Caught in a Flash

Gassing up his aging Camaro along the Costa Mesa Freeway, Shawn (“Just Shawn, OK?”) explained why he’d run that red light two miles back.

He’d fudged the 19th Street signal at the foot of the freeway by a good two seconds, accelerating through at 50 mph or more.

“Those signals are screwed,” he said. “The yellow is way too short.” (Actually, it lasted about 3 1/2 seconds, during which Shawn’s car traveled at least 250 feet. A football field is 300 feet.)

Isn’t it dangerous? Not really, said Shawn. “I’ve never gotten a ticket for it.”

If the main danger is getting caught, then running red lights is about to become much more dangerous for drivers like Shawn. After years of testing and considerable controversy, the red-light cameras are coming to an intersection near you.

In California, they’re already catching red-light runners in Beverly Hills, Oxnard, San Diego, El Cajon, Poway, San Francisco and Santa Rosa. Soon they’ll be working in Los Angeles and Sacramento. At least 25 other California cities are looking into camera enforcement.

Mounted at problem intersections and tripped by sensors buried in the pavement, the cameras snap photographs of cars that plunge into the intersection after the signal turns red.

Within two weeks, a ticket arrives in the mail of the registered owner. The fine is $271 and one point against your driving record. Get four points in a year and your license can be suspended.

“There are drivers who just don’t care,” said Richard Retting, senior transportation engineer at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in Arlington, Va. “There are hard-core offenders. Most of the time, they make it through. But the times they don’t are horrendous for the victims. People are sick and tired of this.”

Running red lights is the single largest cause of urban collisions and injuries, and California leads the nation by far, according to insurance industry research. Red-light runners caused 656 collisions and killed 768 people in California between 1992 and 1996.

These crashes are often lethal because they are almost always “T-bone” collisions--one car striking another in the side. “There are just inches between the outer shell and the occupant,” said Retting, and consequently the chances of being severely injured or killed is the highest of any collision--about 45%.

Ask Karen, a sales manager who drives about 4,000 miles a month in Southern California. She has been hit by red-light runners twice--once while driving, once while riding a bicycle--and both times suffered serious injuries, including a miscarriage.

What does she think about red-light cameras?

“Get rid of them. It’s too much Big Brother,” said Karen, who didn’t want to give her surname. “It’s one step away from bar codes across your forehead. It’s the worst thing I can imagine. Whether or not I did wrong, I’d rather face a person.”

She learned about camera enforcement when she received a ticket in the mail from Beverly Hills police. She thinks she might not have been cited if she could have explained matters to a live cop.

“I’m sure someone who’s in favor is thinking of protection and safety,” she said. “I’m thinking of protection of my privacy. What’s to stop them having cameras everywhere?”

But what’s private about running a red light? supporters ask.

“It’s going to take getting a ticket for a lot of these people to stop,” said Bridgette Smith, who helps manage camera enforcement in San Francisco. “Our whole purpose is to get people’s attention and reduce injuries and fatalities.”

Assemblyman Tom McClintock (R-Northridge), a law-and-order conservative on the Assembly Transportation Committee, is the leader of opposition in Sacramento. He delayed the latest enabling legislation for three weeks with a passionate speech on the Assembly floor.

“The scofflaw who brazenly races through the intersection to the peril of other drivers--we get him, and he’s got it coming,” McClintock told the Assembly.

“But how about the busy mom who misjudges the yellow light by a fraction of a second? Do you really want to take her grocery money for the next month? The elderly gentleman driving his wife to the doctor who hesitates for a fraction of a second before he hits the brakes and crosses the limit line by inches before he stops--do you really want to take half of his Social Security check?”

That’s not how the cameras work, say their supporters.

According to U.S. Public Technologies, installer of all intersection cameras now working in California, there are safeguards to prevent undeserved citations.

The camera, mounted 12 feet above the intersection in a bulletproof case atop a pole at the sidewalk, is connected to the traffic signals and cannot take pictures until the light turns red.

Even with the red light on, the camera won’t photograph every vehicle that passes over the limit line. It is programmed to wait a beat--usually two- or three-tenths of a second--before snapping any pictures, thus eliminating borderline violations.

It also is set to ignore any vehicle traveling at slow speed--usually about 10 or 15 mph--thus eliminating stops just over the limit line and right turns during red lights.

Plate and Driver’s Face Must Be Clear

A second camera is required for left-turn violators--those strings of drivers continuing after the left-turn arrow turns red. (Traffic engineers call it “platooning.”) Those cameras, where they’ve been installed, are quick enough to photograph every vehicle going through.

When the camera senses a red-light runner, it takes two photographs in rapid succession. Under state law, both the license plate and the driver’s face must be clearly visible. Because sometimes the license plate or driver’s face is obscured, 50% to 75% of photos taken don’t qualify for citations.

Citations, accompanied by the photographs, are mailed to the registered owners within 15 days. Like other such tickets, they can be challenged in court.

“We’ve been attacked in court,” said Senior Officer Don Mulville of the Oxnard Police Department. “I’ve been personally to court over 60 times. But we have not lost a case.”

Camera citations, however, carry a unique option. The registered owner who has been cited may return the ticket, swearing that someone else was driving the car.

If he or she provides the driver’s name and license number, the citation is canceled and another issued to the actual driver. Fibbing, however, can land the registered owner in court for perjury.

Results from ticketing red-light runners have been spectacular, according to statistics released by cities.

* San Francisco reported a 42% decrease in red-light violations.

* Beverly Hills saw even greater reductions. By one measure, violations fell by 58%.

* In Oxnard, researchers found a spillover effect: Red-light running also decreased at intersections without cameras. Five people died in red-light crashes in Oxnard the year before the cameras were installed in 1997. Cameras have been in place for more than a year now, and no one has died.

These results can cost a city virtually nothing. To pay for camera enforcement, the enabling legislation sends a minimum of 30% of each fine back to the jurisdiction where the violations took place. When that amount proved insufficient, fines were raised from $104 to $271.

When Oxnard decided to install cameras at 11 intersections and allow the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety to study the results, U.S. Public Technologies virtually underwrote that city’s program. It installed the cameras at its own expense, serviced them and processed the citations, all for $25 per ticket.

“We wanted to show once and for all that this technology works,” said Dana King, the firm’s marketing director.

Now that camera enforcement is catching on, however, cities should expect to “share the risk,” King said. Translation: You’ll have to lay out money for installation and operation, and recoup it through actual fines.

McClintock argues that this sort of arrangement is at the core of what’s wrong with camera enforcement. Cities will begin seeing the cameras as cash cows, the assemblyman said. As citations decrease and fine revenues drop, cameras will be adjusted to issue more and more marginal, or just plain unfair, tickets.

“The rapacity of this system will ultimately bring about its downfall,” he said.

Abby Yant of the San Francisco Department of Public Health denied any profit motive. She helped research driver attitudes in that city and concluded that attitude is everything when it comes to running red lights. “The point is to change the behavior, not make money.”

Aggressive Drivers, Distracted Minds

Yant said interviews of admitted red-light runners showed they fall into two categories--the “aggressives” and the “distracteds.”

“The aggressives, they think they won’t get caught and it’s perfectly safe,” Yant said. “The message for them needs to be, ‘You are going to get caught.’ ”

Camera enforcement is perfect for this, she said. Just seeing the cameras will have an impact on these drivers, much as seeing drunk-driving checkpoints sobers up drivers for a while.

“The distracteds are more challenging,” Yant said. “They have too many things on their minds and space out for a moment or two. They’re cell-phone users, people trying to find their sunglasses, people thinking about dinner.

“They’re good people, they know it’s dangerous and they feel guilty about it. Distracteds explain, but they don’t justify.”

Yant said that when discussing red-light running accidents in which people were killed, respondents displayed startling differences in attitudes.

Distracteds were outraged and thought red-light runners should go to jail. But the aggressives?

“They expressed concern and sympathy for the driver, like ‘He must feel really bad,’ ” said Yant.

“This is often a secondary concern, but for them it was the primary concern. They identified with the drivers, not the victims. Some of these victims were pedestrians on the sidewalk.”

Cities in Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have been catching such drivers with cameras since the 1970s, and reporting large decreases in violations and collisions.

But the cameras were a bust when first tried in California. Pasadena installed two in 1989 and pulled the plug only a few months later. The cameras were using 95% of their film on cars turning right against red lights, which is illegal in most cities but legal in California.

Insurance industry research soon reawakened interest in the cameras, however. In the early 1990s, the insurance institute reported that a person is 25% more likely to be involved in a collision in the city than anywhere else and that red-light running is the largest single cause--22% of all collisions, and 27% of collisions with injuries.

The institute began testing the cameras.

At about the same time, a series of red-light fatalities in State College, Pa., alarmed one of its residents, Tom Larson, who just happened to run the Federal Highway Administration. “I asked our people to start looking seriously for a way we could minimize this behavior,” Larson said.

What resulted was a slick package of audio, video and written materials for launching local safety campaigns, plus $15,000 grants to help get the campaigns started.

Thirty-two cities, including San Francisco and Sacramento, signed up, and some went to great lengths to carry out the campaigns. For a while, police in Kenner, La., were pulling over motorists who had obeyed the red light by issuing prizes instead of citations.

Mila Plosky, who manages the highway administration’s safety outreach, credited the program for making people aware of the red-light running problem and laying a foundation for approval of camera enforcement. “Public acceptance is not there without the (public relations effort),” she said.

In 1994, New York became the first large U.S. city to install the cameras. In the same year, cameras were installed in Southern California at the Blue Line’s high-speed train crossings between Los Angeles and Long Beach. MetroLink added cameras to its Southland train crossings later.

But the turning point for camera enforcement occurred in San Francisco in October 1994. A driver ran a red light at 19th and Holloway avenues near San Francisco State University, swerved to avoid another car and skidded through a crowd of 50 students at a bus stop.

The accident triggered a strong reaction in the city. “Resentment of people running red lights was already past the simmer,” said Susan Lael, then a member of the Board of Supervisors. “When this accident happened, everyone felt, ‘This is out of control.’ ”

Lael said she was receiving calls “that would just blow you away.” One mother called and told her, “Some guy gained a minute and killed my son.”

Lael led the campaign that eventually resulted in legislation to allow camera enforcement. When the expiration date of that legislation was lifted this year, queries from city police and traffic departments greatly increased.

“Scofflaws are a very difficult segment to reach,” the insurance institute’s Retting said. “But the certainty of punishment does change behavior for that group as well. It may just take longer.”

The reaction of Shawn, the scofflaw in Costa Mesa, to such reasoning is pure defiance: “Aren’t there enough cops around handing out bullshit tickets?” Cameras are just one more intrusion, he said.

If any intersection camera photographs Shawn, it will get more than his license plate. It will get his license plate frame inscribed with his driving philosophy: “Get in, sit down, hang on and shut up.”

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Photo Finish

Automatic cameras that snap photos of motorists who run red lights are at work in seven California cities. More are on the way. Supporters say the cameras greatly reduce violations and crash injuries. Opponents say cameras are unfair and an intrusion into privacy.

How Red-Light Cameras Work

A car entering the intersection after the light turns red passes over loops buried in the pavement and trips the camera. Cars making legal right turns or stopping just past the limit line aren’t photographed.

1. First photo: Taken at limit line.

2. Second photo: Taken after vehicle enters intersection.

Citation Sample

If photos clearly show both the license plate number and the face of the driver, a citation is issued by mail to the vehicle’s registered owner. Between 25% and 50% of photos result in citations.

Red-Light Death Rates

Rank: 1.

City: Phoenix

Number of deaths: 8.11

*

Rank: 2.

City: Mesa, Ariz.

Number of deaths: 7.08

*

Rank: 3.

City: Memphis, Tenn.

Number of deaths: 5.45

*

Rank: 4.

City: Tucson

Number of deaths: 5.11

*

Rank: 5.

City: St. Petersburg, Fla.

Number of deaths: 4.95

*

Rank: 14.

City: Los Angeles

Number of deaths: 3.92

*

Rank: 15.

City: Anaheim

Number of deaths: 3.88

*

Rank: 27.

City: Santa Ana

Number of deaths: 3.08

States That Permit Red-Light Camera Enforcement

Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Virginia, Washington. Also, District of Columbia.

California Cities Using Camera Enforcement

Santa Rosa, San Francisco, Beverly Hills, Oxnard, Poway, El Cajon, San Diego

Red-Light Camera Data Block

Red-light cameras contan computers that flash data onto the film as the violation is being photographed. How to read the ciation:

*

Data block for first photo

Time: 16:48 (4:48 p.m.)

Lane 1: yellow light lasted 3.9 seconds

Violation number.

Date: Sept. 21, 1995

Car crossed limit line 7.2 seconds after red light.

Location ID code.

*

Data block for second photo

Time

Interval between photos: 1.5 seconds

Violation number

Date

Second photo taken 8.7 seconds after red light

Vehicle speed: 25 mph.

*

Sources: California Highway Patrol, Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, California Senate Transporatation Committee, local jurisdictions.

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California Jurisdictions Considering Red-Light Cameras

Alameda County

Fremont

Pleasanton

Fresno County

Fresno

Los Angeles County

Burbank

County of Los Angeles (unincorporated areas)

Culver City

La Puente

Pasadena

Santa Monica

Orange County

Brea

Garden Grove

Huntington Beach

Irvine

Riverside County

Cathedral City

Riverside

San Bernardino County

Rancho Cucamonga

San Diego County

Escondido

Santee

San Mateo County

Redwood City

Santa Clara County

Cupertino

San Jose

Ventura County

Port Hueneme

Source: California Senate Transportation Committee