The following was submitted by a reader of CleanSlateMoCo after reading Following the Science on Street Safety.
On September 18. 2023 the Pennsylvania Senate Transportation Committee held a hearing on automated traffic enforcement. When you hear the elected officials endorsing cameras, rather than gathering comments, it says a lot. Only a few pro-camera people were allowed to speak, and submitting written comments was not intuitive.
As expected, the testimony said how great ticket cameras are. Why not, the cameras can bring in a lot of money for various people and entities. Ticket volume must be kept high in order to keep the cameras operating and fund everything. The problem is that you need to dig deeper. If you pull up the written testimony from Jay Beeber and the 3 others grouped with him, you start to get a clearer picture. Beeber went in-depth addressing speed cameras and stop-arm cameras. He did not get into red-light cameras in-depth, but the same concepts may apply. He took on all the programs and refuted everything the pro-camera speakers said. He had reams of data too, and his testimony was 19 pages long. Nobody else had this level of preparation, since the facts were on Beeber’s side.
Pennsylvania has seen various cases of higher crashes near ticket cameras, tickets issued in error, an FBI investigation, whistleblowers, etc.
With best-practice engineering and enforcement, tickets would be rare, and crashes would also be rare. That would not pay for the cameras, grant programs, etc., though. Making average drivers into scofflaws is bad. Engineers how to properly setup the roads, time to start now.
