Are Red-Light Cameras At Intersections A Good Idea?
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Red-light runners be warned. The city council of Orange Park near Jacksonville will soon have a candid camera to watch your every move into those intersections that aren’t quite green.
We’ve all seen drivers who run a yellow or red-light - sometimes speeding up to make it even more dangerous. Not only do they risk being T-boned, but they put pedestrians in danger as well.
Now cameras at busy intersections will be triggered when the car enters the intersection after the signal changes and record the time of day, the vehicle speed, and license plate. Each ticket, which the offender will receive in the mail, costs $125. The state would like to take this across Florida.
A revenue generator for the city? Perhaps. But cameras have been shown to substantially reduce red-light running, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. When they were installed in Fairfax, Virginia and Oxnard, California, cameras reduced red-light running by about 40 percent, and reduced intersection crashes by up to 30 percent.
In 2007, the Institute reported that nearly 900 people were killed and 153,000 were injured in collisions at intersections nationally, about half killed by vehicles running red-lights.
Florida law states you should stop at a yellow light before an intersection, if you can. If the light has just turned yellow and it is safe to proceed and the intersection is clear, you are probably okay. But these things are often left to the discretion of the traffic officer, as many have found.
Just make sure you don't stop suddenly when you remember there is a camera recording your every move. The guy following closely behind you might not have received the memo. #