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**Note** If you enjoy this article, please recommend/like/favorite/link/share this blog with others. I spend a good deal of time writing and researching while trying to “rant responsibly” and wish to help others see when our governments (whether federal, state, or local) work closely with for-profit corporations to fleece local citizens. See my previous series of articles on this topic for more background. After all, it’s your money.

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Recently, some local city and county governments around the state have been citing a recent Missouri Dept of Transportation study as a reason to continue and/or expand their red light camera programs. In their press release, MoDOT proudly proclaims ” We believe automated enforcement is a good tool for keeping motorists safe”. Yet, incredibly, in the very next paragraph of the same PR release, they acknowledge that their own study data revealed accidents at the intersections with red light cameras ACTUALLY INCREASED 14% overall! What the?

If MoDOT really believes that increasing accidents at intersections is a great way of keeping motorists safe, the motoring public needs to immediately storm the statehouse and demand the summary termination of every employee involved in the commission and analysis of this study. After all, think of the children!! Otherwise, with that kind of thinking, we should probably expect them to begin installing large sink holes around the state to reduce congestion, requiring all drivers to operate their vehicles in reverse on Wednesdays to “take some wear off our roads,” and randomly shoving large boulders onto 4-lane interstates to slow people down and get them to buckle up. Seriously, MoDOT, are you as dimwitted as you sound?

“But!” the MoDOT dimbulbs will hurriedly exhort, “The study also found a whopping 45 percent reduction in right angle crashes causing fatalities and serious injuries at intersections using red-light cameras.” Ahh, touche, perhaps? Hmmm, well no, not really. Looking at their own raw data, we find that whopper 45% figure represents a grand total reduction of 3 (that’s THREE) accidents over a grand total of 55 intersections studied over a three-year period (a reduction from 9 to 6 serious accidents). And even that data is sketchy because when looking at the intersections both pre- and post-red light camera installation, they looked at a full 3 years data when compiling the “pre” camera data, but only a 12-36 month “post” camera period, citing not having full data on all of the intersections as a reason. So, were we to actually compare apples to apples, it’s quite possible there would be zero difference in the number of serious right angle accidents, or even an increase in them if comparable and complete data were available.

And that’s not all. There are legitimate questions about the methods and sources used in the MoDOT study which cast serious doubt upon the results and their impartiality. For instance, they failed to use data from the city of Washington, MO, even though the data were available to the authors and fit the purposes of the study. Why would they not use data from the city of Washington? Hmmm, could it be because the data wasn’t helpful to the conclusion they desired? Could it be because American Traffic Solutions, one of the “vendors” who had input into the study, but who’s name was not disclosed by MoDOT, asked that it be excluded? Could it be because Washington has seen fit to take down their cameras (why on earth would they do that? Think of the children, Washingtonians, think of the children!!) and thus pissed off ATS? Who knows, but it is certainly curious that no data made it into the study from one of the first towns in Missouri to install red light cameras. Just the fact that ATS contributed to the creation of MoDOT’s study trashes their statement of impartiality and should therefore be looked upon with skeptical eyes and a grain of salt.

Also consider this: Just in the immediate St. Louis city and county, where red light cameras have been in place since 2005, over 267,000 tickets have been issued. And at $100 a pop, that comes to nearly $27 MILLION in revenue for those municipalities. That’s 27 million reasons for American Traffic Solutions, installation vendors, and city and county government employees to deeply desire proof that red light cameras are more than just an illegal violation of citizens’ constitutional rights, they’re downright good at making people safer! And in the end, all of those conflicted parties just want us to be safe! Right? I mean after all, they couldn’t implement alternative solutions like, oh I don’t know, increase yellow light times, or install “red light ahead” signals at busy intersections, instead of going with the revenue-generating solution that actually INCREASES accidents……could they?

And according to this review of MoDOT’s study:

“The use of Bayesian analysis on the severe crash data is not a good fit for the data due to the extreme rarity of severe crashes at the studied intersections, for example more than 85% of the intersections studied had no severe right angle crashes at all during the before period, making the statistical change shown for severe right angle crashes insignificant.”

In sum, MoDOT’s study is severely flawed, to the point of being little more than a justification tool by cities and counties who want to continue automated enforcement for the benefit of their coffers, all while being opposed in every location where they are used by a large majority of the citizens they are supposed to “protect.”

Golly gosh, at least our incompetent, lobbyist-run, and political cash-compromised government is thinking of the children. At least there’s that.

To fully understand how local and state governments are working to fill their coffers while simultaneously violating your constitutional rights via red light and speed cameras, please visit the excellent www.WrongOnRed.com. It’s a site run by a former city council member for the city of Arnold, MO, the first Missouri town to put red light cameras into use in the state. It has copious amounts of data, research, links, and much more showing the true purpose and behind-the-scenes corruption surrounding the red light camera issue.

UPDATE:

Here’s some evidence that renders even the deeply flawed MoDOT study superfluous. Using the city of Arnold’s own records to prove his point, WrongOnRed’s Matt Hay charts the number of red light violations in Arnold, MO before and after traffic engineers lengthened the yellow light times at the intersections with red light cameras. Note the dramatic reduction in number of violations (and thus citations issued) after yellow light times were adjusted to reflect actual traffic flow. It proves pretty conclusively that simple adjustments are all that is needed to “make us safer,” and that expensive, constitution-violating, money-generating red light cameras operated by for-profit corporations are demonstrably unnecessary, not to mention strongly disliked by the majority of the driving public.

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