If you’ve been driving in Tucson for a while, you know that moment of uncertainty when a red light turns green.
“Should I go yet,” you ask yourself, “or will that get me killed by a red-light runner?” You crane your neck to be sure the approaching vehicles have stopped.
It’s not an abstract concern, and the stakes are even higher for pedestrians and cyclists. So far this year there have been 35 traffic fatalities in the city, 18 of those pedestrians. That puts us on pace for a grim 105 traffic deaths this year, the city’s highest toll. Eighty-six people died on Tucson roads last year.
Traffic deaths and collisions are a surging problem nationally, and we’ve been trying to deal with it here locally. But the problem keeps speeding ahead of our efforts to catch it.
The city approved a five-year traffic-safety plan in 2018, a year when there were 69 traffic fatalities, a number then considered alarmingly high. Last year, the new Tucson police chief, Chad Kasmar, dedicated more officers to traffic enforcement, even as the total number of officers continues to drop.
This year’s Proposition 411, the city’s transportation initiative, would put somewhere around $150 million into traffic-safety improvements over 10 years.
And this Tuesday, Mayor Regina Romero is proposing that the city become a member of the Vision Zero Network, which imagines reducing traffic deaths to zero by redesigning streets and traffic flow in such a way that mistakes don’t lead to deaths. This would formalize an approach the city has already started pursuing.
Even with all these efforts and plans, though, we are missing one tool that has helped here and in other cities. In 2015, Tucson voters overwhelmingly outlawed red-light cameras and photo enforcement of speeding laws.
It was an understandable decision at the time, but it’s regrettable now.
The way our red-light cameras worked was unfair, and the City Council had not fixed the problems. There were too many borderline cases due to the definition of where the intersection begins, and how much time the cameras allowed before issuing a ticket. The fines were also too big, hurting people and giving the impression it was a big money-making scheme.
These days, though, it makes no sense that we don’t have this tool.
Tucson’s system started in 2007 when there were at least 200 more Tucson police officers than the approximately 750 there are now. It zeroed in on eight intersections with lots of collisions. Over the eight years of the program, collisions dropped at those intersections.
While there were problems with the program, they are not inherent in the technology. And the technology promises more consistent, broader enforcement than our dwindling police force can provide.
Faced with a similar backlash against photo enforcement in Illinois, the Chicago-based Active Transportation Alliance presented 10 steps for reform, rather than removing the cameras. Among them:
Target the most dangerous violations, such as blowing straight through red lights.
Don’t create bad incentives for the vendor by paying them by the number of tickets issued.
Allow for due process by having an easily accessible process for contesting tickets.
Develop sliding-scale fines and alternatives to payment, such as traffic school, for low-income drivers
It wouldn’t be worth this bother, but crashes decrease in cities with red-light cameras, and they increase after those cameras have been turned off, as national studies by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety have shown. The result when cameras go away is more deaths in crashes, the institute’s research shows, as we’ve seen in Tucson.
Deaths like that of 8-year-old Yarel Ruiz, who would have turned 9 on Friday. She was a passenger in a car driven by her mother June 1 last year at the intersection of Grande Avenue and West Congress Street. When the light turned green that night, her mother drove into the intersection, and the car was struck by a speeding red-light runner, killing her and injuring her sister and mother.
Red-light cameras may not have prevented that particular crash. The driver was impaired and flying down the road for blocks, Yarel’s father, Yarko Ruiz, told me. But red-light cameras tend to have an influence all around the cities where they are in operation.
Of course, there is no great appetite on the Tucson City Council to revisit this issue. When I asked Romero’s spokesman about it, he said her focus is on passing Proposition 411.
Council members Paul Cunningham and Steve Kozachik responded with varying degrees of skepticism about trying to reintroduce the traffic cameras. It would require a citizens initiative or ballot referral by the council to overturn the initiative passed in 2015.
“I wasn’t a fan of that program, but my perspective has bias as I got three of them,” Cunningham said by text, noting the camera citations he’d received. “The program felt like a money grab.”
But he said he would be open to reconsidering if the program’s previous problems could be fixed.
Kozachik recalled that Tucson voters were decidedly against the cameras. Still, he noted, lines could be painted to show drivers where intersections legally begin, the system could be set to allow drivers a tad bit more time to get into the intersection without being cited, and fines could be set at a low enough level not to be excessive.
Council member Lane Santa Cruz, in whose ward that tragic crash occurred last year, texted me about the broader problem.
“I have an issue overall with the toxic car-centric culture in Tucson,” she said, adding that we need a “comprehensive approach.”
“Vision Zero can be a start, but we have decades of bad behavior to unlearn. People in cars oftentimes forget that the thousand-plus ton machine they are operating can be a weapon on our public roadways.”
Red-light and speed cameras are just a tool in this broader effort, of course. But as the casualties mount and the police force diminishes, it’s a tool we can’t afford to leave unused. Unless we’re content to accept more tragic losses like that of 8-year-old Yarel.
