NMA Community Alert for Albuquerque, NM: City Red-Light Cameras Being Re-evaluated
Mayor Richard Berry has enlisted the University of New Mexico's Institute for Social Research to study whether Albuquerque's streets have become safer in the five-plus years since cameras have been installed at twenty intersectons around town. Here is a link to the story.
Now is the time to let the city administrators know the negative impact that photo enforcement has on traffic safety, and to convince them to remove the cameras.
The NMA put together a packet of information just for this purpose, and it is downloadable from our motorists.org site. Essential Download for Ticket Camera Activists contains executive summaries (and links to the full studies) of several reports and academic studies that document the increase in accident and injury rates after red-light cameras have been installed. The packet also includes several capsule summaries of communities whose photo enforcement programs have gone awry. Additionally, Essential Download includes a petition that can be used by local citizens to signal their opposition to the camera program.  ; This information is designed to be distributed to public officials who are involved in the camera evaluation process.
The most effective use of this information, particularly the petition, is to organize an effort locally. Nothing grabs the attention of politicians more than voters organizing against an issue (except for money, of course). If you are a resident of Albuquerque, or know of a resident, who is opposed to the use of red-light cameras and is willing to organize like-minded residents and commuters, please forward this email to inform them of the NMA information resources that can be used to help convince the city to remove the cameras.
There are two other community-based red-light camera stories that might stoke your fires a bit; both provide excellent depictions of what can go wrong with ticket camera programs.
The first story is an investigative piece done by the CBS TV affiliate in Los Angeles. Law enforcement there was touting improved traffic safety statistics after red-light cameras were installed at several intersections. The station decided to dig deeper, and issued a public records request to gather actual accident statistics for the periods six months before and six months after red-light cameras were installed at 32 L.A. intersections. They found that accident rates increased at 20 of the intersections, some tripling, after the cameras went into operation. A producer from the station contacted the NMA for sourcing, resulting in the interview of the traffic attorney and rear-end collision victim as part of the story. Here is a link to that CBS report. You can print the story and include it with Essential Download, but please be sure to watch the embedded video of the broadcast report. It was really well done.
You may have also heard that the residents of two Ohio towns, Heath and Chillicothe, voted in November to eliminate their existing red-light camera programs and even tossed out some of the politicians who brought the cameras in to begin with. As you can tell, there are never any shortage of stories that tell the true tale of ticket cameras.
Feel free to contact the NMA with any questions you might have about this information. They key is to signal an opposition of the red-light cameras to city officials while they are reevaluating the program, and to show them these studies, reports and stories about the problems caused by ticket cameras.
