Aurora’s dubious affair with companies allowing the city to cash in on careless motorists caught on camera fudging red lights must come to an end.
For several years now, Aurora and its police have tried to persuade the public and state lawmakers that photo red-light ticketing systems make the streets safer.
Neither we nor the public are convinced.
This week, city council critics of these commuter-driven cash cows took up the mantle again against a program that essentially sucks about $3 million a year out of the pockets of Aurora drivers.
It’s got to stop, and it just may. There are proposals to limit the program, and greatly reduce the city’s take for automatically handing out tickets to red-light scofflaws. But the bigger threat is in asking voters if they want to dump the program.
On a state level, lawmakers are trying again to limit these noxious programs across Colorado. One measure is being championed by state Sen. Morgan Carroll, who calls the programs a government overreach and big-brother-like intrusion of the public.
Proponents of these red-light cash programs, making up about half of the city council these days, defend the remote-ticketing systems, saying they reduce serious side-hit crashes and generally make people pay closer attention to their driving.
But this isn’t about doing the justifiable thing. It’s about doing the right thing.
Carroll is right. How far are we willing to go in allowing mechanized and institutionalized monitoring of the public in hopes of catching someone doing something wrong, that comes with a check attached to it?
Not this far. We have no problem with remotely monitoring these and other areas that are designated as dangerous, but if there are so many scofflaws, police and traffic engineers need to find a way to eliminate them without relying on spuriously spying on the public in a cash-for-catching-you schemes that also enrich companies like Xerox.
The statistics and anecdotes from anyone behind the wheel these days will tell you that reckless, distracted and aggressive drivers on roads and highways all over Aurora are far more dangerous and worrisome than are red-light scofflaws at these intersections. Yet those growing problems seem to get little if any attention on the scale of these intersections.
And even if the questionable ethics of these programs are set aside, the sketchy data offered by police and others as indisputable studies simply aren’t. And they aren’t by any means compelling enough to justify the overall wrongness these programs yield.
Here are some facts:
• Intersections that are redesigned or that increase the length of yellow lights are made much more safer and see far fewer accidents than intersections installing red-light cash cows. About 80 percent of red-light runners run the light within the first second of a red light, according to studies completed by traffic departments in Texas and California. Those states showed a reduction of about 70 percent of red-light violations just by increasing yellow-light times by three seconds or less.
• Cities that use these robot-camera devices give them priority over traffic-light synchronization, which is one of the most effective ways to reduce car crashes.
• The delay between the offense and the punishment is often weeks long. A cop pulling over a driver and issuing a ticket has an immediate impact on a driver. Everyone knows what seeing a cop car does to everyone within eye-shot. But just another bill in the mail does relatively little to change driver behavior.
• These systems only focus on one type of scofflaw. They do nothing to stop or prevent reckless, careless and dangerous drivers beyond the intersections, who cause the majority of crashes everywhere.
Aurora needs to pull the plug. If lawmakers can’t bring themselves to do it, the voters will undoubtedly do it for them.