red light cameras

Investigative reporter David Kidwell broke the Redflex bribery scandal and pressured the city to make reforms to the red light camera program, but much of his reporting on automated enforcement was misleading and betrayed an apparent personal bias against traffic cams.

The Northwestern report confirmed that the cameras have significant safety benefits and noted a never-before-documented “spillover effect” that is also resulting in less red light running at intersections that don’t have the cams.

At yesterday's quarterly meeting of the Mayor's Pedestrian Advisory Council, Chicago Department of Transportation commissioner Rebekah Scheinfeld mentioned the "somber" statistics that there was a significant increase in Chicago pedestrian fatalities in 2015 compared to previous years.

Even if you voted for Chuy García, if you know how effective automated enforcement has been for preventing serious crashes in other cities, you may be relieved he didn’t get a chance to shut down all of Chicago’s traffic cameras. However, García and the other challengers did residents a service by drawing attention to ways that the Emanuel administration has mismanaged the program, which forced the mayor to take steps to reform it.

Day in and day out for at least 30 years (and perhaps for almost a century), over 3,000 stoplights all across Chicago have whirred through tens of millions of cycles the exact same way: green, then yellow for three seconds, then red. Yet today, this three second cycle was suddenly declared a public safety emergency, with the Tribune's front page fomenting panic about the crisis posed by "risky" and "too short" yellow phases.

In a huge front-page story Friday, the Chicago Tribune published yet another installment in its long-running vendetta against the city's photographic traffic enforcement program. Because the Trib chose to obscure key information about the severity of crashes, the story is worthless as an evaluation of the city's red light camera program.

Chicago Department of Transportation commissioner Rebekah Scheinfeld told the City Council's Committee on Pedestrian & Traffic Safety that equipment problems that have plagued the city's red light camera enforcement program have mostly been resolved. Although some aldermen were there to pounce upon the media ruckus around the cameras, other aldermen understood that red light cameras can play a role in keeping Chicago's streets safer.

Last summer, the Chicago Tribune reported on the mysterious spikes in red light ticketing at dozens of cameras around the city. Recently, the paper discovered the city had started enforcing violations that took place after slightly shorter yellow phases. This resulted in tens of thousands of additional tickets.

The hunt for the motorist who ran over Dustin Valenta then fled the scene is one step closer, but the cyclist's lawyer says it’s no thanks to the Chicago Police Department. Earlier today attorney Michael Keating received red light camera footage of the pick-up truck from the city in response to a request he filed soon after the February 8 crash. Keating is optimistic it will be possible to make out the license plate number using video enhancement equipment. “But it’s preposterous that the police didn’t do this themselves sooner,” he said.