Chicago Accident and Injury Lawyer Blog

A review of US Department of Transportion (US DOT) statistics shows that an average motorist could drive a billion miles (or the distance from Earth to Jupiter and back) before being involved in a car accident that resulted from a motorist making a rolling stop on a right-hand turn. Nevertheless, municipalities such as Schaumburg, have used red light cameras to generate more than $1 million from right-on-red tickets. Of the 10,000 photo tickets issued since November, only about 200 involved the straight-through type of violation used to justify the devices.

A "violation" occurs when a motorist passes the stop bar painted on the pavement at any speed greater than 2 miles per hour. Because of the design of the monitored intersections, however, motorists often must pull into the crosswalk past the stop bar to see cross traffic before initiating a turn. This means that drivers can be mailed a ticket even if they fully stop before turning.

Supporters of red light cameras insist that the cameras prevent common and deadly t-bone collisions at intersections, but the statistics indicate otherwise. According to a 2001 National Highway Transportation Safety Administration report, 6.33 million crashes occurred in 1998, 1.72 million of which involved one vehicle cutting into the path of another. Of this amount, only 99,000 were classified as "right-turn into path" crashes, the least common type. The number of right-turn accidents was only 20,000 when narrowed to collisions occurring at intersections with traffic lights. And of these, only 2,378 were caused by the violation of the traffic signal.

There is no question that red light cameras serve an important purpose when it comes to encouraging drivers to stop for red lights, but it appears as though municipalities may be taking advantage of these devices for their own revenue generating purposes. Keep this in mind the next time you go to make a right turn on red.