collage by Andrei Cojocaru
St. Louis City red-light cameras
Mayor Tishaura Jones said in her State of the City speech last week that so many folks at recent neighborhood meetings have voiced fears of reckless driving that she’s ready to bring back red-light cameras.
I’d guess half the audience clapped—and this was a room filled with her supporters. The guy sitting next to me went, “Boooo.”
It may turn into a fight this summer. But for now, let’s talk about efficaciousness: Do red-light cameras work?
Nobody I’ve spoken to at City Hall believes that cameras will deter all reckless driving. Rather, Jones and Board of Aldermen President Megan Green, at least, view the cameras as just one element in a bundle of traffic-safety measures they want to enact on top of the $40 million Safer Streets bill. That bill covered engineering tweaks; a camera policy would be an enforcement tweak and, according to Jones and Green, a net benefit.
There’s reason to believe they’re right. I wouldn’t call it a slam-dunk: Critics point, for example, to a study out of Houston finding no evidence that cameras there reduced total accidents and injuries. But, zooming out, the Congressional Research Service concluded in 2020 that “numerous studies” have indeed detected such reductions. And that same year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration summarized the literature this way: Yes, certain programs have caused an uptick in rear-end collisions (because folks start hitting the brakes to avoid running a light), but the more dangerous kinds of crashes—i.e., right-angle or “T-bone” crashes—tend to drop when you mount cameras.
Chicago is illustrative. Researchers at Northwestern University found in 2017 that while that city’s cameras led to a rise in rear-end crashes by 14 percent, they also brought down angle and turn crashes by 19 percent, with two added bonuses: a positive spillover effect to nearby areas, and an apparent learning effect wherein drivers reacted to the new system by violating less over time. All of this, the analysts wrote, led to “significant safety benefits.”
But Chicago can do something that St. Louis can’t: Use red-light cameras to capture a vehicle’s license plate and then ticket the owner, regardless of who was behind the wheel. An Illinois statute explicitly permits this. Missouri has no such statute. Remember how St. Louis and other nearby munis used to have red-light cameras a decade ago? A big reason they don’t anymore is that some of them got sued, and on a single day—August 18, 2015—the Missouri Supreme Court handed down a trio of decisions (here, here, and here), ruling in essence that under our state law, red-light violations are moving violations, which require identifying and assessing points against the vehicle’s “operator,” not its owner.
So a revamped city camera program would have to identify drivers. How? Would the cameras snap images of both the plate and the driver’s face, then check to see whether those match the DMV’s records? What if the driver isn’t the owner? What if the owner is a business? Would the city just let those cases slide, and if so, would that be fair? What about facial recognition software—would that come into play?
Green tells me she’ll await an opinion from the city counselor on what would be needed to “pass constitutional muster” before she’ll commit to any specifics. But she’d like to see a few things. First, “strong policies” on how the data is collected and stored so that privacy is protected. Second, a guard against cameras becoming a revenue generator for the city. (This has been of concern both here and in Chicago). Third, a mechanism to make the fines manageable for low-income violators—maybe a payment plan, which Chicago has. And maybe, Green suggested, violators could attend a driver’s-ed class in lieu of paying a fine.
On that last idea, critics could counter that the trouble with reckless drivers is not that they lack information, but rather, they lack a concern for others, and taking a class won’t fix it. Green disagrees. She says that seeing graphic photos of people harmed by traffic violence “creates something in the psyche” that would sensitize them to the dangers of their behavior.
Even if that’s true, you can’t corral reckless drivers into a class, or into compliance more generally, if you can’t find them or induce them to care about fines or points. Bevis Schock, the libertarian attorney who successfully challenged a red-light camera program on behalf of the plaintiff/radio host Charlie Brennan, holds this view. (To expect that a violator ripping down Kingshighway will care about a red-light ticket sent in the mail, he tells me, “is the stupidest thing he’s ever heard.”)
Perhaps a debate over the solution, then, will become a debate over the problem. Is red-light running similar to street violence in that just a few individuals cause most of the harm, so if you can’t deter those drivers with cameras, then cameras aren’t worth it? Or is red-light running more evenly distributed than that, such that cameras make sense?
A few figures from another study on Chicago’s program suggest a more even distribution. This one was by researchers at the University of Illinois–Chicago and covered 2016–2019:
- 81.28 percent of vehicles ticketed by red-light and speed cameras drew one to three tickets. (My interpretation here: A large majority of violators were not serial violators.)
- 23 percent of camera tickets were issued to drivers residing in low-income areas, and 19 percent of tickets went to drivers in upper-income areas.
- There was no difference in the ticketing rates between cameras in majority Black and majority White/Other census tracts (after controlling for various factors).
Green says there will always be some incorrigible drivers, but she does not believe the city’s problem is “confined to just a few bad actors.” The cameras, she believes, could “make a dent” in traffic violence.
Her hypothesis may not get tested. Red-light cameras aren’t beloved nationally; only 43 percent of respondents supported them in a recent survey. True, the city is no microcosm of the United States. But it’s easy to imagine a coalition of libertarian lawyers and law-enforcement-suspicious progressives locking arms in protest—the same folks disgusted by the post-Ferguson revelations of municipal fines and fees.
On the other hand, cameras are unlike even the best-intentioned police officers: They’re 100 percent bias-free. They simply click when somebody blows through a light. So if Jones and Green remind enough colleagues and constituents of that, and convince them that the cameras will be fairly and smartly distributed, they might get enough support to push this through.
They haven’t yet defined what success would look like, but the Northwestern researchers estimated that over a three-year period, Chicago’s cameras prevented 111 fatal and injury-causing crashes. That’d be a lot less blood, broken glass, trauma, and death.
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