind that these are supposed to be trouble spots, I inquired about the last time these intervals had been changed. "Years and years ago, maybe never," one employee said. Likewise, though cities are typically coached by contractors to place cameras at heavy-volume intersections (generating more tickets), statistics from the same office reveal a noticeable shortage of red-light cameras at the city's most dangerous intersections. Of the top 10 high-crash intersections for the two years that preceded the District's installation of 39 cameras in 1999, the 1997 figures show four of the top 10 (including 2 of the top 3) did not warrant red-light cameras (even though one of them accounted for two of the only three reported deaths). Additionally, 7 of the top 10 high-crash intersections for 1998 didn't rate cameras--even though they were installed just a year later.

In other cities, the percentages are even worse. In Charlotte, North Carolina, WBTV found their safety conscious officials failed to install cameras at 23 of the highest-crash intersections. And in San Diego, the Red Light Camera Defense Team, a consortium of pro bono lawyers representing motorists against the city found that 12 of the 19 red-light camera intersections had three-second yellow intervals, and that Lockheed Martin IMS--our old friends from D.C.--had sought out intersections with high traffic volume, short yellow cycles, and downhill approaches--the kinds of intersections that citation-happy police officers used to call "cherry ponds" or "duck patches." What the lawyers didn't find was any evidence supporting officials' claims that their program, like D.C.'s and Charlotte's before it, was "about safety." Not a single one of the city's 19 cameras was operating at one of its highest-accident sites.


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Tune in Wednesday for Part 3: The Safety Myth


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Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5
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Matt Labash is senior writer at The Weekly Standard.



>> Edited by Tafia on Tuesday 9th December 14:57

[Tafia]

tonyrec said:

Purely cars that jump the lights

I am told told they operate as normal speed cameras when the lights are green.