At Queen and Geary, red light camera gear covers the southbound and westbound approaches to the intersection. (Photo taken Dec. 11, 2023)
If you want to know something about Albany’s lone set of red light cameras, the city’s latest report to the Oregon legislature is worth a look.
State law requires biennial reports from cities that have cameras to catch people running red lights. Since 2007, Albany has had those cameras looking for violators at the intersection of Queen Avenue and Geary Street.
Albany’s latest report was filed in February. You can find it at the Oregon State Library’s website here.
The Queen/Geary cameras cover the approaches to the intersection from the east on Queen and from the north on Geary.
According to the city’s report, the Geary camera went off 5,248 times from January 2020 through December 2022. But only 1,518 violation notices were printed.
The Queen Avenue camera went off much less, only 615 times over the thee-year period, resulting in 159 violation notices being printed.
Over the three years, the two sets of cameras yielded 1,125 red light citations being issued. There were 274 during 2022 alone.
The report does not explain the apparent discrepancy between red light violation notices printed and tickets issued.
The cameras have made no apparent difference in the number of collisions at the intersection. In all the years before and after the cameras were installed, the number of collisions per year has varied from zero to three. “No significant impact,” the report says.
The difference between the number of apparent violations detected by the cameras and the number available for possible prosecution is explained by many factors.
The biggest one is that in more than 1,000 cases over three years, the driver photographed was not the registered owner of the vehicle.
In many other cases, the state DMV records were wrong or incomplete, or drivers were making a safe and legal right turn on red, or the vehicles pictured didn’t have permanent plates.
What the report doesn’t mention is money. It says nothing about ticket revenue collected by the municipal court, or about the amount of police time spent reviewing violation notices sent by Redflex. (That was still the name of the vendor during the period covered by the report.)
On Wednesday night, the Albany City Council is getting a request to bolster the Queen/Geary camera system by adding the remaining two approaches, to add cameras at three other intersections, and to add speed enforcement to all those systems.
We’ll see if the council digs a little deeper into the money angle before it decides. (hh)
The thought that the City would spend even more time trying to smother Queen and Geary with even more cameras is belied by Hering’s paragraph, “The cameras have made no apparent difference in the number of collisions at the intersection. In all the years before and after the cameras were installed, the number of collisions per year has varied from zero to three. “No significant impact,” the report says.”
Of course, wherever the least impact is felt, the natural response is to double down on the effort. Where there’s a small smoke, there might be tiny embers waiting to engulf society in car-crash mayhem. Given the City’s analysis, we could increase City revenues easily by installing ever more surveillance. We simply wish the Council would admit these cameras are largely a fund-raising scheme, having little or no effect on crash outcomes – the very symptom these cameras were designed to alleviate.
Sounds more like an attempted “cash grab” by the city instead of a public safety tool.
Thanks Hasso for the archive link. A treasure trove. The initial (2005) report justifies the camera initiative as risk reduction:
“In 2003, there were an estimated 259 vehicle accidents at red light intersections in Albany, equating to an estimated $2,590,000 for bodily injury and $647,500 for property damage.”(p.1, Background)
Presumably insurance underwriters would be all in and might be coaxed into sharing the overheard costs, if cameras were an effective mitigation measure.
Surveillance cameras do not appear in the top 4 Management Strategies for Reducing Accidents at Intersections (courtesy of LinkedIn’s Transportation Planning chatbot)
1 Signal timing
2 Geometric design
3 Traffic calming
4 Intelligent transportation systems
Coupled with the corrosive impact to the public, already wary of our surveillance state, there’s has to be a (and there are at least 4) better way.
Referring to your statement above about cars “didn’t have permanent plates” I assume you meant NO FRONT PLATE on the vehicle. I have been told by more than one officer that, “They can no longer stop a vehicle for not having a front license plate due to SENATE BILL 1510 which is now AN AMENDED PORTION ORS 131.615.
I have read the Bill several times and find that, even through all the confusing typical law wording nothing that says that specifically. In fact ORS 810.410 (3)sub (b) specifically says “May stop and detain a person for a traffic violation for the purpose of investigation reasonably related to the traffic violation, identification and issuance of citation.” There are some other portions of this bill that are, in my are questionable but deal with vehicle equipment defects.
This is GROSS! i avoid that area at all costs.
Now, I may need to do the same elsewhere in Albany.
Honestly, I ask what the F is going on?
Albany: the sur-veil-lance small town of trumplicans. GROSS!!!
What makes the area gross? Why don’t you go to Portland and live with the liberals and see how pitiful their neighborhoods look and while you are living there, enjoy the crime wave. I can understand why you post anonymously!
So you think it was Trump supporters that hung the pride banner at City Hall? Have you ever got it backwards!