A picture may be worth a thousand words, but pretty soon one in Gainesville might be worth $125.
The City Commission is set to review a proposal that would allow the Gainesville Police Department to install video cameras at busy intersections to help catch motorists who run red lights.
Drivers caught on tape would get a $125 fine for violating a city ordinance drafted by the city's Public Safety Committee, since photographic evidence is not enough to issue a ticket for a moving violation.
GPD spokesman Lt. Keith Kameg said drivers who run red lights can cause head-on or T-bone collisions, the most fatal kind of car accidents.
While we're all for proactively preventing fatal traffic accidents with innovative ideas, we think that installing these cameras is not a solution to the growing problem.
Under the guise of making the roads safer, the police department and safety committee are attempting to convince the commission that the red-light cameras would make dangerous intersections safer. The logic of less accidents equal less fatalities does make sense. However, the cameras could actually cause an entirely new type of accident.
When red-light cameras were installed in Washington, D.C., in 1999, city officials praised their new method of curtailing drivers who blatantly ignore traffic signals.
But an independent analysis of crash statistics by The Washington Post six years later revealed that the number of accidents at intersections with the cameras actually increased.
Rear-end collisions - caused by drivers trying to avoid getting a ticket in the mail by stopping short - more than made up for the reduction in other accidents.
A safety evaluation of red-light cameras by the Federal Highway Administration in 2005 confirmed the dangers of the use of red-light cameras, stating that while right-angle crashes decreased, rear-end collisions increased.
Eric Skrum, spokesman for the National Motorists Association, said in an ABC News interview that the red-light cameras just reward cities for bad engineering.
And maybe that's what the city of Gainesville is really trying to achieve by proposing the camera installation - a bigger reward for the bottom line.
Though the red-light cameras in Washington didn't do much to stop accidents, they did generate more than $32 million for the city from the more than 500,000 fines issued in their first six years of operation.
While the city of Gainesville doesn't have nearly the same amount of traffic as the D.C. area, any revenue is needed revenue at this point.
We fear the improvements that could make the streets safer in Gainesville would probably not even be considered once the money starts rolling in.
Experts argue that elimination of unnecessary lights, traffic-light synchronization and partial deactivation of other traffic lights during periods of low traffic could do more to decrease the number of drivers running red lights.
When properly done, the synchronization of traffic lights can also decrease congestion and fuel consumption.
Once these red-light cameras start making money for the city of Gainesville, the commission will probably not be open to getting rid of a steady income source - especially in times like these.
If safety really is the main concern here - though we suspect it is not - the money spent on installing red-light cameras could be better utilized if it was to go toward improving intersections and solving the real source of Gainesville's traffic problems - sloppy engineering.
