HASSO HERING

The Pacific-Geary intersection looked peaceful just after noon on Saturday, Nov. 16, 2024. But in 2023 this location had the most crashes in Albany.

Safety has been given as the reason for Albany’s red-light cameras and photo radar campaign. So you might think the cameras would be deployed at the intersections with the most crashes. But that’s not the case.

In their annual crime report, Albany police listed the top five intersections for vehicle collisions for 2023. None of the five will get the red-light and speed enforcement cameras the city has contracted to be installed.

Number 1 on the list of crash locations is Pacific Boulevard and Geary Street with 12 collisions last year. The others, in order:

Pacific and Airport Road with 11 crashes, 14th Avenue and Waverly Drive with 10, Ninth Avenue and Hill Street with 10, Santiam Highway and Waverly with nine, and Ninth and Geary, also with nine.

Four of Albany’s top five crash intersections are on state highways, which may explain why no cameras are scheduled there.

According to a 2011 report by the Oregon Department of Transportation, red-light cameras on state highways require ODOT approval. And before giving approval, ODOT requires “that engineering countermeasures appropriate for the intersection be exhausted prior to installation of red-light-running cameras.”

The Albany Police Department has published monthly maps showing where collisions have occurred. By counting the graphic markers on six months of maps ending last June 16 — a tedious process — I estimated that Albany averages between 20 and 40 collisions per month.

One of the new red-light and speed camera systems is scheduled to be installed on North Albany Road at Thornton Lake Drive, in a school zone. According to the police department maps, that intersection had no collisions at all from July 2023 through this past June 16. Police Chief Marcia Harnden has cited speeding as the reason for putting cameras there.

Queen and Geary, where red-light cameras have been working since 2007, now has speed cameras as well. At this location, the police counted five collisions, one with injuries, from last summer to this June.

(The new cameras at Queen and Geary did go live on Nov. 15 as scheduled. “From 11/15-11/21, there were 18 red-light events and 15 speed events that were reviewed and processed as warnings,” Chief Harnden told me in an email on Nov. 22.)

Later this year, the city also plans to install photo enforcement systems at Santiam Road and Geary, and in the school zone at Elm Street and Queen Avenue.

Santiam/Geary had three or four collisions over the year (the maps are not clear on that spot), one or two with injuries. Queen/Elm had two or three, one with injuries.

The ODOT report on red-light cameras was based on studies of such cameras on Mission Street in Salem. It said that collisions went up after the cameras went in, along with the cumulative cost of crashes.

Let’s hope that this does not happen in Albany once the planned cameras are all installed. (hh)

For this story, I should have gotten the police perspective and reasoning for selecting the camera intersections. After seeing the story, Chief Harnden sent it to me: “It’s simple really. First is that ODOT is somewhat challenging to work with and so we are choosing to find other high impact locations to place cameras, which will free up the human being doing the enforcement to focus on the areas that involve state highways. We did our homework on the locations in which we are placing the cameras and their placement is definitely worthy. And our focus will always be on school zones and the approaches to those zones.”