A Tale of Red-Light Cameras Gone Wrong
Posted on 15. Jul, 2009 by admin in News, SMART
The town of Schaumburg, Ill., had a red-light-camera problem. Sure, the installed system at a single intersection netted almost $1 million in tickets, but it also enraged residents and visitors.
We have first-hand experience with the intersection in question, which it turns out isn’t even among Schaumburg’s 10 most dangerous intersections. The intersection in question has a separate right-turn lane with its own signal. The red-light camera was snapping away at people who were turning right on red but hadn’t come to a complete stop. Being ticketed for this benign traffic infraction riled pretty much everyone.
The city was smart enough to know that this was a sore spot and asked the monitoring company to not issue citations for that violation. That had to be done manually, though, and cost the company too much money.
The Schaumburg police studied traffic accidents at the intersection for a year’s time and found no significant accidents from running red lights before or after the cameras were installed. That was the final straw. Schaumburg didn’t renew its contract for the cameras, and they were taken down yesterday.
Red-light cameras in Schaumburg screech to a halt (Chicago Tribune)
