Kansas City, Missouri Red Light Cameras Increase Accidents

 

Red light camera vendor American Traffic Solutions (ATS) is furious that police in Kansas City, Missouri released a report last week evaluating photo enforcement intersections without giving the company a chance to modify the data. In many cities, ATS plays a key role in authoring such studies, but in this case the Kansas City police department went its own way, arriving at conclusions consistent with other, independent research on the topic.

The report found the overall number of accidents increased 12 percent from before cameras were installed to the two-year average after the devices began issuing tickets. Only counting the lanes that are monitored by cameras, the increase in collisions was 29 percent. Rear end accidents increased 17 percent. Right-angle accidents dipped 4 percent...

...Despite the mixed safety results, the cameras over the study period issued 197,494 tickets worth $19,749,400. As a result, the city police commission ordered the police special operations division to re-write the report under the supervision of ATS.

http://thenewspaper.com/news/37/3703.asp

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Kansas City, Missouri

Money is more important than reducing accidents. Red light picture is revenue to local government. Accident is money out of persons pocket. This is probably true in all locals. Doesn't anybody care?

--
Alan-Garmin c340

Working on the re-write...

Interesting how the police commission ordered the special ops. div. to re-write the study "under the supervision" of the for-profit American Traffic Solutions.

Here's the study for those interested:

http://thenewspaper.com/rlc/docs/2012/mo-kcreport.pdf

Interesting

Sounds like a bunch of citizens should sue the city with a jury. I'd bet that any judge worth his salt would decide to hand back the money to citizens.

Fred

Money

Its all about the money

In other words...

HawaiianFlyer wrote:

...Despite the mixed safety results, the cameras over the study period issued 197,494 tickets worth $19,749,400. As a result, the city police commission ordered the police special operations division to re-write the report under the supervision of ATS.

In other words, most of the studies we've seen up to this point have actually been written by the camera companies! Of course the stats will support camera use when they're written by the salesmen. Amazing, and infuriating.

I agree - it's just another

I agree - it's just another way to generate revenue. Even if the city is only getting $.15 for every dollar it brings in; that's $.15 more than they were getting before.

If it don't make dollars; it don't make cents (sense).