I posted last month about the new red light camera system being deployed by the city of Rochester, NY. That appears to be moving forward in the name of safety. Still, I haven’t seen any serious examination of the reality of these systems.

It turns out that the civic minded sounding organization “Stop Red Light Running,” which is providing most of the “safety statistics” to municipalities, is in fact an industry consortium of manufacturers and sellers of traffic cameras. So there’s a nice objective source of data for you. The article states that the organization is actually playing both sides by covertly touting the revenue potential to the municipalities while providing them the safety data to play to their electorates. This is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this. If true, it eliminates the opportunity to assume that the politicians are just hapless dupes in this game. It forces us to assume that they are willfully engaged in deceiving the public and/or putting it at risk in an effort to pad their coffers. Which come to think of it, isn’t so much of an imaginative stretch as I guess I was hoping for.