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Dispatch from Albany: More Red Light Cameras Coming to Long Island

A map showing red light camera-monitored intersections on Long Island. Click through for details.

Legislators have fled Albany for a well-deserved, two-week break. As transportation and pedestrian safety advocates have sifted through the recently-passed budget during the lull, an important discovery has come to light: each county on Long Island has received the go-ahead to install 50 more red light cameras.

To this point, the technology has been successful on Long Island. In 2009, New York State authorized Nassau and Suffolk to install and operate 50 cameras each as part of a “demonstration program,” and a Newsday headline from late 2011 summarizes the program’s progress well: “Report: Red-Light Cameras Reduce Crashes.” According to a Nassau County Traffic Safety Board report, the cameras reduced accidents by an average of 12-16% at 40 intersections under study (10 were left out because of insufficient data). Nassau County Executive Ed Mangano has acknowledged the cameras’ effectiveness.

The cameras save lives because red light running is highly dangerous—the crashes that result from ignored traffic signals tend to combine speed and right-angle (“T-bone”) impacts, which lead to a high number of injuries and deaths. According to a recent report, red light running resulted in 113,000 injuries and 676 fatalities in the U.S. in 2009, and the costs of such irresponsible driving fall disproportionately on innocent victims: the report found that nearly two thirds of those deaths were passengers, other motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians.

As Nassau’s data suggests, these are preventable tragedies. Across the country, red light cameras have been shown to dramatically reduce the number of vehicles running red lights; the aforementioned study found that fatal red light crash rates were reduced by 24 percent in 14 cities that introduced red light cameras. As of 2010, over 500 cities were using this technology.

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Clark Morris
Clark Morris
11 years ago

A prerequisite for red light cameras MUST be the showing that the lights in question meet the federal Manual for Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) standards, especially for yellow light timing. Also the government, NOT some politically connected contractor should be running them. Red light running is a growing problem but some jurisdictions have taken advantage of the situation by shortening yellow light timings in order to generate more tickets.

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[…] a safer Hempstead Turnpike. Safe streets advocates also cheered the expansion of the successful red light camera programs in Suffolk and Nassau Counties, and, in a year when pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities went up […]

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