The Red Light Racket

Depending on where you live, there’s a decent chance it’s happened to you. You open up your mailbox one day and find an unwelcome letter from your local government. Inside is a traffic ticket, accompanied by a grainy picture of your car and maybe, if the angle is right, yourself in the driver’s seat, frozen with a blank, cowlike look on your face.

Your accuser is a camera, the likes of which have been deployed in hundreds of towns across the country since New York City installed the first one in 1992.

American car culture has long embraced the philosophy that it’s only illegal if you’re a big enough jerk to be an outlier. Anyone who’s been passed on the highway by a police officer doing twenty over the speed limit knows this. There is something unsporting about getting ticketed by an unblinking camera. It’s like watching someone catch a fish with an electric reel, except in this case, you’re the fish.

Like towing rackets and civil asset forfeiture laws, red light cameras sprang up as a reasonable-sounding solution to a serious problem. Running red lights is dangerous, and people should obviously not do it. But the actual safety benefits of traffic cameras are questionable, and in some jurisdictions where they were installed, public safety took a backseat to budgetary interests and palm-greasing between local governments and the companies that manufacture the cameras.

The case of Mats Järlström is instructive. In 2013, Järlström’s wife was caught by a red light camera in Beaverton, Oregon. The one-hundred and thirty dollar ticket got Järlström, who has a degree in electrical engineering, interested in the fascinating question of exactly how traffic lights are timed. The equation that governs the length of yellow lights has been in use since around 1960. It was a fine attempt at civic problem-solving, but Järlström believed the formula was incomplete because it didn’t account for the extra time needed for a car making a right or left turn, rather than proceeding straight through an intersection. The result was that drivers making a turn and caught by a yellow light in what researchers call the “dilemma zone”—forced either to slam on the brakes or to hit the gas—would still be in the box when the light turned red and ticketed through no fault of their own.

Over the next two years, Järlström developed a new, extended equation and promoted his research, earning an appearance on 60 Minutes and an invitation to present his findings to the Institute of Transportation Engineers, an international trade group that sets policy recommendations for the federal government. He also emailed local and state agencies with his findings. Järlström provided the Beaverton City Council with research showing that some of its yellow lights were timed too short even by the Oregon Department of Transportation’s regular formula. He included a helpful chart showing that the majority of red light camera tickets issued by Beaverton captured drivers turning right, which he believed vindicated his theory.

Instead of thanking Järlström for his volunteer services, the Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying demanded that he desist and fined him five hundred dollars for practicing engineering without a state-issued license. (The board handled its duties with the grim resolve of the K.G.B. It once fined an activist one thousand dollars for arguing before a city council meeting that a proposed power plant would be too loud, and it repeatedly investigated political candidates who touted their engineering backgrounds but lacked state licenses.) The Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning public interest law firm, took up Järlström’s case, and in 2019 a federal magistrate judge ruled that Oregon’s regulations and the board’s heavy-handed enforcement violated the free speech rights of qualified engineers such as Järlström.

Our nation’s capital also has a particularly aggressive traffic camera network, and there have been several recent cases of government abuse. The Washington, D.C., news outlet ABC7 reported in May on the case of Doug and Nancy Nelson. Doug, a seventy-three-year-old Vietnam veteran, was carjacked at gunpoint. The robber then took his car on a joyride throughout the District, racking up more than two thousand dollars in speeding tickets from cameras.

The Nelsons figured this would be an easy-enough problem to fix. They had a police report, after all. But the D.C. government, first through letters and then in meetings with stone-faced bureaucrats, told them they needed to pay up. The Nelsons’ son-in-law appealed to Washington’s ticket adjudication ombudsman—a real title—who told the Nelsons that they hadn’t filed the right form to challenge the tickets properly. No one of course had told them this before, and unbeknownst to the Nelsons their case had already been closed. After six months of fruitless appeals, they owed more than five thousand dollars in accumulated fines. It was only when ABC7 began asking pointed questions to local officials about why two senior citizens were getting soaked in fines for being victims of crime that the Department of Motor Vehicles dismissed the tickets.

That’s only government incompetence on a personal level, though. The real danger is what can happen at scale with a rigged traffic camera. Even the most dedicated police officer can only pull over so many people. An automated camera, on the other hand, doesn’t miss.

Earlier this year, Washington’s NBC News4 found an intersection where residents complained that a stop-sign camera was ticketing them even though they were coming to full stops. When the news channel pulled the statistics for the intersection, it found that the snap-happy camera had generated one million dollars in fines in just a two-month period. What’s more, the number of tickets had jumped dramatically, from four-hundred and fifty-one during the same two months in the previous year to eight-thousand nine-hundred and thirty-eight. Despite this, and despite the news channel observing drivers coming to full four-second stops and still being ticketed at the intersection, a spokesperson for the Department of Transportation insisted that the camera in question was working properly. Then again, for the District’s purposes, maybe it was.

These sorts of money-grabs happen in other places. I once spent two days sitting through hearings at Chicago’s municipal impound court and watched a parade of owners whose cars had been indefinitely impounded for crimes they had either not committed or had been found innocent of in county court. The only way for them to get their cars back was to pay thousands of dollars in fines and storage fees. In 2017, a joint investigation by ABC7 and the Chicago Sun-Times discovered that the vast majority of drivers in several Chicago suburbs cited for running lights were making right turns. (Score another point for Järlström’s theory.) When the reporters sat through court to watch the long line of drivers contesting red light camera tickets, they found that most tickets, indeed in some cases nearly all of them, were being dismissed after video showed the drivers coming to complete stops. Two years later, ABC7 found three Chicago intersections where the duration of green lights had been shortened, but only in the directions where red light cameras had been installed. Coincidentally, those intersections were all among the top ten revenue generators for Chicago red light cameras.

The amount of money these cameras can rake in, all from the pockets of residents, is staggering. The busiest red light camera in Chicago in 2019 generated more than six-thousand five-hundred dollars a day. Overall, local governments in Illinois made more than one billion dollars in red-light camera revenue from 2008 to 2018, according to the Illinois Policy Institute. It will probably come as no shock to hear that Illinois has also generated the most notable cases of public corruption involving red light cameras. A former Illinois state senator pleaded guilty last January to federal bribery and tax evasion charges tied to his support of the red-light-camera company SafeSpeed. The F.B.I. caught the senator on tape promising to go “balls to the wall” to protect SafeSpeed’s interests during the legislative session in exchange for five thousand dollars a month. The feds also indicted the mayor of Crestwood, Illinois, this year on charges of accepting bribes from SafeSpeed while the company was looking to expand into the town.

Meanwhile, SafeSpeed is facing a class action on behalf of motorists who were ticketed as a result of the company’s alleged racketeering scheme to litter the Chicago suburbs with red light cameras. The lead plaintiff in the suit received a one hundred dollar ticket for running a red light while turning right. (One might start to notice a pattern emerging here.) As is often the case in Chicago, SafeSpeed is not being accused of anything new. The previous Chicago red light camera vendor, RedFlex, was caught in a kickback scheme that led to a twenty-million-dollar settlement and a ten-year federal prison sentence for the former city hall manager who oversaw the lucrative contract. The former C.E.O. of RedFlex also pleaded guilty to steering campaign contributions to officials in Columbus and Cincinnati in exchange for contracts.

Evidence of shortened traffic light signals have popped up in other places. In 2010, San Carlos, California had to issue more than one-hundred-fifty thousand dollars in traffic ticket refunds after citizen complaints led to the discovery that an intersection with a red light camera had an illegally short yellow duration. Fremont, California, refunded nearly five-hundred thousand dollars to drivers in 2017 in a similar debacle. In 2013, The Florida Department of Transportation announced that it was slightly lengthening the duration of yellow lights, following a local news investigation that alleged cities were using shorter yellows to make more money from red light cameras. Over the years, newspapers and citizen sleuths have also found shortened yellow lights at intersections with red light cameras in Nashville, Chattanooga, Lubbock, and Dallas.

Yes, there’s corruption and malfeasance, one might argue, but both of those problems can be fixed with stronger oversight. If red light cameras do actually reduce traffic fatalities and accidents, that might be an acceptable trade-off. The argument for traffic cameras is that they reduce accidents by deterring light-runners and speeders, and this makes sense on its face. The sting of a one hundred dollar ticket is not soon forgotten.

Research from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety suggests that cameras reduce fatal red-light crashes by about twenty-one percent, while fatal crashes increase by thirty percent at intersections where cameras were removed. A study from 2013 of red light cameras installed in Virginia found significant decreases in the amount of red-light violations after cameras were installed. But another one from Case Western Reserve University in 2018 involving traffic accidents in Houston found that red light cameras had no appreciable effect on the number either of traffic accidents or of injuries resulting from them. The decline in angle accidents, like the dreaded “T-bone,” was cancelled out by an increase in all other categories of accidents, such as rear-end collisions. A traffic study commissioned by the Chicago Tribune in 2014 found similar increases in rear-end collisions, while the actual reduction in T-bone crashes was far lower than the numbers claimed by the city. More damningly, the Tribune also found that Chicago was placing cameras at relatively safe intersections with low numbers of injury-causing accidents, and that it had dropped the threshold for cameras to ticket drivers even when the yellow-light duration was below the three-second minimum required by federal standards. (The federal Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, a scintillating read, says that a yellow change interval should have a minimum duration of three seconds and a maximum of six seconds.) This year’s annual Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles report on red light cameras around the state found that crashes actually rose after the installation of cameras, from roughly ten thousand to eleven thousand. Both angle and rear-end collisions increased, as did injury crashes. The number of fatal crashes decreased by one.

Setting aside the debatable safety benefits of red light cameras, the political reality is that Americans hate them, and politicians have responded accordingly. The use of red light cameras across the United States peaked in 2012, when they were deployed in five-hundred forty jurisdictions. Since then, their use has been steadily declining. As of May, they exist in three-hundred and forty jurisdictions. Governor Greg Abbot of Texas, a truffle pig for populist issues, signed legislation banning new red light cameras in 2019. Maine, Mississippi, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and West Virginia have also banned red-light cameras and speed cameras. There has been legislation introduced at each session during the past few years in Florida and Illinois to get rid of them, although none of those bills have passed.

This brings us to another important question, namely whether police belong in the business of traffic enforcement in the first place. A faddish idea right now among criminal justice advocates is to divorce police from civil traffic enforcement, leaving the business of handing out tickets to unarmed public servants or automated cameras. Traffic stops account for the majority of interactions between police and the public, and they are a major source of stress for both officers and civilians. At police academies, recruits are shown videos of officers being gunned down during traffic stops and taught that a split second of lapsed vigilance can lead to their murder. If one’s goal was to free up police’s time to solve more violent crimes, which have low clearance rates in many major cities, traffic enforcement would not be a bad place to start.

But if the decline of traffic cameras is reversed as part of a broader de-policing strategy, it could lead to the sort of corruption and game-rigging described above, albeit on a much larger scale. People have little tolerance for the sort of petty panopticon that red light cameras have delivered in places like Illinois and Washington, and local governments have shown over and over again that they cannot be trusted to avoid the perverse incentives that traffic cameras create, or transparent enough to earn the public trust.

Let’s return to Beaverton, for instance. It turned out that the city lengthened the duration of yellow lights at one of its problem intersections a few months after Järlström first presented his findings to the city council, but it never publicly announced the change, much less admitted it to Järlström, even as he was being hounded by a state agency. When a local news channel dug up records showing the change, city officials insisted the light had never been improperly timed. In 2020, a year after Järlström won the right in federal court to promote his research and to call himself an engineer, the Institute of Transportation Engineers voted to adopt a new formula for traffic light timing. It included his extended equation.

C.J. Ciaramella is a reporter for Reason magazine.