Comment by sowbug 18 hours ago
When red-light cameras are installed at an intersection, the number of rear-end accidents typically increases as drivers unexpectedly slow down instead of speeding up at yellow lights.
The cost of these accidents is borne by just about everyone, except the authority profitably operating the red lights. (To be fair, some statistics also show a decrease in right-angle collisions, which is kinda the point of the red-light rules to begin with.)
> it’s an unsolvable problem because there is an asymmetric risk of stopping vs accelerating
This just sounds like everyone is speeding and/or distracted.
No one wants to risk a ticket with a guess at how long the yellow is going to be, or whether they’ll make it thru or not. That is the unsolvable part. Yellows are inconsistent , and you aren’t accounting for slow-moving traffic ahead of you that might cause you to block the intersection, etc.
There was actually a scandal in Chicago were a study found that the city systematically reduced the length of yellows only on lights that had red light cameras in order to harvest tickets.
Then they shorten the yellow so that it isn't "with a mild deceleration" but a full-on stomp-on-the-brakes stop.
>speeding up at yellow lights
I remember reading somewhere accelerating at orange light is actually a ticket-able offense?
My memory may be outdated or only local to my jurisdiction but my understanding is that yellow means “do not enter the intersection” where “intersection” begins before the box, usually with some alternate street indicator, like broken white lines turning to solid, at a braking distance that accounts for posted speed limit and yellow light duration.
That seems only like a temporary problem until people get used to actually stopping at red lights, as they are supposed to. After the initial acceptance phase, it should minimise accidents over the longer term.