Short yellow lights in Florida

The best thing the jurisdictions can do to reduce that by the camera operators is to decouple the $$$ made by the operators from the number of tickets given.

Fred

I am not opposed to speed and right light cameras.

But there should be standard time lengths set for yellow lights. Then drivers and enforcement agencies could verify whether someone has been playing with the timing cycles.

Red light and speed cameras are nothing more than revenue generators for the cities, and the cities will do whatever they can to maximize their profit potential. This includes reducing yellow light times below federal minimums. Changing the minimum times for yellow lights to a "one size fits all" setting won't change a thing. The cities are still going to set the yellow light times unreasonably short in order to maximize profits.

The only effective solution to the issue of cameras is to ban them outright.

of an incident that happened over a year ago in the Tampa area. The timing on the lights when using the ITE formula was for X seconds and a fraction more. The signal controllers on the street corners could only do timings in full second increments. The highway worker was faced with the problem of "Do I round up or round down?" Some techs rounded up, others rounded down so the lights "short cycled" for a fraction of a second according to the formula. State guidelines on how to handle the problem were vague leaving the decision up to the technician. The state guidelines were rewritten so the timing was always increased to the next full increment if required.

Since that happened almost two years ago, all the state owned units have been upgraded to where they can set signal lights to the nearest tenth of a second as calculated by the ITE formula.

Problem is the greedy companies and cities desire for more money drives them to not follow accepted standards and most people don't have the time or can't afford to take a day off to go to court, hire a lawyer to fight these borderline illegal activities.
The cities guilt the public into acceptance of these cameras and then when the money starts rolling in the cities and company that installed the cameras just can't help themselves to the easy money.

One of the problems is the courts. They could sort it out just by doing one thing - when a person wins in court for a camera which had shortened yellow time, the court could impose a penalty on the company for reducing the margins. How long do you think it would take for the company to bleed money & stop the appalling practice???

Fred