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Seattle Sets the Stage for Automatic Traffic Camera Expansion - The Urbanist
(www.theurbanist.org)
I worked for the city government in Houston, TX for a bunch of years. I shared an automation lab with the traffic division (just a really big room with public works gear on one side and traffic gear on the other). We would test programming changes on hardware in there before field deployment. I got to know them pretty well and got to mess with their stuff. It was interesting because of how differently they approached the question of automation than I did. Whereas my programs and gear were more focused on local control with manual override for local operators, their gear was hyperfocused on timing across controllers in a region, backup controller switching, and file verification. The process they had to go thru to change timing was exhausting and I'd read stories in media about citizens being pissed about traffic lights not being right while their engineers had been going thru the struggle to validate timings at that exact location for weeks and months. They were an unloved bunch but that's what you gotta do when a single timing or programming error kills people.
Anyway.
Houston decided to try to save its taxpayers money by doing a public/private with a red light camera company. They'd share the revenue generated and they started with (I think it was 6?) intersections that were the worst for red light running results in serious injury and property damage. One was near my house and I was really happy about it because if you know Houston, 610 south loop feeder at Stella Link is terrifying.
The citizen response was ferocious. People (including city workers and cops) were just straight up spouting bullshit about the cameras and the traffic department, the most common being that traffic lowered the time of the yellow in order to trap people into more tickets because the real purpose of the cameras was revenue generation. Even my close family were convinced traffic fucked with the yellows.
So I roll over to their side of the lab to ask traffic and you could tell they were super pissed off about it. They brought out all programming change documentation to that signal going back a decade. Maintenance records for the gear. SCADA communication records. Everything. They had already put together their data to defend themselves and it was iron clad. They even dug out the bluetooth data showing the average speed had gone down approaching the red light proving that driver habits were responding to the camera, resulting in fewer accidents with less lethality when it did happen. The Stella Link "short yellow" became the most complained about light in the greater Houston metro. They told me they got more complaints on that yellow in a week than they had gotten on that light for any reason in any 12 month period.
After a big political fight, the cameras were turned off. In the seven day period after they were turned off, no complaints against the Stella Link yellow were made. It just magically stopped being a problem. And my father in law told me that I had been lied to by traffic and that no matter what I said or saw, he knows they changed the timing.
anyways, yes to red light cameras