I don't buy the increased accidents theory

I knew there was a RLC and crossed the cross walk on yellow. Sent me pics with an $85 dollar fine because I was in the intersection on red. Is this fair?

It depends on how the local authority wrote the law on signals. Most have a "permissive" yellow where it is legal to enter an intersection on yellow. Others have a restrictive yellow where it is not permitted to enter the intersection on yellow and if you are in the intersection when the signal turns red, it is assumed you entered the intersection when the light was yellow. The biggest problem is you don't always know how the law reads when the flash goes off.

it would be impossible to have a pic of the car not reaching the stop line, when the light turned red, if the poster entered the intersection on yellow. Totally impossible. So I'd be curious if there are 3 pics, or simply one.

I would say it isn't fair, because if you want to make people guess when yellow turns to red, there has to be a countdown timer. But I've never heard of a RLC violation having one picture. It's actually pretty funny, because it lacks the 4th dimension as in 4D, which is time. So I have a still pic of you in the intersection, and the light is red. I have no way of conclusively determining when you entered. You could have very well entered on green, and been unable to complete your turn due to oncoming traffic. Nothing like adding a musical chairs element to driving.

At least in my area, the law is written that there has to be a picture of you ENTIRELY behind the line while the light is red, and then a second one that shows your vehicle in front of the line while the light is still red. If it is not clear that the vehicle was entirely behind the line on the first shot, then it is thrown out by officers who review the cameras. There is also a slight delay so the first flash won't trigger right as the light turns to red, you have a small grace period. In my area, there is a third picture that is higher res to show the license plate.

The cameras (at least in my area) aren't designed to catch people who just reacted too slowly, but rather to catch the offenders who blatantly disregard the lights and intentionally run red lights when they have more than ample time to stop or offenders who are going so fast over the speed limit that they can't stop in time (which are the dangerous ones).

Further, the cameras I've encountered are designed to only trigger at a certain approach speed. I'm not sure what the approach speed is, but it is designed such that a person who is making a legal right turn on red, will generally not trigger the camera, and even if he does, the second picture won't show him in front of the line (since a legal right turn on red requires a full stop and if you are approaching a light at this speed it is set to trigger at, the time at which the second photo snaps will be before you can take off again after coming to a full stop). I actually am on a volunteer fire department and tired this out for myself. Even at the higher approach speeds that we come at red lights, while we'll trigger the camera, the second photo won't show us over the line or shows us barely over the line even though we don't make a full stop (my department guidelines require us to go through an intersection against a red light at 10 mph or lower) so if it doesn't show us across the line, it certainly won't show someone who is coming to a complete stop across the line.

The only area I know that this might not apply to is St. Louis, MO where their laws do not allow for you to enter an intersection on green unless you can clear the intersection. But unless you are there, I doubt most places would be able to just show one picture of you since most everywhere else I know of in the US allows you to enter the intersection on green to make a left.

Also, to address the OP's title, I also don't believe that traffic cameras increase accidents at intersections. At least in my experience, there have not been more accidents at red light camera intersections after they put them in than before. Of course I'm basing this off of the one intersection that I have data for, but the number of motor vehicle accidents our department responded to in the year preceding the installation of the cameras and the year following the grace period was not statistically significant (there were slightly fewer accidents after the installation, but that could be due to random chance). I do not have data on the severity of the accidents though there has yet to be a fatality there after the installation of the cameras. The way I see it is if it might possibly help, but doesn't hurt, we might as well put them in and maybe get a few more people to consider slowing down in the area and if not, put a bit more money into our town's coffers. As our police chief said about people posting online about our speed traps, "Let 'em! Even if we write fewer tickets, people will still slow down on that busy street knowing there's a high chance there's a cop behind the tree and that makes our community safer."

There's actually some sheriff's departments that park their spare cruisers on turnarounds at more dangerous junctions on the interstate for this reason. Kind of a poor man's traffic camera!

As others have indicated, it does not seem possible that a ticket was issued to you if you entered the intersection during the yellow phase of the light.

If your municipality has an ordinance different from the typical one that reads something like what the traffic engineer in my home town provided.

You say that you were sent "pics". Would you please indicate what these pics showed and how many pictures there were?

The only way I can imagine that your described situation could occur would be (1) for the equipment to be defective , or (2) for there to have been another car that caused your car to have been part of one of the pictures, and (3) for both the vendor and officer(s) reviewing the pictures failing to catch the error, and (4) for there to be no grace period allowed.

Most traffic cameras are also taking video from which frames can be extracted, so you would have been able to have evidence that your car had been ticketed improperly.

I am wondering why you did not dispute this ticket.