Do Traffic Cameras Really Make Streets Safer?

They are despised by drivers and many lawmakers.

I opened the mail one day last fall and found an envelope from the D.C. government charging me $100 for driving too fast on K Street on a Sunday afternoon a couple of weeks before. You go through little stages in those situations: First, disbelief -- “Surely we weren’t doing that.” Then, anger -- “Can’t the District of Columbia find a better way to pay its bills?” And finally, a fear of having blundered into a rigged game. Maybe we were going 39 miles an hour in a 25-mph zone, as alleged, but 25 is a suspiciously low limit for a spot just off a freeway. Is the whole point to make a little extra money off unsuspecting motorists? If so, the only practical way to enforce that kind of rule is with cameras, which is exactly how it’s done in D.C.

If this is the way they are going to use technology, you may be tempted to say, perhaps we’d all be better off if they took the cameras out. But would we? Let’s stop and think about it for a minute.

They’ve been thinking about it a lot in Iowa, where an angry and long-running fight is taking place between cities that consider traffic cameras an essential component of safety and conservative state legislators who see them as one more scheme for fleecing taxpayers. Both sides accuse the opposition of playing Big Brother. But they have wildly different ideas about just who or what Big Brother is. To the anti-camera Republicans in the legislature, Big Brother is the cities that have installed the machines to snoop on motorists. To the cities, Big Brother is an insensitive state government trampling on local rights.

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