Analysis of Tallahassee’s red light camera program

By Paul Henry:

I obtained crash data from the Florida DOT and looked at how effective red light cameras were over a three-year period in Tallahassee: 18 months prior to cameras, and 18 months afterwards.

Half of the 6 intersections had more red light running crashes than before, while half saw a reduction. A 7th intersection (CC & Mahan) did not have a red light violation in the three-year period. Why did it get a camera?

When you look at the data, the clear pattern is that there were more injury and rear end crashes after camera use. One intersection (Killearn and CC) had only 15 crashes for the three-year period, yet it received a camera. The next lowest intersection was CC and Tennessee, which had 4 times the crashes: 45. This suggests the Killearn placement was more about revenue than safety.

I need your help to get this information out. WCTV will no longer post my comments since I held them accountable for poor reporting on the March 17, 2012 crash. In that story, the reporter(s) made up the story that the at-fault driver ran a red light, and kept repeating it. WCTV won’t even correct the story to spell his name correctly.

I have uploaded it here for electronic download: http://retiredpublicsafety.com/documents/rlc/Analysis_TLH_RLC.pdf